The influence of her stepmother, Mary Goodman, must have been an inspiration. She appreciated learning so highly that she was one of a committee of women who appealed to the school board to extend to girls the same privileges in studies as were enjoyed by the boys. We know also that about the time the school was started, the year 1792, and for many years afterwards, the society in Litchfield was such as to be a constant education to a woman with the receptive mind of Miss Pierce, and it must have been largely due to that influence that the school studies and methods developed as they did in the course of years. The adding of many branches not heretofore attempted by women must have been the result of an unconscious but phenomenal growth on the part of the teacher. In later years her efforts were supplemented by those of her nephew, the son of her sister Susan, Mr. John Pierce Brace, also a born educator, whom she educated at Williamstown college that he might become her assistant. From the autographs in the album of Mary Peck, pupil and teacher in the school, who married Edward D. Mansfield, a pupil in the law school, the mental quality of the Litchfield society of that day can be gauged as well as what might be its effect upon the mind of any bright girl who was thrown constantly in contact with it. The Litchfield Female Academy, which was begun with two or three pupils in the dining-room of a young girl teacher, attained, under the guidance of this remarkable woman, a vigorous life of forty-one years, and proved itself to be a pioneer on this continent of the higher education of women. 1792–1793. CONTEMPORARY NOTICES OF MISS PIERCE AND HER SCHOOL. We know very little about the early stages of the school, and therefore the following extracts from contemporary writers give us all that can be learned about its origin and the reasons for its establishment. Tradition says it was begun with one pupil in Miss Pierce’s dining-room in 1792. [Illustration: PL. II.—JOHN PIERCE BRACE ] [_From the History of the Town of Litchfield, by the Hon. George C. Woodruff._] “Miss Sarah Pierce opened a School in this town for the instruction of Females, in the year 1792, which has very justly merited and acquired a distinguished reputation.”[2] The school continued under her superintendence for nearly forty years, and its reputation has since been well sustained by her successors. It was incorporated in the year 1827, by the name of “The Litchfield Female Academy.” [_From Hollister’s History of Connecticut._] To this pleasant little village among the hills came the very flower and nobility of American genius. Here might be seen Calhoun, Clayton, Mason, Loring, Woodbury, Hall, Ashley, Phelps, and a host of others, who were preparing themselves for the high places of the cabinet, the senate and the bench.