Woman's American Baptist Home Mission Society

[2] The first Circle, auxiliary to the Society, was formed at Jamaica Plain; and the first money (US$50), was sent in March, 1878, to aid Harriet Newell Hart in her work among the African American people in a little village in Georgia.

On May 24, Mrs. Thomas Nickerson, who had just returned from the south and west, met the Board of Directors, and urged the need of pushing forward the Home Mission work.

The First Annual Meeting was at the Clarendon Street Baptist Church, Boston, November 14, 1878; five teachers were reported in their fields of labor, two were under appointment, and the receipts of the year totaled US$1,533.

She returned to Boston to report the bleak findings of her Southern pilgrimage and proposed a school for women and girls.

Packard sold personal possessions to raise money and planned a school in Atlanta near Morehouse College, supported by the American Baptist Home Mission Society.

The Women's Society reversed its original decision and, in March 1881, commissioned Packard and Giles as missionaries and teachers to begin a school in Atlanta.

Laura Spelman Rockefeller and her sister Lucy had been students at Oread, 1858–1859, and had met Packard and Giles on a visit in 1864.

Packard's vision for the future of the school, financial astuteness, and missionary piety secured assistance from Rockefeller.

The debt on a new campus with five frame buildings, formerly used as a barracks for the Union Army occupying Atlanta, was discharged, and the school was renamed Spelman Seminary for Women and Girls in honor of Laura Rockefeller's parents.

Coleman was the first vice-president of the new organization and president of the New England Branch of the Woman's American Baptist Home Mission Society, the branch being a local organization whose purpose was the holding of inspirational meetings and otherwise fostering the work of the Woman's American Baptist Home Mission Society.