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Ellen Clara Sabin

Ellen Clara Sabin
Ellen Clara Sabin, Wisconsin Educator, 1914.jpg
Formal portrait, 1914
Born November 29, 1850
Sun Prairie, Wisconsin
Died February 3, 1949
Madison, Wisconsin
Education Attended University of Wisconsin
Occupation Educator

Ellen Clara Sabin was the president of the Milwaukee-Downer College from 1891 to 1921. She was a well-known advocate for the education of women. Sabin developed her own curriculum and teaching style which she practiced in both Wisconsin and Oregon before accepting the position as college president at Downer College.

“‘Education is liberation, and it may free women only from her ignorance, littleness, weakness, and fears.’” - Ellen Sabin.

Sabin was born in 1850 on November 29 in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin to parents Samuel H. Sabin and Adelia Bordine Sabin. As an infant, her family moved to California as part of the gold rush, but returned to Wisconsin in 1854. Sabin was the oldest of 11 children so as an adolescent she was often responsible of her siblings.

In 1866, Sabin enrolled in the University of Wisconsin at the age fifteen. She was among the first women admitted to the university. At the university, she did not pursue any specific course of study. While attending college, she began teaching at the Sun Prairie Grade School in her hometown which was near the university. Sabin left the university after three years without graduating, accepted a job teaching seventh grade in Madison, Wisconsin. By the time Sabin was nineteen, she was the principal of the Fourth Ward School.

In 1872, Sabin moved with her family to Eugene, Oregon. She found the education system in Eugene unsatisfactory so she begin independently teaching the community. She began by teaching her siblings and a few neighbors. After a short while, her opened a private school with thirty children. A year later, she moved to Portland where she became the principal of a school known at the time as the Old North School of Portland. Sabin was the first female to ever hold a principal position in Portland.

News of Sabin's success in Portland reached Sabra Warner Lewis, an acquaintance of Sabin's back in Wisconsin. Although she had always specialized in elementary education, Sabin was contacted by Lewis’s brother, a trustee of a “small backwoods college in Wisconsin” known as Downer College for Women in Fox Lake, Wisconsin. Downer was in need of someone to take over the school's presidency. Even though Downer offered her twice the salary they had paid to any previous president, it was still substantially less than she was making in Portland. So when Sabin decided to accept the position of college president, she took a major decrease in pay.


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