USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > The story of Essex County, Volume II > Part 2
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While the above matters were not more characteristic of Essex County than of other parts of the country, there was one movement in which Essex County played an important part and which led to the founding of her most distinguished schools. That movement was the rise of the academies. In England academies had come into being after the Act of Uniformity (1662) had excluded dissenters from the public schools and universities, and these academies served to train dissenting clergymen. Jonathan Edwards, in his "Thoughts on the Revival," drew especial attention to the English academies, and advised his American friends to imitate the idea. Thoughtful people saw that such institutions started by individuals or groups in communities where there was no grammar school, combining empha- sis on religion with training along social and economic lines, would provide a much more practical education than the Latin Grammar
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School required by law, but rarely provided by the town.4 Ben- jamin Franklin opened an academy in Philadelphia in 1749, and in Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts thirty-seven were founded between 1763 and 1805. Of these six were in Essex County, and five more were founded there before 1830. Governor Dummer, Phillips Academy, Bradford Junior College, and Abbot Academy still thrive and are ranked among the most famous schools in America. The others, after a shorter or longer existence, have ceased to be.
In 1789 several influential citizens who styled themselves "bene- factors" contributed funds for the establishment of Marblehead Academy. For some time it was successful as a co-educational school, but eventually became a high school. Lynn Academy was opened in 1805, had a somewhat checkered career, and was superseded by the high school in 1849. The excellent Dr. Spofford established Mer- rimac Academy, at Bradford, in 1821. In spite of being so near Bradford Academy, which was co-educational until 1836, it pros- pered until 1870, when it was merged with the Groveland system of public schools. Topsfield Academy was founded in 1828 and was successfully carried on until 1860. Byfield Female Seminary was established in 1818 by the Reverend Joseph Emerson, who was remarkably liberal in his educational theories and attracted many young women to his school. But he never succeeded in placing it on a permanent basis, and it was discontinued in 1822. Zilpah Grant, a faithful follower of Mr. Emerson's ideals, established Ipswich Seminary in 1826 as a school from which teachers should go out by the hundreds to destitute children of the nation, and as a place to train the "superfluous women of the East" for teaching in the West. Had not the ill health of Miss Grant and her able collaborator, Mary Lyon, and the failure of the trustees to create a permanent school forced its abandonment in 1839, Ipswich Seminary might have been a rival, as it was a forerunner, of Mount Holyoke Seminary.5
FRANKLIN ACADEMY-The first incorporated academy in the State to which girls were admitted was Franklin Academy, estab- lished in 1799 in North Andover. The academy was built with two rooms of equal size, one for the male department and the other for the female department. Though no records of Franklin Academy
4. "Bradford, a New England Academy," by Jean Sarah Pond, pp. 33, 34. Brad- ford, Massachusetts, 1930.
5. "Bradford, a New England Academy," by Jean S. Pond, pp. 131, 132.
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survive, it had a flourishing life of more than fifty years and num- bered among its members students from more than a hundred dif- ferent towns, a dozen states, and several foreign countries. Nathaniel Peabody was the first preceptor and his wife, Elizabeth Palmer, the first preceptress. One of its instructors, Cyrus Pierce, was chosen by Horace Mann to head the first normal school in the United States. But the name which overshadows all others is that of Master Simeon Putnam, "Old Put," whose harsh discipline and irascible temper became a legend, but who for fifteen years kept his classes constantly filled with students from all parts of the country.
From 1817-33 Mr. Putnam conducted the academy with the exception of an interlude lasting slightly more than a year, 1825-27. The trustees, feeling that his profits from the school were too large. determined to revise their agreement with him. Whereupon, Put- nam at once put up his own schoolhouse and attracted so many stu- dents away from Franklin Academy that the trustees were obliged to relent. A new contract was made by which Putnam leased Frank- lin Academy from the trustees, agreeing to "receive all the children of the inhabitants of the North Parish, at a tuition of twenty-five dollars for forty-five weeks, or in that proportion for a term, and to allow the Trustees the use of his school-house for their Female School thereon, such portions of the year as they may require." He must have been an extraordinary schoolmaster, indeed, to so hold the trustees in the hollow of his hand, and to make money by charg- ing twenty-five dollars tuition !
