MISS KELLY, THE OTHER COLLEGE OF CHARLESTON AND THE SILKWORM

 

Female students at the College of Charleston may not have had as difficult a time in enrolling as at other institutions in the Holy City,  but the fact of the matter is that for the first 125 years of the college's existence, it was an all-male institution.

 

Henrietta Aiken Kelly wanted to change that as early as the 1860s, when she campaigned to have enrolment opened to women; they would have to wait until 1917 for the privilege, but she couldn't. So she set up a competing institution, named the Charleston Female Seminary in 1870.

 

Henrietta Kelly was born on St. Patrick's Day in 1844, the daughter of William Aiken Kelly (1799-1822), a Phildelphia-born builder and property owner of Irish parentage who had settled in Charleston with his brother John (later to be the father of Captain William Aiken Kelly, a noted Confederate officer). In January 1839 at the age of forty, William Kelly married Mary Stoll (1812-1876), a member of a prominent Charleston family who was then twenty-seven. 

 

Their family of five girls and two boys, born between 1839 and 1854, were brought up in comfort, and three of the girls married into the Catchart family, also of Irish background and part of an extended family migration from Co. Antrim in the early 1800s, settling mainly in the Winnsboro and Columbia areas of South Carolina (Robert Cathchart married Amanda Kelly, and William Catchart married Mary Eliza Kelly; when she died in 1876 at the age of thirty, he married her younger sister Catherine). 

 

During the 1860s the family suffered a number of setbacks, including the death of a young sibling (Robert) in 1860, and the death of Mary Stoll Kelly in 1867.

 

By the early 1870s the remaining Kellys (William, Henrietta, a sister Laura who had not married and the youngest child, John D., then twenty-six) were living in a new house at 50 St. Philip Street, which had been designed and built by the Irish architect John Devereux (the Kellys eventually had other properties at 107 and 109 in the same street).

 

It was at St. Philip Street that Miss Kelly developed her school (established two years earlier at her previous home) and within a decade it had become a thriving institution with a growing list of distinguished alumni, including Sarah Campbell Allan, the first woman doctor in South Carolina. Known as 'The Charleston Female Seminary' or simply as 'Miss Kelly's School'

 

In 1882, following the death of her father, the institution moved to 151 Wentworth Street, where a third storey was added to a building that had been the home of a prominent merchant family. It was here that Henrietta Kelly began to consider other areas of endeavor in which she might involve herself for the betterment of mankind. For whatever reason, she chose silk production. 

 

The production of silk is a complex process, involving the feeding and rearing of silkworms so that they weave a hibernation cocoon of the proper fibrous density, suitable for weaving into the captivating material that had been a timeless expression of elegance in dress.

 

The cocoon contains the worm itself in the pupa stage, preliminary to its emergence as a moth, and in order to harvest the silk with the least damage to the fibre, the pupa must be killed, usually by piercing or immersing in hot water, a process known as filature.

 

The unwinding of the silk from the cocoon and its transfer to a carrier reel for commercial use is a delicate and labor-intensive process, but it has attracted the attention of communities and entrepreneurs for centuries.

It was first introduced into America in early colonial times, and though the challenges of economical scale and care in handling both cocoons and fibre were always present, there were booms in production in the north-east US in the 1830s, and in California in the 1860s. 

 

The major attraction for local communities was that the labor involved could be carried out by ordinary people without extensive training or complex installations, although the number and type of filature baths were critical to the success of the venture, which could involve the sale of silkworm eggs, cocoons and raw or finished silk, or indeed all four. Reeling became progressively more automated as the industry developed, though this brought its own problems as the technology became more complicated.

 

In 1878 the U.S. Department of Agriculture appointed to its staff a thirty-five-year-old British-born entomologist named Charles Valentine Riley, state entomologist in Missouri since 1868, who had come to America at the age of seventeen and become a farm laborer, journalist and artist in Illinois. He had been educated at various European centers, where he proved to have an aptitude for natural history and despite an initial difficulty with his superiors in his new position, he became the most enthusiastic promoter of silk culture until his death in an accident in 1894. He returned to Europe to update his knowledge and appointed a ‘special agent’ named Philip Walker to work specifically on silk production, producing a diverse program that supplied mulberry trees, silkworm eggs and cocoons, and also setting up experimental stations at Philadelphia and New Orleans.

 

In 1896 Henrietta Kelly left her position at the school she had founded and set off on a mission to Europe: she would travel through the principal countries engaged in the cultivation of the silkworm and learn as much as she could about the process and the industry it supported.

 

When she returned in 1902, she was appointed a 'Special Agent' for the Department of Agriculture and continued the work pioneered by Riley and Walker, producing a definitive guide to silkworm cultivation in 1903 (when she was almost sixty) under the title 'The Culture of the Mulberry Silkworm'.

 

She seems to have maintained her connections with Charleston, where in 1898 she commissioned a house at 39 Smith Street, adjacent to the school building at Wentworth Street, though she does not seem to have lived there for any length of time (it was rented to members of the Hornik family for many years).

 

When she died in 1916, at the age of seventy two, she had been living in Columbia SC with a niece, though two of her sisters were also resident in that city; her sister Amanda died in the same year and another sister Catherine in the following year. A third sister Laura, who does not seem to have married, died in 1930 at the age of eighty.

 

This remarkable woman is not well documented in the annals of the Irish in Charleston and her educational and scientific dedication warrants further study.