Dixwell School


Dixwell's Private Latin School, also known as the Dixwell School and later renamed Hopkinson School and Legate's Private Classical School, was a college-preparatory school in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, which operated from 1851 to roughly 1937. It was one of America's first modern private day schools. During its heyday in the second half of the nineteenth century, Dixwell's was one of Harvard College's most important feeder schools. Its rise paralleled Harvard's transition from a training ground for clergymen to a socially elite institution primarily patronized by the sons of wealthy businessmen.
Dixwell's was closely associated with the Boston Brahmin elite. It trained many notable alumni, including Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Secretary of State Robert Bacon, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Sr., Massachusetts Governor Roger Wolcott, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Henry Adams.
The school's alumni made significant contributions to the development of tennis and American football. In 1876, Dixwell men organized and hosted the first American lawn tennis tournament. The school produced many of the sport's first American stars, including Richard Dudley Sears, Malcolm Whitman, and James Dwight. Dixwell students were the primary force behind the Oneida Football Club, the first organized American football team. Other athletes include two-time Olympic gold medalist Ellery Harding Clark and 1920 America's Cup-winning skipper Charles Francis Adams III.

Background

Latin schools, academies, and public schools

Until the second half of the nineteenth century, American secondary education was divided into two tracks: classical-ministerial and business-vocational. In the seventeenth century, when the first secondary schools were set up in the colonies, "preparation for college... was practically preparation for the ministry." At the time, ministers were expected to learn Latin and Greek. The colleges refused to admit students who had not studied those subjects. As a result, aspiring college students were generally channeled to Latin schools and grammar schools.
The primary alternative to the Latin school was the academy, which offered Latin and Greek courses for college-bound students but also included topics practical for non-clerics who were not interested in college, like mathematics, English, and French. Academies were principally set up in the countryside to educate students from the surrounding era, in lieu of a public school. In some cases, they were chartered and subsidized by the state, and acted as predecessors of county high schools. Academies, such as Phillips Andover and [Phillips Phillips Exeter Academy|Exeter Academy|Phillips Exeter], largely displaced the old Latin schools. By the 1850s, only a few Latin schools remained, mainly in the larger cities. One surviving classical school was Boston Latin School, which eventually gave rise to Dixwell's.
Starting around 1850, the rise of free, taxpayer-funded public high schools largely displaced the academies' role as vocational educators. This process picked up at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1889, 31.87% of American high school students went to private school. By 1912, public school enrollment rose fivefold. Although private school enrollment grew in absolute terms, its share of the industry shrank to 11.55%.

Admissions requirements at Harvard College

In the nineteenth century, Harvard College grew secular and wealthy. As early as the 1830s, Harvard-watchers were already noticing that Harvard's student body was trending socially elite and exclusive. Dixwell alumnus Henry Adams wrote that when he attended Harvard in the 1850s, the Boston elite was already "sending their children to Harvard College for the sake of its social advantages." George Santayana graduated from Harvard in 1886 and called the new Harvard a "seminary and academy for the inner circle of Bostonians."
These changes disrupted Harvard's curriculum, but not its admissions practices. The sons of wealthy businessmen often went into business themselves, and to cater to these students, Harvard modified its curriculum to teach "mercantile and active" subjects. From 1798 to 1830, 24% of Harvard students went into the ministry and 17% into business. From 1835 to 1860, these preferences flipped to 9% and 24%, respectively. As a result of these changes, some members of the Harvard community protested that Latin and Greek had little direct practical utility for the modern Harvard student. Even so, Harvard continued requiring applicants to study both Latin and Greek until 1887.
In fact, in the first half of the nineteenth century, Harvard tightened its admission requirements—which still prioritized Latin and Greek. Students "began to fail the examination in significant numbers" starting in the 1830s. Applicants began spending more time in secondary school to prepare for Harvard, and the average age of matriculants increased from 15.5 in 1810 to 17.5 in 1850.
Ronald Story attributes Harvard's decision to changes in its governance, which allowed Boston's commercial elite to influence Harvard's admissions requirements, while at the same time generously funding high schools whose curricula were tailored to those requirements. Critics protested that the stricter requirements favored students at the leading prep schools, such as BLS, Roxbury Latin, Exeter, Andover, and Round Hill. By contrast, the new crop of public schools generally lacked the resources to employ a classics teacher.

