When Anna Head was just 11 years old, her family left Massachusetts and moved to a budding city on the West Coast: San Francisco.

In San Francisco, her father established a law practice and Head's mother taught, eventually establishing a small French and English school for children in her home near De Fremery Park in West Oakland. Anna Head graduated from Oakland High School in 1874, then studied music in Boston for a year.

Afterwards, she returned to the Bay Area to attend UC Berkeley, where she studied education administration. She was one of 23 women at a time when Berkeley's total number of students was 117.

When Anna Head graduated from UC Berkeley, she spent the next decade travelling the world, including far locations like Greece and Egypt. Head's expeditions inspired her progressive philosophy of education and established the vision for the school she would eventually open in Berkeley upon returning home.

At age 30, after Anna Head returned from her excursions abroad, she opened Miss Head's School for Girls (MHS) using the proceeds from the sale of her mother's school.

Miss Head's School for Girls was unique in that it used progressive education methods and taught advanced subjects to girls, at a time when women's education was mostly limited to domestic skills and scripture.

The Berkeley Daily Herald featured the school in 1892, writing, “The [school's opening] was begun under difficulties, because the aim of its founders was to conduct it on principles that were in advance of the methods then in common use, and parents were shy of new experiments. The effort was to establish a school that would do away with the useless routine work that cumbers so much of the ordinary teaching and replace it with what was best in the German and Eastern systems.”

Despite Anna Head's progressive beliefs for women's education, she was adamantly opposed to women's suffrage, to the dismay of many of her students.

Anna Head built the school in what was then a rural part of Berkeley so students could freely explore nature. Head believed that “one fact learned from nature is worth a dozen learned from books.”

The core curriculum of MHS included four years each of English, math, a foreign language, and history, and a recommended fifth solid of science. She also recognized the value of the arts “to increase the powers of observation of each student.”

Anna Head was a “real polymath and an inspiring teacher, offering instruction herself in English, Latin, Greek, history of art, psychology, and zoology.”

In addition to a strong core curriculum and the arts, Anna Head valued physical activity and offered “cheerful and inspiring exercises,” like horseback riding, dancing and games.

Notably, Miss Head's School for Girls had a basketball team and played the first women's basketball games ever recorded. MHS took on UC Berkeley, beating them by a score of four to three.

If you've ever wondered why there are so many brown shingle houses in Berkeley, you can look to Anna Head and her cousin, a prodigy architect who died only a few years into his career, Soule Edgar Fisher.

Channing Hall, constructed in 1892, was the first brown-shingle building in Berkeley and helped launch the Arts and Crafts movement in the Bay Area.

The wood structure “[created] a sense that the building was carved from a tree or belongs in nature," and the Berkeley Daily Herald wrote that "No one to look at it would say that it was a school building. It seems rather a quaint old English country house or private mansion.”

Between 1892 and 1927, the Miss Head's School campus expanded to have over a dozen structures. The school complex is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and was described in a recent article by the National Trust for Historic Preservation as a school that “broke barriers in American architecture and girls' education.”

In 1909, Anna Head retired and sold Miss Head's School. During her 22 years as headmistress, MHS became nationally recognized as one of the most prestigious schools for girls, and parents from across the country sent their daughters to Berkeley to attend.

Anna Head sold the school to Mary E. Wilson, who later renamed the school to the Anna Head School for Girls in honor of its founder.

Anna Head passed away on Christmas Day in 1932. The school lived on, though, and has since weathered many storms.

In 1955, UC Berkeley obtained the property through eminent domain, forcing the Anna Head School to move to a new location in Oakland. In 1979, the all-girls school became the co-ed Head-Royce School.

Six buildings from the original Anna Head Complex still stand - Channing Hall, the Gables, Alumnae Hall, the Pool, and Study Hall - and, today, they are occupied by UC Berkeley's Institute for the Study of Societal Issues.

A few of them have recently been renovated, but the original building, Channing Hall, is slated to be razed to build more student housing.

Paul Chapman, a local historian and former headmaster and previous principal of the Head-Royce school, has led community efforts to preserve the Anna Head complex, and he stated that Channing Hall's demolition “would erase an essential part of Berkeley's historical memory and legacy.”

Reflecting on Anna Head and the school's architecture, Laken Brooks writes for the National Trust for Historic Preservation:

“The school's impressive preservation and social development demonstrates how schools play an important role in their community's history. This Shingle-style campus blended into the landscape and encouraged Bay Area architects to move from a Victorian to the American, nature-influenced buildings now iconic in California. The Anna Head School for Girls influenced thousands of female scholars and designers to question the norm. These Berkeley buildings, forgotten by many, still stand as a testament to the shifting history of girl’s education and architecture in the United States. And behind this campus, Anna Head reminds us that one woman can have a resounding impact on history.”