Like the usual pedagog of his day Master Putnam was, without question, often unjust, always harsh, and sometimes cruel to the idle and disobedient. But he had boys to manage who had less sense of discipline than the youngsters of today and they, in many cases, lived with him in his house, thus irritating him twenty-four hours of the day. Moreover, he was in ill health, and the constant pain of acute neuralgia so broke him down that he died in the prime of life at the age of forty-seven. Dull boys, or even ordinary boys must have exasperated him when we learn what Professor Cornelius C. Felton, late President of Harvard College, accomplished under his tutelage in 1822-23. Professor Felton, speaking of himself, recalls that :
"In this year and a quarter, while at Franklin Academy, he read 'Sallust' four times, 'Cicero's Orations' four times,
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'Vergil' six times, 'Graeca Minora' five or six times, and the poetry of it, till he could repeat nearly all of it by memory; the 'Annals and Histories of Tacitus,' 'Justin,' 'Cornelius Nepos,' the 'Anabasis of Xenophon,' four books of 'Robin- son's Selections from the Iliad,' Greek Testament four times, besides writing a translation of one of the Gospels and a translation of 'Grotius de Veritate,' which he brought in the manuscript to college. He also wrote a volume of about two hundred pages of Latin exercises, and one of about one hun- dred pages of Greek exercises, and studied carefully all the mathematics and geography requisite to enter college."
Of the "Female Department" at Franklin Academy almost noth- ing is known except the names of the preceptresses. But the "females" must have enjoyed themselves, as in the early 1800's the rigidity of Puritan customs had so far relaxed as to permit frequent dances at "Mr. Parker's Hall." In one case, in 1806, the name of the Pre- ceptor, himself, headed the list of "managers" of the festivity. Miss Lucy Foster was thinking of these good times at Franklin Acad- emy when she wrote from the lonely wilds of Canterbury, New Hampshire :
"I hear oftener than I wish to of your dances and other amusements, not, my dear girl, that I wish you to be deprived of them; far from it, altho' I am not altogether happy, I wish my friends all the happiness they can enjoy, but at the same time it wounds my feelings to think of those diversions which you know I am so fond of, and can't partake of them."
Distinguished and successful as it had been, Franklin Academy finally succumbed to the competition of Phillips Academy and Abbot Academy, which were only a few miles away, and about 1853 the school closed its doors.6
The presence of so many academies in Essex County is indica- tive of the vital interest in education that existed here in the early years of the nineteenth century, an interest fostered by the work of Horace Mann, who married one of the daughters of Mrs. Peabody, first preceptress of Franklin Academy, and an interest which has
6. For the fullest account of Franklin Academy see "Historical Sketches of Andover," by Sarah Loring Bailey, Boston, 1880, pp. 542-55.
Essex -- 36
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flowered in the four great schools which now distinguish our country. It remains to give a brief sketch, all too brief because of limitations of space, of each of these flourishing institutions.
GOVERNOR DUMMER ACADEMY-Governor Dummer Academy,7 first known as Dummer School, the oldest endowed boys' boarding school in the United States, was established in Byfield on March I, 1763, in accordance with the terms of the will of the late Lieutenant- Governor William Dummer. William Dummer had a distinguished political career and twice served as actual Governor of the province, once at the departure for England of Governor Shute, and once upon the death of Governor Burnet. But he is best remembered for found- ing the academy which bears his name.
The trustees erected a small, one-story building, about twenty feet square, in 1762, and chose as first master Samuel Moody. Mas- ter Moody was a conscientious and persevering teacher, and the school prospered exceedingly under him. He started with twenty- eight pupils, and twenty-seven years later five hundred and twenty- five students had passed through his hands. Among them we find such distinguished names as Hon. Elias Hasket Derby, of Salem; Hon. Rufus King, of Scarborough; Hon. Samuel Phillips, of Andover, and Commodore Preble, of Portland.
In 1782 Dummer School was incorporated as Dummer Academy and the entire charge of the institution, including the selection of teachers, placed in the hands of fifteen trustees. Master Moody resigned on March 25, 1790, and died in Exeter the following December 17. In 1797 the General Court recommended that half a township in Maine should be appropriated for the use of the Acad- emy. This grant was in line with the principles laid down at this time that academies were, in most respects, public schools; that they were a part of an organized system of education; that they ought to be distributed to suit the needs of different localities, one to every twenty-five thousand people; and that their advantages should be used for the common benefit.
Samuel Moody? was such a remarkable man and raised Dummer School to such heights that it is fitting to describe him at some length
7. "A History of Dummer Academy," Newburyport, 1914.
