 For thirty four years she ran Mary Baldwin College, which was named in her honor in 1895 and later became Mary Baldwin University.Born to Margaret Sarah Sowers Baldwin Heiskell (1810 - 1855) and her husband William Daniel Baldwin (1803-1830) in Winchester, Virginia at the northern end of the Shenandoah Valley on October 4, 1829, Mary Julia Baldwin never knew her father, who died when she was a baby.Raised by her maternal grandparents in Staunton, Virginia after her mother remarried, in 1842 Mary became a member of the first class of sixty girls at the Augusta Female Seminary.