History

Founding a new school

Epes Sargent Dixwell attended Boston Latin School and Harvard College, graduating from the latter in 1827. After briefly practicing as a lawyer, he became the BLS headmaster in 1836. At BLS, he taught Charles W. Eliot, the future president of Harvard University, and folklorist Francis James Child. He reportedly loaned Child the money to attend Harvard.
In the early 1850s, the City of Boston attempted to cut off city services to families that did not pay property taxes to the city. It ordered employees to move to Boston or quit. It also banned suburban students from attending BLS. Dixwell lived in Cambridge and refused to move. As a result, in 1851, Dixwell left BLS to start a new private school at 2 Boylston Place, near Boston Common and Piano Row. Financial concerns may have also played a role in the move, as Dixwell complained that the City had underpaid him in the past. He ran his new school as a for-profit enterprise, and boasted that running a private school paid better.
In a stroke of luck, two of Dixwell's first students were also two of his most famous. Henry Adams attended Dixwell's because his suburban address prevented him from attending BLS. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.'s father Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. picked the brand-new Dixwell School due to his disapproval of Dixwell's replacement at BLS.
Pedagogically, the school's curriculum was "based entirely on the entrance requirements of Harvard"—that is, the classics. Dixwell liked science, and co-founded the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1848. Even so, when Henry Cabot Lodge Sr. attended Dixwell's in the 1860s, the curriculum focused on Latin and Greek, and also included some mathematics, French, and classical history. Lodge was a mostly-indifferent student in high school, and quipped that to Dixwell, "anything of modern history or of the history of our own country was thought quite needless." Dixwell had some outright critics, including BLS alumnus Charles Francis Adams, who hated Dixwell's BLS and called it a "conventional, mechanical, low-standard day-school and classical grind-mill." However, the system achieved its intended purpose. Dixwell claimed that only one of his students ever failed the Harvard entrance exam—and that student got in on the second attempt.

Wealth, influence, and relationship with Harvard

Dixwell's Boston Latin student Charles W. Eliot remembered the Dixwell School as the start of a new "epoch in the development of secondary education in the city of Boston." Dixwell responded to several major changes in American education and upper-class tastes: the relocation of wealthy men like Dixwell to the suburbs, the rise of college as a socially advantageous training ground for secular careers, and Harvard's decision to retain its increasingly obsolete, Latin-focused admissions criteria even as it gradually secularized its curriculum. Dixwell was not the first man who tried to provide an expensive college-preparatory classical education outside the public school system. However, he was arguably the first teacher to do so successfully, and he paved the way for similar private prep schools.
Dixwell's BLS was a case in point. In Dixwell's day, BLS was itself deemed "principally... for the rich and exclusive." Dixwell recalled that during his school years, the BLS leadership felt threatened by a rival private school founded by "an Englishman named Fisher", which had "received the patronage of several rich men." Competition from Fisher forced BLS to improve its academic reputation, which allowed BLS to then drive Fisher out of business and claim his students. In turn, Eliot wrote that the Dixwell School was the first private school to rival BLS academically, and that because of Dixwell's success, many other private day schools were established, which drew away "many sons of well-to-do families" from BLS.
Coming from a socially elite background, Dixwell was well-placed to capitalize on these changes. His family was wealthy. He had read law under Charles Jackson, the father-in-law of Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. He married into another leading Boston family when he wed Mary Ingersoll Bowditch, the daughter of Nathaniel Bowditch. His Harvard roommate was Cornelius Felton, the future president of Harvard University. Two of his daughters married his well-born students: Fanny Dixwell married Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and Mary Dixwell married George Wigglesworth, the future president of the Harvard Board of Overseers and treasurer of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose family gave its name to Wigglesworth Hall at Harvard Yard.
Dixwell cultivated a similarly patrician student body. He set the tuition at $250/year. By contrast, Phillips Exeter charged day students $14 and boarders around $150. In fact, Dixwell's cost at least twice as much as Harvard itself, although when unofficial-but-socially expected costs of attending Harvard were included, Harvard was likely more expensive. Dixwell limited enrollment to 50 students, set up shop in what was then a "very select" neighborhood, and quickly moved into a purpose-built facility down the road at 20 Boylston Place. He educated many wealthy students from Beacon Hill and the Boston suburbs, and sought to teach his students "the morals and manners befitting sons of Boston's patrician class." One biographer wrote that at Dixwell's, "it was taken for granted that would attend Harvard College as generations of their fathers had before them."
The school coexisted with upper-class boarding schools, and educated boarding school alumni who needed additional training for college entrance exams. For example, Frederick Shattuck, the first-ever student at St. Paul's School in New Hampshire, finished his college preparation at Dixwell's and duly proceeded to Harvard College and Harvard Medical School. Shattuck recalled that " did not approve of me, and I did not appreciate him." William Sumner Appleton Jr. similarly "attended" St. Paul's but was "fitted for college" at Hopkinson's. Dixwell alumnus William Hathaway Forbes was the first president of the re-founded Milton Academy in 1885, and several students attended both Milton and Hopkinson's, including Forbes' son Cameron, Citibank chairman James H. Perkins, and surgeon William E. Ladd.
Aided by these shifts, Dixwell's became one of Harvard's leading feeder schools. Dixwell's and its competitor Nobles trained 12% of all Harvard undergraduates from 1846 to 1870. In addition, by the middle of the nineteenth century, nearly 40% of Harvard freshmen were alumni of three schools: Dixwell's, BLS, and Exeter. Robert Grant, whose father bucked upper-class convention by sending his sons to BLS, concluded that Charles Eliot "had no brief for sending a son to a public school for the sake of democracy if the free education provided was inferior to what could be had at a private ."

Hopkinson School

Dixwell retired in 1872 and sold the Boylston Place campus to John Prentiss Hopkinson, who had taught at Dixwell's for six years before leaving in 1868. Hopkinson renamed the school after himself; it was familiarly nicknamed "Hoppy's." In 1889, Hopkinson moved the school to Edwin Booth's old home at 29 Chestnut Street, Beacon Hill, "where his school reached its zenith of popularity."
The Hopkinson School continued to enjoy close ties with Harvard University and the Eliot family in particular. Charles W. Eliot had recently taken over Harvard University, and he encouraged private secondary schools to build strong relationships with Harvard. Eliot sent his own son Samuel to Hopkinson's, and Samuel eventually married J. P. Hopkinson's daughter. From 1870 to 1895, Hopkinson's was Harvard's third-largest feeder school, with 331 students. In 1895, Hopkinson's was Harvard's largest feeder school, with 53 students, prompting the Boston Globe to write that Hopkinson's commanded "enormous social prestige" at Harvard and that "Hoppy men" were a "cinch" for the Harvard College social clubs. All together, Dixwell's and Hopkinson's sent over 800 students to Harvard between 1851 and 1905.
Hopkinson was associated with several other prep schools. One of his assistants, James Greenough, married into the family of G.W.C. Noble and joined that man's competitor school in 1892; as a result, Noble's Classical School was renamed to Noble and Greenough. Another assistant, Arthur Volkmann, started his own Harvard feeder school in 1895. Hopkinson's students also started boarding schools. William Amory Gardner co-founded Groton School in 1884, and William Cameron Forbes co-founded Middlesex School in 1901.

