Mount Carroll Seminary. Photographs, Circa 1860s-1880s

This collection contains five photographs of the faculty and grounds of the Mount Carroll Seminary in Mount Carroll, Illinois.

The Mount Carroll Seminary (1853-1896), located in Mount Carroll, Illinois, was founded as a private, non-denominational, coeducational seminary. It is regarded as a pioneering institution for its time, in part because it was governed by women. It later evolved into a women's seminary, a women's junior college, and a women's college, before becoming a coeducational college renamed Shimer College. In 2017 it was incorporated into North Central College as the Shimer School of Great Books.

Frances Wood Shimer (1826-1901) was the chief administrator of the Mount Carroll Seminary from its founding until 1896. Originally from Saratoga County, New York, she moved to Mount Carroll, Illinois, in 1853 to establish the school. In 1857 she married Henry Shimer, an entomologist and physician who taught science classes at the seminary. Upon her retirement, Frances Shimer transferred control of the seminary to a board of trustees affiliated with the University of Chicago.

The collection consists of carte de visite portraits of Frances Shimer, Henry Shimer, and Miss Atkins, the school's music teacher. The portraits were taken by D. R. Miller of Mount Carroll, Illinois. It also includes a mounted photograph of the main building of the Mount Carroll Seminary and a mounted photograph of Frances Shimer in the seminary's reception room. Both have inscriptions on the front and were taken by a photographer with the last name Parke, of Mount Carroll, Illinois.

Dwain Berggren of Urbana, Illinois, donated the photographs to the library in 2016.