Harriet Newell Haskell

Harriet Newell Haskell (14 January 1835 - 1907) was an American educator and administrator from the U.S. state of Maine. She taught from 1855 to 1860 in Waldoboro, Maine and Boston, Massachusetts. From 1860 to 1868, she was a teacher and principal at Castleton Collegiate Seminary, Vermont. Thereafter, for 39 years, she served as principal at Monticello Seminary in Godfrey, Illinois. She earned a Litt.d. in 1904 from Mount Holyoke College.

Harriet Newell Haskell was born in Waldoboro, Maine, 14 January 1835. Her father was Bela B. Haskell, a banker and shipbuilder, and a citizen of Lincoln County, Maine. He served two terms in the Maine Legislature and was collector of customs of his district under President Zachary Taylor.

Haskell was educated in Castleton Collegiate Seminary, Vermont, and Mount Holyoke Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College), Massachusetts, from which school she was graduated with honor in 1855.

Her first experience in teaching was in Boston, in the Franklin school. Afterwards, she was principal of the high school in her own town, and later in Castleton Collegiate School. It was while in that school the Rev. Truman Marcellus Post, D. D., president of the board of trustees of Monticello Seminary wrote to a friend in Maine, asking him if he could recommend to him a woman to take the then vacant place of principal of Monticello, who was a scholar and a Christian, a woman of good business capacity and a good educator as well. The friend replied that there was only one such woman in the world, and that was Haskell, of Castleton College, but that she could not be removed from the State of Vermont. After three years of solicitation, Haskell became principal of Monticello, in 1868. The last years of her father's life were passed with her in the seminary; he died in 1887. The Monticello Seminary was destroyed by fire in November, 1888, just as the institution was beginning its second half-century. Through Miss Haskell's energetic efforts a temporary building was put up, and the school was reopened with eighty-nine of the one-hundred-thirty young women who were in the institution when the fire came. In less than two years, the buildings were erected with the corner-stone of the new building laid on 10 June, 1889. Haskell died 1907 in Saint Louis, Missouri.

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