Cheshire Academy - Rolling Stone Yearbook (Cheshire, CT)

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F OREWORD Cheshire Academy offers this book as an invitation, courtesy and aid to the many individuals and families who are touring the Academy during the season of 1956-57, the one hundred and sixth-third anniversary of its founding. The pictures and stories published in these pages are selected from the 1956- 57 year activities. Both text and art are representative of New England, rather than definitive. To do sound justice to a subject so rich would take volumes. But here you will find a fewhiftoric highlights, a foretaste of New England setting, a glimmer of life as we lead it. Therefore, the staff responsible for the publication of this year's Rolling Stone sees fit to issue a guidebook, a guide to a time as well as a place. This book could not have been produced without the help and cooperation of the student body, faculty and a wonderful staff, whose constant aim it has been to produce a book worthy jnf Cheshire Academy, and one that would tell the story of our school year here. We sincerely hope that we have succeeded in these aims and that you enjoy every page of this, your 1957 ROLLING STONE The Staff

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Bowden and Bronson Halls

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We can imagine a group of teachers and students from foreign lands arriving in the town of Cheshire to visit and study Cheshire Academy as an outstand- ing but representative American preparatory school. First of all they would no doubt want to walk around the campus, see the physical basis, and hear the Academy's background and history. Here is the heart and center of Cheshire Academy - Bowden Hall. The administrative offices, in- cluding the gracious study'of the headmaster, are on the first floor, a number of boys are housed up- stairs. New students and their parents usually make their first acquaintance with Cheshire here in the oldest building on the campusf, The men in those days clearly built for the fu- ture. In every sense. The thirty men who raised the S702 to begin the Academy-then the Episcopal Academy of Connecticut-must have felt something of the passion for education which so moved Thomas jefferson, the conviction that a government of the people must depend on an educated citizenry. Thomas jefferson had not yet been elected pres- ident then. No, George Washington was president when the Academy was founded. jefferson had already made a great impact on our country's history, however. I don't know whether any of the Cheshire subscribers -most of them farmers-were followers of his or not, but intense recognition that for growth and progress America must have education must have permeated men's thoughts all over the new nation. Were they thinking of education or of religion? Both, no doubt. The position of the lovely Con- gregational church at the apex of the green symbolizes the place of religion in their lives. And the other Cheshire churches hold important places. Across the highway you see St. Peter's Episcopal Church, with which the history of the Academy is closely associatedg HISTORY OF though it is now non-sectarian. The transepts of St. Peter's were built to seat the growing student body. How did Bowden Hall get its name? From the first headmaster to serve in it, Dr. john Bowden. But even before there was a building, in 1794, the Reverend Mr. Bronson had opened classes. The building at the end of the portico, now actually one with Bowden Hall, was named Bronson Hall. It contains the library, the bursar's office, and a chapel which we understand to be the oldest private school chapel in the country. Do all boys attend ? Bowden Hall and Bronson Hall V Unless by their parents' wish they attend another service. But the constitution forbade compuslory church attendance except as parents should direct even in its early days, when the Academy was under the guidance of the Episcopal Church. During those days, following the resignation in 1802 of Dr. Bow- den, the Episcopal rectors served also as heads of the Academy up to the time of the Civil War, when Dr. Sanford J. Horton became the head and reorganized the school as a military academy. Horton Hall, the