National Park Seminary Historic District

About this property

National Park Seminary—later renamed National Park College—was an elite, private, nonsectarian women’s boarding and finishing school that operated from 1894 until 1942. in Forest Glen Park, Maryland. Its name alludes to nearby Rock Creek Park. Renowned for its highly eclectic, international architecture and rigorous lifestyle preparationwas a private girls' school. The historic campus is to be preserved as the center of a new housing development. The land that became National Park Seminary was originally the ancestral territory of the Piscataway (Conoy), who managed and stewarded the region collectively without concepts of individualized real property. Following European colonization, the land originated under the Maryland proprietary system established by Cecil Calvert (Lord Baltimore) and was acquired by the colonial governor before passing to the Carroll family. The tract was divided and resold through colonial patents issued in the late 1600s, becoming part of the broader Forest Glen estate region associated in the 1700s with Daniel Carroll, a Founding Father who signed both the Articles of Confederation and the United States Constitution. The historic parcels were eventually assembled in 1887 by the Forest Glen Improvement Company, which developed the site into a resort hotel known as Ye Forest Inn, a summer vacation retreat for Washington, D.C., residents. Following the resort's financial failure. The property was leased to John Irving Cassedy and Vesta Harvey Cassedy, whom later purchased the former resort hotel Ye Forest Inn in Maryland, which redeveloped it into a finishing school for young women. John Irving Cassedy and Vesta Harvey Cassedy were Ohio-born educators who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Ohio Wesleyan University. They began their teaching careers at Lasell Seminary in Massachusetts, a private women’s school, where they taught a curriculum that combined academic subjects such as languages, history, and science with instruction in music, art, and domestic sciences After working in women’s education and boarding-school administration, the Cassedys accumulated savings through several years of teaching and administrative positions at private seminaries. National Park Seminary officially opened its doors on the last Thursday of September 1894 with an inaugural class of 48 female students. Under the leadership of the Cassedys, the seminary quickly gained a reputation as a highly progressive yet prestigious residential school. To accommodate the expanding student body, which grew significantly from its original 48 students, the campus was expanded with a unique network of covered walkways connecting the dormitories and academic halls. The founders structured the school's daily administration around a close-knit academic community, a system later supported by members of the administration such as Assistant Dean Miss Edna Roeckel.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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