Friedrich Frbel opened the first kindergarten on 28 June 1840 to mark the four hundredth anniversary of Gutenberg\'s invention of movable type. Frbel created the name and the term Kindergarten for the Play and Activity Institute, which he had founded in 1837 in the village of Bad Blankenburg, in the small, former principality of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, Thuringia, Germany. The first kindergarten in the United States was founded in Watertown, Wisconsin by (Margaret) Meyer Schurz (wife of activist/statesman Carl Schurz) in 1856. It was based on Frbelite principles that she had learned about in Europe. Schurzs older sister, Bertha Meyer Ronge, had opened \"Infant Gardens\" in London (1851), Manchester (1859), and Leeds (1860). Margarethe Schurz initially taught five children in her home (including her own daughter, Agatha) in Watertown,

Friedrich Froebel.