Mansfield Female College Museum

One of the earliest women's colleges in the American South opened here in 1855 — a building dedicated to teaching women in a place that would become a battlefield nine years later. Mansfield Female College operated continuously for seventy-five years, teaching through the Civil War and well into the twentieth century, closing in 1930. The town saw the last major Confederate victory at the Battle of Mansfield in 1864, which means the college stood through that fight and kept its doors open for another sixty-six years after. The surviving college building is now a Secretary of State museum on Monroe Street in DeSoto Parish. It's open Wednesday through Friday, 10am to 4pm — a place where you can stand inside one of the oldest commitments to women's education in the region, in a town that saw both a last stand and a long persistence.