American educator, born at Berlin, CT, on the 23rd of February 1787; educated in Berlin and in Hartford, CT, she began to teach when sixteen years of age. She served as principal of various academies, taking charge of an institution in Middlebury, VT, where she married Dr. John Willard in 1809. She opened a boarding-school for girls at Middlebury in 1814, and subsequently a seminary for girls at Waterford, NY, which was moved to Troy in 1821, where it was known as the Troy Female Seminary. She resigned the management of this institution to her son, John Hart Willard, and settled in Hartford, CT, in 1838. She published her Journal and Letters from France and Great Britain (1833), and contributed the profits, amounting to about one thousand dollars, to the support of a school for women in Athens, Greece, which had been founded through her efforts. Among her many publications were A History of the United States (1828); Universal History (1835); Last Leaves of American History (1849); and a volume of Poems, containing Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep (1830). She died at Troy, NY, on the 15th of April 1870.
