Electa Quinney: Stockbridge-Munsee Schoolteacher

Electa Quinney is generally recognized as Wisconsin’s first ‘public school’ teacher. The school she opened in Kaukauna in 1828 was the first in the state where students did not have to pay to be enrolled. Naturally, this meant that many of her pupils were Native Americans and poor whites who had never before been able to afford the luxury of schooling. (1)

Quinney was a Stockbridge-Munsee Indian herself and was particularly interested in teaching the children of the Stockbridge- Munsee settlement around South Kaukana. She had come with her tribe to the Fox River Valley from New York in the massive Indian removal of 1827. The Quinney family was prominent in the Stockbridge-Munsee tribe and must have been fairly prosperous in New York for daughter Electa was educated at primary school in Clinton and at a female seminary in Connecticut - unusual opportunities for an Indian woman at that time.

Before coming to Wisconsin, Quinney put her education to use teaching Indian children in New York. When she arrived in Kaukauna she was determined to continue her work by establishing a ‘free school’ in the nearby Presbyterian mission. Within a few months the school opened its doors. According to one former pupil’s recollection, written in 1893, “Miss Quinney was a better teacher than the average teacher today . . . She rarely whipped; opened her school with a prayer. It was modeled after the best public schools of New England at the time.” (2)

In a tribute to Quinney in the Wisconsin Journal of Education in the 1890’s, it was said that “Miss Quinney was highly respected by the whites, and moved in their best society at Fort Howard.” It was also said that she refused to marry the sheriff of Brown County because “she was too proud to marry a white man.”7 Instead she married Daniel Adams, a Mohawk, who was a Methodist missionary to the Oneidas. With him she moved to Missouri where he was the pastor for a tribe of Senecas. After his death she married a Cherokee newspaper editor and eventually returned to her farm at Stockbridge, Wisconsin where she died in 1885.

(1) Information on Electa Quinney was located in the files of the Stockbridge-Munsee Reservation museum with the aid of Beatrice Miller, museum curator.
(2) The Honorable E.S. Miner of Necedah. Quoted in Muh-He-Ha-Ne-Ok: A History of the Stockbridge Nation by John Nelson Davidson. Milwaukee: 1893, p. 56.

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