Anna Sneed opened a school for girls in Kirkwood in 1861. The St. Louis Public Schools would not allow the Bible to be used as a text. She wanted a school which featured:
In 1891 she married John C. Cairns and he designed a new campus on Oakland just east of Hampton and named it Forest Park University. It averaged about 150 pupils and contined in existence until 1925 or 1926.
Photo is in the book FOREST PARK by Caroline Loughlin and Catherine Anderson.
See full citation below.
In the Forest Park book Loughlin and Anderson have several passages on the university:
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Two different universities planned to move near the park in the 1890s, and one, Forest Park University, did. The school for women moved in 1891 from Kirkwood, the suburb Hiram Leffingwell had developed, to a former cornfield next to Forest Park and changed its name from Kirkwood Seminary to Forest Park University.
Anna Sneed Cairns founded and operated the school. In addition to her work in educating women, Mrs. Cairns was a leader in both the prohibition and women's suffrage movements. The university consisted of three colleges (Forest Park College, the School of Art and Elocution, and the College of Music) as well as a preparatory school and served both boarding and day students (Fig. 3-25). Until the streetcar line reached the university in 1895, day students traveled by horses and "wagonettes," which crossed the park hourly to make connections with the streetcar line. The streetcar remained the best way to the campus from the city, since there was no road along the park's southern edge. When the city authorized Oakland Avenue in the late 1890s, the road ran west from the university toward St. Louis County, not east toward the city. (42)
The school took advantage of its location next to the park. Brochures told parents that their daughters would "spend the day in the invigorating air" around Forest Park "instead of the
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smoke, dust and sewer gas of the city." "The boating, riding and walking in Forest Park," the school advertised, "the lawn tennis and croquet, furnish delightful recreation . . . and the end of the year finds [the students] blooming with health, instead of spiritless and pale, as is often the case with girls in the close and unwholesome air of cities." (43)
Notes:
42: Jour BPI October 10, 1897. p. 376 February 21, 1898, p. 586, October 28, 1898, p. 234.
43. FPU Bill (1897), 9-10.
p. 80:
(This section concerns the World’s Fair)
“Forest Park University erected a new building on its campus south of the park to serve as a hotel during the fair and a university building afterward. Profits from hotel guests, the school hoped, would help pay for the new building.”
p. 148. Mrs. Cairns had sold the university by September 1926.
See:
Loughlin, Caroline and Catherine Anderson. FOREST PARK. St. Louis: The Junior League of St. Louis, 1986.
Also see:
Anne Johnson, NOTABLE WOMEN OF ST. LOUIS.
1914. pp. 43-50.
and
St. Louis and Missouri Womanhood.
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