Mount Holyoke College Mary Lyon's Mount Holyoke Female Seminary opens with eighty students. Fidelia Fisk '42 sails to Persia and becomes one of the first unmarried women in the world to serve as a missionary abroad.
Seminary building is damaged by lightening.
Poet Emily Dickinson attends Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Esther Howland, first producer of valentines, graduates. Mary Lyon dies. Lydia Shattuck graduates, serves as chemistry and botany teacher until 1889, and becomes leading botanist in the United States. Course of study expands from three years to four.