Susan Blow opened the first publicly financed kindergarten in the United States in St. Louis in 1873.
Blow had studied Friedrich Fröbel’s kindergarten ideas and returned to St. Louis after training in New York. With support from school superintendent William Torrey Harris, she established a class at Des Peres School in Carondelet.
The first class contained 42 children. Lessons used play, songs, blocks, paper, clay, weaving, modeling, stories, and gardening, reflecting Fröbel’s belief that young children learned through guided activity rather than formal lectures.
Blow directed the program without pay during its first year and later trained large numbers of kindergarten teachers. Within three years, her system had more than 50 teachers and over 1,000 pupils. By 1883, every public school in St. Louis had a kindergarten.