Page "Wellesley College" Paragraph 1

Pauline Fowle Durant, and her husband, Boston lawyer and lay preacher Henry Fowle Durant, founded the college in 1870 ; the first students enrolled in 1875.

Wellesley is one of the original Seven Sisters Colleges, a group of independent non-profit female colleges founded to parallel the formerly all-male Ivy League colleges.

After the destruction of the central College Hall in 1914, the college adopted a master plan developed by Central Park landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., Arthur Shurcliff, and Ralph Adams Cram in 1921 and expanded into several new buildings.

The campus hosted a Naval Reserve Officer training program during the second World War and began to significantly revise its curriculum after the war and through the late 1960s.