Sarah Halsell & Dr. John Collier
Mansfield Male and Female College
from "Southeast Corner of Tarrant County Before the Civil War"
by Sallie Hodges McKnight
Up to this time there had been little interest in education. Mrs. Sarah Halsell, from Virginia, had taught private schools in the home of Col. Johnson and Captain Feild. In the early '50s Joseph Nugent, a Canadian of strong personality, opened a private school for the general public, and proceeded to show what could be accomplished in a short time by the use of a great deal of impatience and a long rod. Mr. Nugent believed in nothing but accuracy and arithmetic, and fairly tanned figures into the hide of reluctant youth.
The general idea appealed to the adult population, and in 1876 they cleared a wide swath in the brush preparatory to building a college. They wanted the best or nothing and entertained no
delusions about not having to pay for it themselves. They had always paid exactly and in full for everything they had obtained. Even defeat at arms had been achieved at a terrible cost, and they had only to tighten their belts and live a little longer on the reconstruction diet of barley coffee, polk salad and corn bread.
Dr. John Collier, Presbyterian minister and noted educator, was secured as president, later to be joined by Smith Ragsdale, an educator of state-wide prominence. The institution was
co-educational, non-sectarian, and was known as the "Mansfield Male and Female College." With Dr. Collier as a Yale man, Fleet of the University of Virginia, and head of the piano department from New York City Conservatory of Music, pupils were attracted from as far away as Montana.
Dr. Collier included in his curriculum all higher mathematics and one dead language, so that pupils arriving with little preparation were at once plunged into deep water. Strangely enough, most of them survived the shock and went out into the world after graduation with courage to tackle anything. There were primary and intermediate departments, but to save their dignity, "grown up" young men were permitted to carry on in all departments at the same time, and often effected strange results by practising English punctuation at irrelevant intervals in the middle of Latin sentences.
A typical example was that of Zill Harlan who arrived absolutely without preparation, at once plunged into the deep, was fascinated by exclamation points, and came up for air at the end of a short time with the following translation into Latin of the English sentence "I love you:" "I amo you Amas! Amat!" and after deep cogitation, to round out the sentence added "Amamus! Amatis!
Amant!" This he boldly inscribed on the blackboard at public examination. That he later became a cultured man and a brilliant county attorney of Falls County, was perhaps more to his credit
than if he had been led up to it gradually. Many men who became prominent later were educated here.
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