8. "An Old New England School, a History of Phillips Academy, Andover," by Claude M. Fuess, Boston and New York, 1917, p. 81.
9. The material on Samuel Moody in the following paragraphs is drawn from Nehe- miah Cleaveland's "Centennial Discourse," delivered on August 12, 1863.
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here. Harsh, masterful, scholarly, and distinctly eccentric seem to be the adjectives which apply to the great schoolmasters of Essex County, and Moody answered the description in every particular. He had taught for sixteen or seventeen years at York, Maine, where his eccentric father, "Handkerchief" Moody, and equally eccentric grandfather, "Faithful" Moody, lived, before he came to Dummer School. For nineteen years he conducted the academy in every respect. The trustees under the will did nothing, and had nothing to do. The parish committee was annually chosen, but their office was little more than a sinecure; and the overseers of Harvard Col- lege were never called upon.
Moody had, literally, no care beside his school, which soon filled up. For a good many years there were from seventy to eighty boys in the school, twenty or twenty-five of whom boarded at the Man- sion House. How the master continued to pack them in his diminu- tive schoolroom, and how the steward managed to lodge and to feed them in a building which would seem crowded with half that number are insoluble problems.
Our knowledge of this celebrated man is wholly traditional, and has been handed down to us from his pupils. Large and somewhat coarse, vigorous rather than graceful, unquestioned master in his own domain, and yet lively in feeling, thought, manner, and speech, sturdy, earnest, and sincere-such would seem to be a good descrip- tion of Master Moody. His scholarship was somewhat limited in scope, for he made no pretense to mathematics, natural science, or even to common arithmetic. French he read well and accurately, but it was in Latin and Greek -- especially the former-that his strength as a scholar and a teacher mainly lay. There is no reason to suppose he had read many of the ancient authors, but his knowledge of the text books required to prepare boys for college was exhaustive and at his fingers' ends. To maintain his accuracy at its highest pitch it is said on good authority that Master Moody was in the habit of studying the French and Latin dictionaries, in regular course, from A to Z.
"The promptness and exactness for which he was so remarkable, were the qualities which he required in his pupils, and which he labored, not in vain, to create. Of his peculiar methods and appliances, a few only are remembered. His
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views of order in a school-room differed from those which usually prevail. Silence, there, he thought, was more dis- tracting than noise. Accordingly, he not only permitted, but encouraged his scholars to study audibly. The buzz of sixty or seventy boys loudly conning their various tasks, not only filled the room, but could be heard at some distance from the house. New-comers unused to the practice were disturbed at first, but soon fell in with the current, and liked it well. This confused murmur made the recitation of classes and remarks of teachers inaudible to the rest, and thus favored abstraction and attention.
"Though he lived long before the days of gymnastic apparatus and instruction, he looked carefully after the amuse- ments, the health, and the safety of his boys. In the matter of bathing his regulations were strict and peculiar. The time and the place were fixed by him. The state of the tide was carefully observed, and if the favorable moment happened to come in the midst of school hours, he suspended work for a while, and sent the boys out to bathe -- so important in his view was the salubrious immersion."
An amusing story is told of one of Master Moody's outbreaks in the classroom:
"Mr Moody generally dubbed his pupils with the prefixes borne by their fathers. Young Preble, whose sire was a Briga- dier of considerable note, was falsely charged with some offence, of great atrocity in the Master's view, who, believing it true, seized the fire-shovel, a large flat-bladed implement of home-make, rushed rapidly to the place where Preble sat, and brought it down with great force and much show of pas- sion, very near to the boy's head. Then, returning to his seat -the look of anger all gone-he pleasantly said-'Boys, did you observe the Brigadier, when I struck ? He never winked. He'll be a general yet.'"
An interesting comment on the early curriculum at Governor Dum- mer Academy is made by Charles D. Brodhead, in "The Archon," a magazine published by the school, in the June, 1933, number :
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"From 1763 to 1837 the Academy existed as a 'grammar school' according to the will of its founder, that name imply- ing then the study of Latin and Greek languages as the basis of preparation for the 'Cambridge College.' Observe the curriculum as it was announced in the catalogue of 1837:
"First Year:
"Latin Grammar, Jacob's 'Latin Reader,' Cæsar's 'Com- mentaries,' Sallust, 'Reading and Making Latin,' Ancient and Modern Geography, Roman Antiquities, Arithmetic.
