Downer and E. Hartfod Ave., Milwaukee, Milwaukee County 

On September 14, 1848, Mrs. William L. Parsons, the wife of a Congregational minister, opened the Milwaukee Female Seminary at the corner f Milwaukee and East Wells. Three years later it was chartered by the legislature, thus placing Wisconsin in the vanguard of education at a time when colleges for women were almost unknown. A new building was erected at 1120 North Milwaukee Street. In 1855 the Wisconsin Female College, later named Downer College, was chartered at Fox Lake. Both schools experienced financial difficulties until they merged to become Milwaukee Downer College in 1899. The two institutions combined their resources and moved in 1890 to this site, which became a new campus of forty wooded acres. When the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee purchased this campus in 1964, Milwaukee Downer moved to Appleton to join Lawrence College and is now part of Lawrence University. Formal nurses' training in the United States began in Boston in 1872. In 1888, the Woman's Club of Wisconsin organized the Wisconsin Training School for Nurses, patterned after the Bellevue School of Nursing in New York. In 1894, the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul launched Wisconsin's first private hospital and organized a training school for nurses at St. Mary's Hospital, Milwaukee. The two-year curriculum was expanded to three in 1901, and a diploma was awarded upon graduation. The school, incorporated separately in 1912, became state-accredited in 1913 and nationally accredited in 1940. Affiliation with other institutions of learning began in 1924. The name was changed in 1932 to denote the transition from train¬ing to education. Rising costs and growth of college degree programs brought vol¬untary dissolution in 1969 after having graduated 1,913 nurses

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[Source: McBride, Sarah Davis. History Just Ahead (Madison:WHS, 1999).]