Female Academy was rechartered as the East Tennessee Female Institute, which had the power to confer degrees. Around the same time, the school's trustees began squabbling with the church's representatives, and the board voted to sever ties with the church in 1847. During the 1850s, two East Tennessee College faculty— George Cooke and R. L. Kirkpatrick— served as principals of the East Tennessee Female Institute. The latter became principal in 1856, and endeavored to keep the institute open amidst the American Civil War in the early 1860s. The Union Army closed the school in late 1863 and used the school building as a hospital. The school reopened in 1866, and operated under various superintendents until 1877, when the building was leased to Knoxville for use as a public school. In 1885, women's suffragist Lizzie Crozier French and her sister, Lucy, leased the building and reopened the East Tennessee Female Institute. Along with classical subjects, Crozier-French stressed public speaking, and published a text, A Manual of Elocution, for her students. During this period, the Ossoli Circle, a women's club founded by Crozier-French in 1885, held its initial meetings at the institute. The Crozier sisters operated the school until 1890, when the trustees voted to sell the property. Later years In 1892, the East Tennessee Female Institute, which had been renamed the East Tennessee Institute and School of Music, began classes in a new building on Main Street. Under the leadership of Professor Charles Ross and a new faculty, the school's enrollment grew to over 100 by 1894. William Rule's Standard History of Knoxville, published in 1900, described the school as having "large, well lighted and ventilated" rooms that were "well supplied with apparatus, books and maps for teaching languages, sciences, art and history." With the rise of free public education in Knoxville in the late 19th century, the institute had difficulty attracting students willing to pay tuition. In 1911, the school closed, and its building was leased to the University of Tennessee Home Economics Department. In 1919, the school's trustees made a deed of gift of the building to UT, which for several years used the building for its College of Law. Curriculum For most of its history, the East Tennessee Female Institute offered a mix of classical studies and "ornamental" studies. During Estabrook's tenure in the 1830s, first-year students learned spelling, reading, geography, and arithmetic. These subjects were continued in