Notre Dame of Maryland Collegiate Institute for Young Ladies

Notre Dame of Maryland University is a private Catholic university in Baltimore, Maryland. It is Maryland’s only women’s college and offers certificate, undergraduate, and graduate programs for women and men.

The Roman Catholic academic/educational religious congregation of the School Sisters of Notre Dame founded the school in 1873. It originally established and named the “Notre Dame of Maryland Preparatory School and Collegiate Institute“. The N.D.M.U. now is one of the oldest institutions of higher education for women in the United States.

The “Notre Dame of Maryland Preparatory School and Collegiate Institute” was initially today’s equivalent of elementary, middle, and high school. The College of Notre Dame of Maryland was raised to the level of a four-year college for undergraduates in 1895. The original, lower preparatory school moved from the College of Notre Dame’s North Charles Street location to its current campus further north in suburban Baltimore County at the county seat of Towson in 1960, and is now known as “Notre Dame Preparatory School (or “Notre Dame Prep” for short).

In 1896, the Collegiate Institute became the first four-year Roman Catholic college for women in the United States.

In 2011, the College of Notre Dame of Maryland attained university status with the addition of several graduate-level programs and changed its name to the “Notre Dame of Maryland University”, by the approval of the state legislature, the General Assembly of Maryland, various regional accrediting agencies and the Roman Catholic Church.

This series of 34 stereoviews were made by William M. Chase & David Bachrach, Baltimore, Maryland during the school’s first years given that image No. 34 is titled “First Communicants, 1877.” William Moody Chase (1817-1905) was a prolific producer of stereoviews for many decades. David Bachrach (1845-1921) took the only known photograph of Abraham Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address.