Courtship and Marriage in the Territories

One might say Asa Mercer was a "marriage arranger." In 1861 he became a founding father and first president of the University of Washington. He was from New England and noticed a severe shortage of marriageable women in Seattle. So he went back to Lowell, Massachusetts and recruited eleven women to accompany him to Seattle. At the time the Civil War was in progress and New England had been stripped of its eligible bachelors. Mercer saw the opportunity to bring young women west to work as teacher