Louise Plessner Pollock, born in 1833 in Germany, died July 24, 1901 at Skyland, Virginia, was an influential early advocate of the Kindergarten Movement in 19th century America. Born Louise Caroline Frederica Augusta Victoria Wilhelmina von Pless (Anglicized as Plessner), she married in 1850 in Dresden to George Henry Pollock, who was born in Massachusetts in 1829. She is often stated to have opened the first kindergarten in America, but that seminal event actually took place in the home of Margarethe Meyer-Schurz in Watertown, Wisconsin, in 1854. Pollock did open the first kindergarten in West Newton, Massachusetts, in 1863 or 1864, other schools were modeled after her later National Kindergarten and Normal School in Washington, D.C., and she wrote and translated articles, song books, an