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NOTES FROM THE DIARY OF SUSAN E. FOREMAN
By Linda Finley*
INTaODUMroN
Susan E. Foreman was the daughter of Reverend Stephen
Foreman who lived in Park Hill, Cherokee Nation. She attended
the Fayetteville Female Seminary, and, upon completing her
education here, she taught the Cherokee neighborhood school at
Webber's Falls beginning in 1862. Susan's diary is of interest
not only because her notes are typical of almost any girl away
at school, but also because she continued the tradition of educa-
tion.'
A note on a rural historic project to preserve an old cemetery
carried out by the Mt. Comfort Club of Washington County,
Arkansas, was published in the Ozarks Mountaineer, August,
1964. A reference to the Fayetteville Female Seminary is given
as follows:
"A little-known burial at Mt. Comfort is that of Sarah B. N.
Ridge. She was the wife of John Ridge, chief of the Cherokees,
who was murdered in June, 1839, along with his father, Major
Ridge, and his uncle, E. C. Boudinot, because of their consent
to the removal of the Cherokees from Georgia and Tennessee
to the Indian Territory. John Ridge had met and married Sarah
Northrup when he was in school in New England. After his
death, she moved her family to Fayetteville, Ark., where she later
died. Her chief contribution to the history of northwest Arkansas
was that she brought with her, when she moved to Arkansas,
a missionary who had been teaching her children in the Indian
Territory. This was Sophia Sayer, who founded the Fayette-
ville Female Seminary, one of the series of schools that gave
Washington County an educational reputation that some 30 years
later resulted in the establishment of the state university of
Fayetteville."
A copy of the diploma of Miss Mary E. Stone, the last
graduate of Miss Sawyer's Seminarywas sent to The Chronicles
by the late Mrs. W. R. Holloway of Tulsa and appears here on
-Linda Finley, a young writer of Dyersburg, Tennessee, makes thin
contribution of "Notes From The Diary of Susan E. Foreman" from the
original diary now in the possession of her aunt by marriage, Mrs. W. T.
Finley, of Bacone, Oklahoma. MIrs. Finley (Lulu Lipe before her mar-
riage) Is the great granddaughter of Rev. Stephen I. Foreman, historienlly
noted Cherokee minister before the Civil War. -Ed.
t The "Life of Miss Sophia Sawyer, Founder of the Fayetteville
Female Seminary," by Carolyn Thomas Foreman, was published in The
Chronieres of Oklahoma, Vol. XXXII (Winter 1954-1955).