erally gave her but little encouragement, but wished her God-speed
in what she should dare in the good cause. One Friend wrote her from
Philadelphia; entering warmly into her scheme, but advised her to wait
till funds could be collected. "I do not want the wealth of Croesus,"
was her reply; and the Friend sent her $100, and with this capital, in
the autumn of 1851, she came to Washington to establish a Normal
School for the education of Colored girls, having associated with her
Miss Anna Inman, an accomplished and benevolent lady of the Society of
Friends, from Southfield, Rhode Island, who, however, after teaching a
class of Colored girls in French, in the house of Jonathan Jones, on
the island, through the winter, returned to New England. In the autumn
of 1851 Miss Miner commenced her remarkable work here in a small room,
about fourteen feet square, in the frame house then, as now, owned and
occupied by Edward C. Younger, a Colored man, as his dwelling, on
Eleventh Street, near New York Avenue. With but two or three girls to
open the school, she soon had a roomful, and to secure larger
accommodation, moved, after a couple of months, to a house on F
Street, north, between Eighteenth and Nineteenth streets, west, near
the houses then occupied by William T. Carroll and Charles H. Winder.
This house furnished her a very comfortable room for her school, which
was composed of well-behaved girls from the best Colored families of
the district. The persecution of those neighbors, however, compelled
her to leave, as the Colored family who occupied the house was
threatened with conflagration, and after one month her little school
found a more unmolested home in the dwelling-house of a German family
on K Street, near the western market. After tarrying a few months
here, she moved to L Street, into a room in the building known, as
"The Two Sisters," then occupied by a white family. She now saw that
the success of her school demanded a school-house, and in
reconnoitring the ground she found a spot suiting her ideas as to size
and locality, with a house on it, and in the market at a low price.
She raised the money, secured the spot, and thither, in the summer of
1851, she moved her school, where for seven years she was destined to
prosecute, with the most unparalleled energy and conspicuous success,
her remarkable enterprise. This lot, comprising an entire square of
three acres, between Nineteenth and Twentieth streets, west, N and O