The Burwell School, established in 1837 by Margaret Anna Burwell and Reverend Robert Burwell, was one of the earliest schools in North Carolina to provide a scholarly education for young women and operated until 1857. Its students studied a rigorous academic curriculum, with some boarding there from distant places and others attending as day students from Hillsborough. The house was also home to Elizabeth Hobbes Keckly, an enslaved teenager in the Burwell household who later became First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln's dressmaker and confidante and wrote a memoir chronicling her friendship with Mrs. Lincoln. Today the Burwell School Historic Site is operated as a museum about the education of young women and life in the 19th century.