"Second Year:
"'Reading and Making Latin,' Sallust, Virgil's 'Aeneid,' Cicero's 'Orations,' Fisk's 'Greek Grammar,' Jacob's 'Greek Reader,' Arithmetic, and English Grammar.
"Third Year:
"Same Latin and Greek authors as before, Virgil's 'Bu- colics' and 'Georgics,' English Grammar, Declamation, Exer- cises in Latin and English translations, Composition, Algebra.
"Notice the absence of geometry, physics, chemistry, French, German, and history. It is probable that 'English Grammar' included the literature of the day, but think what was missing to Master Moody's pupils; Bobby Burns was born only four years before classes started; so there was no 'Highland Mary'; no Wordsworth yet could say 'My heart with pleasure fills and dances with the daffodils'; no noble knights of Tennyson's; no 'Hail to thee blithe spirit' from revolutionist Shelly; no 'Last Duchess' from the suitor of Miss Barrett of Wimpole Street. Doctor Johnson was the Literary Guild and Webster's 'Collegiate Dictionary' com- bined, Jean Jaques Rousseau was furnishing a prototype for Havelock Ellis and Bernard Shaw with his 'advanced' ideas on rearing of children and the rights of man. Voltaire was the H. G. Wells and Mencken who debunked contemporary civilization.
"As for natural sciences, what was there of worth in them for the school boy, even had they been taught? True, Rob- ert Boyle's laws of expansion were known, but Priestly found
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oxygen in 1774, and Lavoiser discovered in the same year that the burning of materials did not destroy them, but only created other compounds. Messrs. Gay-Lussac, Arrhenius, and Bunsen of the famous burner, were yet unborn, and men never had to worry over electrolysis even in the College. Darwin had caused no Protestant or Catholic expounder of St. Paul to tremble at the thought of evolution.
"In the list of studies above, the subject of 'Roman An- tiquities' has a meager place in the first year and apparently passed for history, but what history? If we take ancient his- tory what was there? Mr. Gibbon, whose antique f's for s's so bother the perusers of his musty volumes had not yet worked out the story of Rome's 'Decline and Fall.' Pompeii had not yet made 'Cave canem' the school boy's image of Roman domestic architecture. The Rosetta Stone was only found in 1799, and so all Egypt, except for Herodotus' yarn spinning, was yet a closed book. Babylonia, lacking the Behistun Rock language key, was in the same condition. Consider too that in reading the Greek of the 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' those boys were taught that they were probably only the delightful imagery of ancient mind, not the wells of knowledge of preclassic culture that Schliemann's diggings at Troy and Mycenae have proved them to be. How could anybody be bothered with understanding those bogies of U. S. History: 'tariffs,' 'internal improvements,' 'strict and loose construction,' 'citizenship of corporations' when there wasn't any United States and 'taxation without representation' was not nearer to history than the 'Impartial Herald' of New- buryport. 'British Imperialistic Policy' was studying at the Academy in person; for Sir David Ochterlony, the colleague of Hastings, was preparing to quell Indian Sikhs and Sepoys by conjugating Latin verbs under Master Moody's eye.
"With all the lack of what is now considered the ele- ments required for a good education, and despite the 'dread language drill' the old system had its blessings. As for Latin and Greek, a pupil offers his testimony, with which we shall close. 'I was obliged to learn everything about every word of every lesson. .. . I learned to love Greek better than any other
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study. ... The sufficient reason was, I made a better beginning in it than in anything else, and what I learned, I learned bet- ter than I ever learned anything before.'"
Ever since Samuel Moody's day Governor Dummer Academy has continued its useful work under twenty-two successive masters. Under Edward W. Eames, a youthful and able administrator, who became headmaster in 1930, the school has recovered from tempo- rary difficulties, and is functioning with renewed vigor and success. It has now (1933) a capacity enrollment of 114 students, including boys from thirteen states other than Massachusetts, from the Dis- trict of Columbia, and from two foreign countries. The faculty consists of sixteen masters.
