Moses Brown School

Moses Brown

Original building of the Moses Brown School campus, ca.1819
Location
Providence, RI
USA
Coordinates

41°49′59.2″N 71°23′54.36″W / 41.833111°N 71.3984333°W / 41.833111; -71.3984333Coordinates: 41°49′59.2″N 71°23′54.36″W / 41.833111°N 71.3984333°W / 41.833111; -71.3984333

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Information
Type Private
Religious affiliation(s) Quaker
Established 1784
Head of school Matt Glendinning
Faculty 216
Enrollment 771 total
Average class size 11 to 15 students
Student to teacher ratio 8:1
Campus Urban, 33 acres (130,000 m2)
Color(s) White and Navy Blue
Athletics 30 sports
Mascot Quaker
Website

www.mosesbrown.org

Moses Brown School
Location 250 Lloyd Ave., Providence, Rhode Island
Area 30 acres (12 ha)
Built 1819
Architectural style Colonial Revival, Second Empire
NRHP Reference # 80000088[1]
Added to NRHP July 24, 1980

The Moses Brown School is a Quaker school located in Providence, Rhode Island, founded by Moses Brown, a Quaker abolitionist, in 1784. It is one of the oldest preparatory schools in the US.[2] The school motto is “For the Honor of Truth” and the school song is "Beneath the Elms" a reference to the large grove of elm trees that still surrounds the school to this day.[3] The school has maintained its Quaker heritage with help from their Quaker in residence, Galen Hamann. Meeting for Worship is still held once a week and people have the opportunity to participate in the adjacent meeting house of the Providence Society of Friends.[3]

Founder

Moses Brown (1738–1836) was a member of the Brown family, a powerful mercantile family of New England. Co-founder of Brown University, a New England abolitionist and industrialist. He went on to become a pioneering advocate of abolition of slavery in the US while starting the Moses Brown School.

History

First meeting place of the school from 1784-88 in the Portsmouth Friends Meeting House

In 1777 a committee of New England Yearly Meeting took up the idea for a school to educate young Quakers in New England. The committee, which included Moses Brown, was part of an effort within Quakerdom to promote their faith to the next generation. Brown wanted to ensure that when they reached adulthood they would be able to make a living.

The school opened in 1784 at Portsmouth Friends Meeting House in Portsmouth on Aquidneck Island, which was the administrative center for Yearly Meeting, and which had historically been heavily Quaker. However, by the 1780s it was an isolated location, and in the years after the American Revolution it was difficult to recruit both students and teachers. Four years later the Yearly Meeting decided to close the school "for one year", in June 1788; the school remained closed for over three decades.[4]

During those years, Moses Brown worked to restart the school, and, as treasurer of the school fund, was able to convince the Yearly Meeting to reopen the school – in part by donating a portion of his farm located in Providence, Rhode Island for the school to be built on.

The school reopened in 1819 in Providence under the name "The New England Yearly Meeting Boarding School." Moses Brown then joined with his son Obadiah and his son-in-law William Almy to pay for the construction of the first building, which still serves as the main building of the school. Obadiah Brown also left $100,000 in his will to the school, a sum unheard of at the time for a school endowment or gift. In 1904 the school was renamed "Moses Brown School" to honor its benefactor and advocate. It offered an "upper" and "lower" school for "younger boys".[5]

As the Quakers were early advocates of gender equality, Moses Brown School was a co-educational school. However, in 1926 it became a boys-only school as was the fashion in U.S. society at the time. As attitudes again became more liberal, it again became coed in 1976. Well-known faculty over the years included the twin Quaker educators Alfred and Albert Smiley in the mid-Nineteenth Century[[6]] and noted children's author Scott Corbett in the 1960s. "Moses Brown School: A History of its Third Half-Century" by Bill Paxton, who was an English teacher at Moses Brown, covers the school's history during the period 1919-1969.[[7]]

As of 2013 the school was owned by New England Yearly Meeting, with its own Board of Overseers, and operated independently of the yearly meeting. The school was examining the possibility of changing its specific affiliation while still retaining its identity as a Quaker school.


Academics

Ninth and tenth graders are offered limited flexibility in their courses, aiming to expose them to a varied selection of topics. Juniors and seniors, however, are much freer to flexibly select electives and other such courses. English is the only subject mandated through four years in the Upper School, though it is also the department with the greatest variety of electives offered. Students must complete up to Precalculus in order to satisfy their Math requirement, and study a single language for three years, and lab sciences for two. There is a requirement for a comparative religions class. Moses Brown offers AP classes in Statistics, Calculus, Spanish Language, French Language, Latin Vergil, Biology, Physics, Chemistry and more. Students are also required to take a years worth of art classes. In addition the Co-Curricular program remains a cornerstone of the Moses Brown experience. Students are required to participate in varied school activities whether as a member of a sports team, an actor in a play, or a student in a dance class. This still helps to foster community engagement.[3]

Facilities

Notable alumni

See also

References

  1. ↑ Staff (2010-07-09). "National Register Information System". National Register of Historic Places. National Park Service.
  2. ↑
  3. 1 2 3 4 "My Site". mosesbrownalumni.weebly.com. Retrieved 2016-04-14.
  4. ↑ Rayner Wickersham Kelsey, Centennial history of Moses Brown school, 1819-1919 (Moses Brown school, 1919) pg. 50 http://books.google.com/books?id=28kiAAAAMAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s
  5. ↑ "Moses Brown School". The Independent. Jul 6, 1914. Retrieved August 1, 2012.
  6. ↑ http://www.redlandsdailyfacts.com/lifestyle/20090321/smiley-twins-the-early-years
  7. ↑ http://www.amazon.com/Moses-Brown-School-half-century-1919-1969/dp/B0006W2I9S
  8. ↑ "A History of Swan Point Cemetery". Swan Point Cemetery. Retrieved March 26, 2014.
  9. ↑ Vincent "Buddy Cianci", Jr., David Fisher, Politics and Pasta: How I Prosecuted Mobsters, Rebuilt a Dying City, Dined with Sinatra, Spent Five Years in a Federally Funded Gated Community, and Lived to Tell the Tale pg. 10
  10. ↑ "'A Girl in the Race'? Sue Minter Weighs a Run for Governor". Seven Days. Retrieved September 11, 2015.
  11. ↑ Moses Brown School: "More than two thousand members of the MB community were on campus Oct. 17-19 for MB Expo, a celebration of play, passion and purpose" retrieved May 26, 2014

External links

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