Eliza Cooper Blaker  Eliza Cooper Blaker (March 5, 1854 – December 4, 1926) was an American educator who headed the free kindergarten movement in Indianapolis from 1882 to 1926 as the first superintendent of schools for the Indianapolis Free Kindergarten and Children's Aid Society. She also established the Indianapolis Kindergarten and Primary Normal Training School at her Indianapolis home in 1882. Renamed the Teachers College of Indianapolis in 1905, she served as its president until her death in 1926. Four years later it became part of the education department at Butler University. Eliza Ann Cooper was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on March 5, 1854, to Jacob and Mary Jane (Core) Cooper. The eldest of three children, Eliza was raised in a family that struggled financially, especially after her father, an abolitionist Quaker, enlisted in the Union army during the American Civil War. He died in 1869, when Eliza was fifteen. Her mother was a seamstress in Philadelphia. Instead of pulling Eliza out of school to work in the cotton mills, Mary Jane supported her daughter's interest in becoming a teacher. Eliza attended public school and graduated from Girls Normal School of Philadelphia, a teacher's college as class valedictorian in June 1874. After graduation she taught for two years in the Philadelphia public schools. Cooper first became interested in kindergarten education in 1876, when she attended the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia and saw a kindergarten demonstration presented by Ruth Burritt, a Boston educator. Cooper completed training at Burritt's kindergarten training school in Philadelphia in 1880 and began her long-time career as a kindergarten educator. Cooper married Louis J. Blaker, a childhood friend, on September 15, 1880. The couple had no children. He died of a heart attack in 1913. In 1882, when the Hadley Roberts Academy, a private school for affluent families in Indianapolis, began its search for a kindergarten teacher, Burrito recommended Blaker for the position. Black accepted the job and moved to Indianapolis with her husband. Shortly after the move to Indianapolis, Blaker left the academy to help the Children's Aid Society, founder of the Indianapolis Free Kindergarten Society, established free kindergartens for the city's impoverished children. Because many of the children lacked sufficient clothing or food, the Society sought donations from the community to help obtain the necessary items. The city's free kindergartens also provided services similar to the settlement houses of that era to assist recent immigrants. The Indianapolis Free Kindergarten and Children's Aid Society incorporated in 1884, the same year that  Blaker was selected as its first superintendent.