Guilford, L. T. (Linda Thayer)

Linda Thayer Guilford (1823-1911) was an educator and temperance advocate of Cleveland, Ohio.

From the description of Papers, 1843-1910 / Linda Thayer Guilford. (Rhinelander District Library). WorldCat record id: 19732887

From the description of Linda Thayer Guilford papers, 1843-1910 [microform]. (Rhinelander District Library). WorldCat record id: 44502306

Lucinda Thayer Guilford was born on November 22, 1823. Her father was a shoemaker in Lanesboro, Massachusetts who suffered from mental illness. Her mother died at a young age. In 1838 Frances L. Greene, principal of a newly opened private school for girls in Lanesboro, hired Guilford as an assistant. At age sixteen, Guilford also began working at the Crane Paper Mill in Dalton, Massachusetts. With the support of Greene, Guildford entered the middle class of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1845 and graduated in 1847. Guilford taught in Watertown, New York, and then went to Cleveland, Ohio in 1848 to be the principal of a new female seminary. At this time she changed her first name to Linda, the nickname that her brothers had given her. Guilford remained in Cleveland for the next thirty years, teaching at the Cleveland Female Seminary and then at the Cleveland Academy, which she founded in 1860. She was also president of the Ohio Women's Press Club for a number of years and was active in the temperance movement, writing a number of temperance articles and a book entitled "Margaret's Plighted Troth." Guilford also wrote the books "The Story of Cleveland School," 1890, and "The Use of a Life," 1885, a biography of Zilpah P. Grant Banister. On March 1, 1911 Guilford died at the age of eighty-seven in Cleveland.

From the guide to the Guilford papers MS 0756., 1845-1912., (Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections)