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Lillie Arndt Williams was born on September 22, 1853, to Rebecca Lombaert and Griffith Williams, in Lambertville, New Jersey. She attended Lambertville Schools, then enrolled in the New Jersey State Normal School at the age of 16 in 1869. She graduated in 1871, but continued her education through the years with coursework and summer sessions at several schools including Yale, White Mountain Summer School, Clark University, and Chautauqua Institute. She began teaching at the Model School immediately after graduation in 1871 until 1887, when she began teaching at the New Jersey State Normal School, first as a teacher of History and English, then in 1891, she became a teacher of Psychology. She retired on June 30, 1916. Throughout her career and after, she was invited to present papers and lectures at a wide variety of events and education conferences, including at the International Congress of Education at the World’s Fair in Chicago, and she frequently published on topics of education and psychology. She held positions in various organizations such as: Vice President of the Society for Study of Children, President of the Trenton Child Study Association, Director of the New Jersey Council of Mothers, and Director of New Jersey Council of Charities and Corrections. She continued to live in the family home in Lambertville which also was shared with the family of her sister Isadora Williams Scobey (1857-1945), who graduated from the New Jersey State Normal School in the class of January 1877, and was a Model School teacher before having children; and her brother-in-law and fellow Normal School teacher Frank H. Scobey (1858-1940) who graduated from the New Jersey State Normal School in the class of 1881. Lillie and the Scobeys moved to Montclair, New Jersey in early 1923. She died soon after, on July 13, 1923, at her summer home in Center Harbor, New Hampshire.

Dr. Kuhn taught at New Jersey State Teachers College from 1919 to 1952 and was Head of the Speech Department, Supervisor of Drama, and member of the Faculty Committee on Assembly Programs.

Levi Seeley was born on November 21, 1847, to Hannah Thorpe and Levi Seeley, in North Harpersfield, Delaware County, New York. He attended the New York State Normal School in Albany in 1871, and received an honorary master's degree from Williams College in 1883. He studied in other schools in the United States and Europe, notably Germany, and published the book: The German Common School System. In 1886, he married Marie Hesse in Germany. He taught and/or served as principal at schools in New York, as well as at Ferry Hall Seminary in Lake Forest, Illinois from 1887 to 1894. He moved to New Jersey to become the head of the Department of Pedagogy at the New Jersey State Normal School in Trenton in 1895 until he retired in 1917. In addition to teaching he wrote several other textbooks and articles on education. He moved to Amherst, Massachusetts in 1921, where he died on December 23, 1928.

Mabel Evelyn Bray was born in Madison, New Jersey on January 3, 1878, to Edward A. Bray, a Presbyterian clergyperson who emigrated from England in the 1870s and Priscilla Sarah Haire, a concert pianist from Michigan. By 1880, the family left New Jersey and were living in Michigan where Bray spent her youth along with her younger siblings, John R. and Eugenia (later Persons).
Bray’s educational background was diverse. She graduated from the Michigan Female Seminary in 1897; studied music in Germany and Italy; and completed courses at the University of Michigan, Detroit Conservatory of Music, and programs through the New School of Methods of Public School Music in various locations.
After traveling in Europe and singing in “small-town opera houses,” she began teaching music at public schools in Moorhead, Minnesota in 1899. Later, she taught at a few other schools in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and St. Louis, Missouri. By 1903, she was head of the Music Department at the State Normal School in Cheney, Washington. Six years later, she returned to New Jersey to teach at the Westfield Public Schools. There, she founded The Supervisors School of Music. In Westfield, she began living with fellow teacher Harriet E. Mann, until Mann’s death in 1944.
According to the September 25, 1979 issue of The Signal, Bray arrived at The New Jersey State Normal School in Trenton in 1918 “to organize and administer a new special music curriculum.” She served as head of the Music Department from 1918 until her retirement in 1948 and earned the rank of full professor in 1935. She improved music instruction throughout the state by organizing high school choral groups. Her music program at what is now The College of New Jersey extended through the 1970s. She authored several music textbooks, including the Music Hour series for teachers and students.
In 1959, she moved to the Royal Oaks Manor retirement home in Duarte, California. There, she taught music appreciation classes to the other residents for fourteen years. She also edited the house newsletter Oak Leaves.
Trenton State College honored her in 1963 by naming the newly built music building “Bray Hall.” It was demolished in 1999 to make way for the new Social Sciences Building.
Mabel Bray died on May 27, 1979, at the age of 101, in Duarte.