PHILLIPS ACADEMY-Among Master Moody's first pupils were two youths who together were to found Phillips Academy, Andover, and establish it upon an enduring basis. They were Samuel Phillips, Jr., and Eliphalet Pearson. The former was graduated from Har- vard in 1771 and became a man who, while modest, introspective, and somewhat sombre, exhibited an amazing energy and versatility in affairs, and a public spirit which caused him to be chosen as Justice of the Court of Common Pleas of Essex County, President of the Massachusetts Senate, and Lieutenant-Governor of the Common- wealth. At some time before his twenty-sixth year he began to specu- late on the subject of education and the need for an academy inde- pendent of town or parish committees, of a new type, and of a broader scope than any then in existence in the colonies. He secured the cooperation in his slowly maturing plan of his father and of his uncle, Dr. John Phillips, purchased an ample tract of land in the South Parish, and on April 21, 1778, the constitution was signed.
This often quoted document, undoubtedly the work of Samuel Phillips' hand, shows him to have been a pioneer in a new field and worthy to be ranked with Horace Mann and Andrew D. White as one of the few original minds in American education.10 Among its provisions are :
"The foundation of a public free School or Academy for the purpose of instructing Youth, not only in English and Latin Grammar, Writing, Arithmetic, and those Sciences,
IO. Fuess : "An Old New England School," p. 72.
ANDOVER-PHILLIPS ACADEMY Portico of the Addison Gallery of American Art
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wherein they are commonly taught, but more especially to learn them the great end and real business of living. . . ..
"But above all, it is expected that the Master's attention to the disposition of the minds and morals of the youth under his charge will exceed every other care; well considering that, though goodness without knowledge (as it respects others), is weak and feeble, yet knowledge without goodness is danger- ous, and that both united form the noblest character, and lay the surest foundation of usefulness to mankind.
"This Seminary shall be ever equally open to youth of requisite qualifications from every quarter.
"And, in order to prevent the smallest perversion of the true intent of this Foundation, it is again declared, that the first and principal object of this Institution is the promotion of true Piety and Virtue: the second, instruction in the Eng- lish, Latin, and Greek languages.
On April 30, 1778, school was opened by Principal Eliphalet Pearson with thirteen pupils in an old, unpainted carpenter shop. Pearson "has been called 'in some respects the most remarkable man ever connected with the institutions of Andover.' He was a stubborn, autocratic pedagogue of the old school, powerful in physique, domineering in manner, and exacting in his requirements from his pupils. But he was something more than merely a master in the classroom. Washington once said of him, 'His eye shows him worthy, not only to lead boys but to command men.' His astound- ing energy and versatility made him seem to be a kind of 'super- man.' "11 He was a musician, a skilled mechanic, a shrewd farmer and trader, and the master of six foreign languages. After retiring from the principalship he became president of Harvard, and later professor at Andover Theological Seminary.
Space does not permit an account of Phillips Academy's ten head- masters (from 1786 to 1927 the head of the academy bore the title of principal), of whom at least four, besides Pearson, have been conspicuous in education-John Adams, Samuel H. Taylor (Uncle Sam), Cecil F. P. Bancroft, and Alfred E. Stearns.
"Uncle Sam" Taylor left his indelible stamp upon the school. A strong man, a harsh disciplinarian, a precise and exacting scholar, he
II. Fuess: An Old New England School. p. 86.
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aroused devoted loyalty or bitter animosity among all with whom he came in contact. But under his guidance Phillips Academy grew to be a great American school, reaching to the Far West and South, and even to foreign countries for its scholars. Parents spoke of sending their sons, not to Phillips Academy, but to Dr. Taylor. In a school where little supervision of the boys was possible, he estab- lished law and order by the severity of his reprimands and by a sys- tem of personal observation which those who were caught spoke of as spying and sneaking. His methods in the classroom were terrify- ing to the timid or bashful boy, but those who passed through his classes learned once and for all the value of thorough scholarship, and the dignity of honest labor. On January 29, 1871, Dr. Taylor died suddenly in the vestibule of the Academy Building in the thirty- fourth year of his administration, the longest in the history of the school.
Dr. Taylor was succeeded by Dr. Cecil F. P. Bancroft, who was principal until his death in 1901. Under his shrewd and patient guidance the school entered a new period of effectiveness and pros- perity. He made a complete revision of the curriculum, greatly broadening the range of studies and enabling the school to meet the entrance requirements of any college or scientific school, and he gathered about himself a larger and more efficient body of teachers. The attendance increased : in 1873 there were two hundred and sixty- two pupils; in 1895, five hundred and twenty-four; and after 1892 the number never dropped below four hundred. Dr. Bancroft also strove to secure additions to the equipment; dormitories, a good laboratory, and the Borden Gymnasium were built through his efforts.
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