Located in Antigua it was opened as an informal women's training school in 1840, by Bishop George Westerby of the Moravian Church.
Westerby and his wife's success with their initial trainees, led them to seek "black and coloured" girls between the ages of ten and fifteen to be trained to teach others about cleanliness, industry and order.
[11] For the first thirty-eight years of the school's existence, the majority of its funding came from the Mission Board in Germany,[12] but in 1892, the Government of the Leeward Islands agreed to pay for the education of eight girls for a cost of £25 annually.
Then during World War I, the Moravian Church lost all of its German investments and discussion turned to whether the school should be closed.
They made no recommendations to improve the conditions at the school and their attempts to redirect students to distant Trinidad were ineffective.
[19] Though the school adopted numerous survival strategies, including accepting paying students,[24][25] it limped through the next few decades.
The school lowered entrance requirements in an attempt to gain more paying students, but that simply eroded the already declining standards.
[28] When Spring Gardens closed in 1958, it had the distinction of having been the longest operating training institution founded by missionaries in the region.
[29] The government announced that at the end of the term, it would no longer support the school financially, choosing instead to found a new training college.
[27] In 1960, students from Spring Garden were moved to the Leeward Islands Teachers' Training College (LITTC) which opened in Golden Grove, in St. John's Parish.