The Mount Carroll Seminary was the name of Shimer College from 1853 to 1896. The Seminary was located in Mount Carroll, Illinois, in the United States. A pioneering institution in its time and place, the Mount Carroll Seminary served as a center of culture and education in 19th-century northwestern Illinois. Despite frequent prognostications of failure, it grew from 11 students in a single room to more than 100 students on a spacious campus with four principal buildings. Unusually for the time, the school was governed entirely by women, most notably the founder Frances Wood Shimer, who was the chief administrator throughout the Seminary's entire existence.
Earliest known drawing of the Seminary, from 1867.
Frances Shimer, founder of the school and proprietor or co-proprietor from 1855 to 1896
The Oread, published by the Oread Society.
Mount Carroll Seminary, engraving, 1878.
Shimer Great Books School
Shimer Great Books School is a Great Books college that is part of North Central College in Naperville, Illinois. Prior to 2017, Shimer was an independent, accredited college on the south side of Chicago, originally founded in 1853.
Frances Shimer (seated) and Cindarella Gregory, 1869
Metcalf Hall (built in 1907) was the main administration building of the Mount Carroll campus, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.
438 N. Sheridan Road, built in 1845, the main building of the Waukegan campus. The former campus was designated a historic district in 2006.
Mortimer Adler, whose great-books philosophy of education influenced Shimer's curriculum; Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins founded the Great Books Foundation in 1947.
