Profile · Sun Prairie, Wisconsin
Ellen Clara Sabin
Sun Prairie-born educator; Portland schools superintendent; president of Milwaukee-Downer College, 1895–1921
under $50,000 (1949$)
Ellen Clara Sabin was Sun Prairie's first educator of national standing, and she began by teaching her own town. Born there on November 29, 1850, to Samuel and Adelia Sabin, she was carried west as an infant during the California gold rush and brought back to Wisconsin in 1854. The family settled at Windsor, just north of Sun Prairie. Oldest of eleven children, she taught the younger ones at home, then at fifteen or sixteen enrolled at the University of Wisconsin among the first women in the regular course. She taught Sun Prairie's grade school while still a student, left without a degree, and by nineteen was principal of Madison's Fourth Ward School. Oregon made her famous first. She worked as a teacher and principal there, then in 1887 became superintendent of Portland's schools, the first woman to hold that post in a large American city. Wisconsin pulled her home in 1890 to rescue struggling Downer College at Fox Lake. She mediated the 1895 merger with Milwaukee Female College, built the new Milwaukee-Downer campus, and served as president until 1921. Occupational therapy entered the college curriculum on her watch, and she helped organize the Wisconsin Federation of Women's Clubs. She died in Madison on February 3, 1949, at ninety-eight. Lawrence University still keeps a Sabin House. Sun Prairie holds the birth, the grade-school classroom she ran as a teenager, and the hometown claim for a career that remade Milwaukee-Downer.