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Agency History/Biographical note:
Lucinda Thayer Guilford was born on November 22, 1823. Her father was a shoemaker in Lanesboro, Massachusetts who suffered from mental illness. Her mother died at a young age. In 1838 Frances L. Greene, principal of a newly-opened private school for girls in Lanesboro, hired Lucinda as an assistant. At age sixteen Guilford also began working at the Crane Paper Mill in Dalton, Massachusetts. With the support of Greene, Guildford entered the middle class of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1845 and graduated in 1847. Guilford taught in Watertown, New York then went to Cleveland, Ohio in 1848 to be the principal of a new female seminary there. At this time she changed her first name to Linda, the nickname that her brothers had given her. Guilford remained in Cleveland for the next thirty years, teaching first at the Cleveland Female Seminary and then at the Cleveland Academy, which she founded in 1860. She was also president of the Ohio Women's Press Club for a number of years and was active in the temperance movement, writing a number of temperance articles and a book entitled "Margaret's Plighted Troth." Guilford also wrote the books "The Story of Cleveland School" (1890) and "The Use of a Life" (1885), a biography of Zilpah P. Grant Banister. On March 1, 1911 Guilford died at the age of eighty-seven in Cleveland.

Scope and Content:
The L. T. Guilford Papers consist of correspondence, writings, an autograph album, memorabilia, and biographical information. Most of the material consists of letters written by Guilford during her time as a student at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, correspondence and writings relating to the writing and publication of her book "The Use of a Life," and copies of books and articles written by Guilford. Her letters written while at Mount Holyoke, 1845-1847, contain detailed accounts of her life at the school. She describes her  course work and examinations, domestic work, daily schedule, room, expenses, sickness among students, rules, going to see a famous "Native American," and a picnic with Amherst College students. She also writes of traveling to Mount Holyoke and meeting the principal Mary Lyon, teacher Abigail Moore Burgess, and her roommate, Alzina V. Pixley Rood. She discusses the marriage of teacher Susan Reed to William Howland, missionary meetings, and the authors Catharine Esther Beecher and Lydia Howard Sigourney. The letters include quotations from Mary Lyon's talks and a poem. The collection contains a sketch and article by Guilford about her benefactor and teacher Frances L. Greene (later Mrs. Henry Bagg). There are also several unpublished writings relating to "The Use of a Life" (her biography of Zilpah P. Grant Banister), a short speech regarding Guilford's experience at Mount Holyoke and a copy of "The Story of a Cleveland School", her 1890 acount of her work as a teacher in Ohio. The collection also includes an autograph album with signatures from her Mount Holyoke classmates and notes about their deaths, a memorial sketch about Guilford published in 1912 by several of her classmates, an obituary, a formal photograph dated ca. 1847, and a slide of the photograph.

Cite as: L.T. Guilford Papers, Mount Holyoke College, Archives and Special Collections, South Hadley, MA.

Access Restrictions: Unrestricted.

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