Lawrenceville School - Olla Podrida Yearbook (Lawrenceville, NJ)

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Dorothy Jarvix

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LL, UDDIDA SCHUCI. HISTUIQY ,I . HE I25lQll Anniversary is a fitting time to review the history of the School. Of the boarding schools that have had a continuous exis- tence it is the oldest in New Iersey and the third oldest in the country. In 1810, when the School was founded, academies were taking tl1e place of the grammar schools of colonial and revolutionary times. The grammar schools had prepared boys for college, where they were to be trained for the ministry. The academies were the schools of the people and the fore- runners of the high schools. When these, beginning about 1825, superseded or absorbed most of the academies, those that survived, and Lawrenceville was one of the few, went back to preparing boys for college as their chief function. The Rev. Isaac V. Brown came to Lawrenceville fit was then called Maidenhead and was first settled sometime before 17005 as pastor of the Presbyterian Church. He had previously been a tutor at the College of New Iersey, as Princeton was then known. In order to eke out his income, after having tried and found the raising of silkworms unprofitable, he started the School in 1810 with nine boys. One of these was Iohn C. Green, who lived at Cherry Grove, about a mile from the village on the road to Prince- ton, the Great Road, the main highway between New York and Philadelphia. There were no catalogues in the early years and the first mention of the School in print is in an advertisement in the Trenton and Philadelphia newspapers in 1812. So successful was the School that in I8I4 he put up the first building, which some eighty years later became known as the Hamill House, and sometime later a schoolhouse, which is now the Laboratory. The school year was divided into two sessions of five months each, with April and September for vacations. The charge, which covered board, lodging and tuition, was in I8I2 eighty dollars a year. The subjects taught were thc Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, German, Italian and English languages, Moral and Natural Philosophy, Political Economy, Mathe- matics, Rhetoric, Elocution, Geography, History, Civil Engineering, and all the branches of elementary English and commercial educationf' Boys were admitted between the ages of five and sixteen and their morals and manners were strictly and laboriously attended to. Though Dr. Brown thought that acquiring a practical knowledge of mechanics, gardening and agriculture could H11 the time spent in idleness N inc