Susan Lincoln Tolman Mills

Susan Lincoln Tolman Mills (born Nov. 18, 1825, Enosburg, Vt., U.S.—died Dec. 12, 1912, Oakland, Calif.) American missionary and educator who, with her husband, established what would become the first U.S. women’s college on the west coast.

Susan Tolman graduated from Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College), South Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1845 and remained there as a teacher until her marriage in 1848 to Cyrus T. Mills, a Presbyterian missionary with whom she sailed immediately afterward to Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon). For six years Mills assisted her husband in his work as principal of Batticotta College, taught classes in domestic skills to local girls, and helped supervise several day schools. In 1854, in very poor health, the couple returned to Massachusetts. By 1860 they had fully recovered; they traveled to the Hawaiian Islands, where Cyrus Mills became president of Oahu College for children of missionaries and Susan Mills became a teacher in the school. She introduced calisthenics for girls and brought her Mount Holyoke experience to bear in emphasizing the sciences. Cyrus Mills’s ill health forced them to leave Hawaii in 1864 and settle in California.

In 1865 they bought the Young Ladies Seminary in Benicia and set about remaking it into a girls’ school of high standing. Again Mount Holyoke provided impetus, this time in the form of several teachers whom the couple persuaded to move to California. In 1871 the school was moved to a more attractive and accessible site a few miles from Oakland. Mills Seminary, as the school was renamed, soon featured the imposing Seminary Hall (later Mills Hall) as its principal building. The school was incorporated in 1877. Susan Mills served as principal of the seminary until her husband’s death in April 1884, when she acquired the additional duties of board member and acting president. From 1885—when the school became Mills College, the first women’s college on the Pacific Coast—to 1890 she continued as principal under two presidents. In 1890 she was elected president of Mills College, and during her 19 years in that post she worked constantly to raise standards and secure recognition for the school. Beginning in 1906 the seminary classes were progressively eliminated. Mills retired in 1909.