Lawrenceville School - History

History

One of the oldest prep schools in the U.S., Lawrenceville was founded in 1810 as the Maidenhead Academy by Presbyterian clergyman Isaac Van Arsdale Brown. As early as 1828, the school attracted students from Cuba and England, as well as from the Cherokee Nations. It went by several subsequent names, including the Lawrenceville Classical and Commercial High School, the Lawrenceville Academy, and the Lawrenceville Classical Academy, before the school's current name, "The Lawrenceville School," was set during its refounding in 1883. An 18-acre (73,000 m2) area of the campus built then, including numerous buildings, has been designated a U.S. National Historic Landmark District, known as Lawrenceville School National Historic Landmark. A newer portion of the campus, not intruding into that district, was built in the 1920s.

In 1951, a group of educators from three of the elite prep schools in the United States (Lawrenceville, Phillips Academy, and Phillips Exeter Academy) and three of the country's most prestigious colleges (Harvard University, Princeton University, and Yale University) convened to examine the best use of the final two years of high school and the first two years of college. This committee published a final report, General Education in School and College, through Harvard University Press in 1952, which subsequently led to the establishment of the Advanced Placement program.

Lawrenceville was featured in a number of novels by Owen Johnson, class of 1895, notably The Prodigious Hickey, The Tennessee Shad, and The Varmint (1910). The Varmint, which recounts the school years of the fictional character Dink Stover, was made into the 1950 motion picture The Happy Years which starred Leo G. Carroll and Dean Stockwell and was filmed on the Lawrenceville campus. A 1992 PBS miniseries was based on his Lawrenceville tales.

In 1959, Fidel Castro spoke at the school in the Edith Memorial Chapel. Recent speakers have included boxer Muhammad Ali, former president of Honduras and alumnus Ricardo Maduro, first female President of Ireland Mary Robinson, playwright Edward Albee, legal scholar Derrick Bell, poet Billy Collins, playwright Christopher Durang, historians Niall Ferguson and David Hackett Fischer, the Rev. Peter J. Gomes, poet Seamus Heaney, political analyst Ariana Huffington, novelist Chang-rae Lee, photographer Andres Serrano, poet Mark Strand, writer Andrew Sullivan, politician Lowell Weicker, ambassador Pierre-Richard Prosper, philosopher Cornel West, physicist Brian Greene, actor Chevy Chase, TV show host Jon Stewart, singer Jimmy Buffett Noble Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus and Medal of Honor recipient Jack H. Jacobs.

Among Lawrenceville's prominent teachers over the years have been Thornton Wilder, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winning author, who taught French at the School in the 1920s; R. Inslee Clark, Jr., who revolutionized Ivy League admissions at Yale in the 1960s; and Thomas H. Johnson, a widely-published authority on Emily Dickinson. Faculty members have gone on to head institutions such as the Horace Mann School, Phillips Exeter Academy, the Groton School, Pacific Ridge School, Milton Academy, Westminster School, the Peddie School, Riverdale Country School, Governor Dummer Academy, and the American College of Sofia (Bulgaria).

Lawrenceville was all-male for much of its nearly 200-year history, until the board of trustees voted to make the School coeducational in 1985. The first girls were admitted in 1987. In 1999, the student body elected a female president, Alexandra Petrone; in 2003, Elizabeth Duffy was appointed the School's first female head master; and in 2005, Sasha-Mae Eccleston, Lawrenceville Class of 2002 and Brown University Class of 2006, became Lawrenceville's first alumna to win a Rhodes Scholarship.