This article was originally published in the December 2012 issue of Our Town Salem.
From the Desk of the Town Clerk
Music Vale Seminary
By Pat Crisanti
Looking around Salem today, it is very hard to envision this area during the 1800’s. However, there really was a “secluded valley”, green and fragrant by nature, and a magnificent music school known as The Music Vale Seminary, just off of Route 85 near Pratt Road. Elegant young ladies of well-to-do families from around the world attended the school. These young women gathered to learn about music and took lessons on how to play on a variety of instruments, mostly on pianos, which were made by the Whittelsey brothers right here in Salem. The gentility of the time and the innocence of that era seems like a story all by itself. The young women of the school created a school paper called The Gleaner of the Vale. The stories of Music Vale were spread far and wide by other periodicals of the day as well.
Excerpted from Dwight’s Journal of Music, Boston, Massachusetts, pg. 182, Sept. 8, 1855:
One who has read Tennyson’s “Princess,” can conceive of a mystical community of romantic, beautiful young ladies, segregated from the coarse and selfish world, and leading the happiest life imaginable, a life all music, in a secluded valley, unapproachable to vulgar feet, in the midst of the very land of “blue laws” and of “wooden nutmegs.” Of such we have information in a most cheerful little paper called the Gleaner of the Vale, of which a stray number or two have reached us. It is full of the happiest little articles, emanating from the happy members of a female seminary in a happy valley, which rejoices in the name of Music Vale. Music Vale Seminary is the title of the institution; and the life there would seem to be in imitation of the birds, one life-long practicing of pianos and singing of songs, and studying of counterpoint, and rehearsing of original operas, and warbling praises of such paradisiacal existence. Nothing but Music and Happiness are recognized; with these every page and paragraph of the Gleaner seems to be steeped and dripping. The whole business of the life is learning music; and to this end these heroines make laws and establish order, and Amazon-like, shrink not from athletic (finger) exercise, trying to strength and courage. Here are the “Rules and Regulations”:
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Ladies will commence practice at sunrise.
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Hour of retiring, 10 o’clock, P.M.
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Required practice will be four hours per diem.Extra practice will be credited on the bill, by themonitress, to the pupil.
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The visiting or calling on neighbors, attending parties, or absence without permission, is prohibited.
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Ladies will be required to dust their rooms and pianos prior to commencing practice in the morning, alternately, and successively taking precedence by seniority.
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Conversation with ladies at pianos without permission, is prohibited.
Permission to print this excerpt was granted by:
Clarke Haire
President
Cass City Chronicle - Tuscola County
PO Box 115
6550 Main Street
Cass City, Michigan 48726
(989) 872-2010
(989) 872-3810 fax
Pat Crisanti has been Salem’s town clerk since 2002. She is state certified as a Firefighter I and Fire Police.