Legate's Private Classical School

As late as 1895, Hopkinson was the only individual listed on the school's marketing materials. That same year, Arthur Volkmann left and opened a new school on Marlborough Street in Back Bay. In 1896, Hopkinson promoted Burton John Legate to co-principal; Legate had been teaching at Hopkinson's since 1880. Legate officially took over the school in 1905, and renamed the school to Mr. Legate's Private Classical School. However, Hopkinson kept the campus and sold it to Mary Morton Kehew in 1907. Legate moved to nearby 66 Beacon Street.
The Legate School appears to have vanished into obscurity. Dixwell alumnus Winthrop Scudder claimed that J.P. Hopkinson retired in 1897 and that the school closed that year. However, the Hopkinson School continued to list both Legate and J.P. Hopkinson on school advertisements until the 1905–06 school year. Moreover, after renaming the school, Legate claimed that his school was the "uccessor to the Hopkinson School", as well as Dixwell's. He claimed the Dixwell's foundation date of 1851. By 1931 the Legate School had been removed from Sargent's private school handbook, but it still appeared in other educational directories as late as 1934. Burton Legate died in 1937, at the age of 82.
Hopkinson's student body may have decamped for Nobles and Volkmann's, which eventually merged. Volkmann's eventually "ranked among the most socially prestigious in Boston," and became "Nobles' closest athletic and academic rival." The Sargent private school handbook wrote that Volkmann's "succeeded in large part to the popularity of 'Hoppy's' and for some years held the primacy among Boston schools." Following the merger, Nobles held a ceremony to honor Dixwell's alumnus Gerrit Smith Miller, during which a plaque honoring Miller was unveiled on campus. At the ceremony, Nobles headmaster Charles Wiggins claimed that the Dixwell alumni agreed Nobles was now "the natural inheritor of traditions." However, the plaque "disappeared soon after the unveiling" and has never been replaced.

Athletics

American football: The Oneidas

Dixwell's was a pioneer in early American football. In 1862, seven years before the 1869 Princeton vs. Rutgers football game, Dixwell's student Gerrit Smith Miller established the Oneida Football Club, named after Oneida Lake in New York State, near Miller's home. The Oneida Football Club fielded 12 Dixwell's students, including Miller, Robert Means Lawrence, and Francis Greenwood Peabody, as well as two students from Boston English and one student from Boston Latin. Football historians Walter Camp and Parke H. Davis could not think of any earlier football club "organized on a permanent basis."
To some extent, the novelty of the Oneida Football Club was determined in retrospect: "hat a group of boys was playing a form of football was nothing new or remarkable for Boston at the time." The Dixwell School already had its own football team, an after-school activity organized "simply as a matter of fun and exercise," which Miller joined in 1860. In fact, Miller did not even learn football at Dixwell's: according to Amos Alonzo Stagg, he had picked up the game while living in New Jersey. Moreover, the rules of early football were still evolving, and the Oneida game did not resemble modern football. However, Parke Davis wrote that while there had been many pickup football games before 1862, Oneida was the first club "playing a definite schedule of games."
Despite having Boston Latin and Boston English students on their roster, the Oneidas played games against the Latin and English school teams, as well as a combined Latin-English team. The team dissolved after four years.

Tennis

The school's alumni made significant contributions to American tennis. After Dixwell's, James Dwight graduated from Harvard in 1874. In 1876, he organized America's first lawn tennis tournament at the Nahant, Massachusetts estate of his uncle William Sumner Appleton Sr., who also attended Dixwell's. He served as president of the United States Lawn Tennis Association for twenty years, and has been called the "Father of American Tennis."
Dwight taught the game to his cousin Richard Dudley Sears, a Hopkinson's graduate. Sears won the first seven U.S. Championships in men's singles, and teamed up with Dwight to win five U.S. Championships in men's doubles; Sears also won a sixth doubles title with Joseph Clark. Other Hopkinson's men also excelled at tennis: Malcolm Whitman won three more U.S. titles in men's singles, and Irving Wright won two U.S. titles in mixed doubles.

Interschool athletics

Hopkinson's made various attempts to organize athletics on a school-by-school basis. During the 1885-86 school year, Hopkinson's, Roxbury Latin, and St. Mark's started the Interscholastic Athletic Association, an early high school athletic conference. St. Mark's left in the 1888-89 school year, but the day schools responded by adding Boston Latin, Boston English, Cambridge High and Latin, Worcester Academy, Exeter, Andover, and several other schools. By 1900, Hopkinson's, BLS, Cambridge Latin, Newton High School, and Brookline High School were announcing a new league, but Hopkinson's left within five years.
The Hopkinson's football team went into decline. In 1903 the team was unable to complete the season and the team was temporarily disbanded. In 1904, Hopkinson's announced that it was permanently dropping football and intended to drop hockey and baseball as well.

Notable alumni

Dixwell's

Hopkinson's