At age 15, Stow began a three-year course of study at Elizabethtown Female Seminary in Ohio, a boarding school 16 miles from Cincinnati. The school's mission was to cultivate "earnest and independent thought," to teach habits of "order, economy, punctuality, and industry," and to qualify women to "enter any Sphere that Providence may assign."
Stow's friends were all from rural farming communities in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. She and the other girls from Switzerland County travelled upriver by steamboat to reach the school, where they lived during the school term.
