#Stockbridge junior senior high school free
Īn inscription on a panel in the 1914 school building reads, In permanent gratitude to Cyrus Williams, a discerning citizen of this town, who, appreciated that knowledge is the only safeguard of free institutions, gave enduring reality to this belief by the endowment of our first public school. His friend, David Dudley Field named his sixth son Cyrus West Field, after Williams. He was married first to Fannie West and then to Sarah Huntington. His parents were Daniel and Esther Avery Williams. Williams was born on Main Groton, Connecticut. The school was soon renamed the Williams Academy for its benefactor. In 1841 Cyrus Williams, a physician, businessman and president of the Housatonic Bank in Stockbridge, donated $3000 to the Academy. All educated in Stockbridge, Stephen Johnson Field, Henry Billings Brown and David Josiah Brewer served together as Associate Justices from 1891 to 1897. In the early and mid-1800s Stockbridge schools earned the distinction of educating three Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States who served on the high court at the same time. In 1829 the ‘Stockbridge Academy’ was incorporated and sometimes referred to as the ‘New Academy’. The school's reputation attracted students from outside the area who boarded with local families. Three of the four students in the first graduating class of Williams College in 1795 were alumni of the Academy. The founding of the semi-private Academy after the Revolutionary War marked the beginning of a more structured commitment to secondary education in the town. Through the pre-Revolutionary War years several small schools were opened to serve the children of newly arriving settlers scattered between the distant boundaries of adjoining towns. It served as a school for the Christian education of Indian children. The first school in Stockbridge was erected in 1737 under the supervision of John Sergeant, a missionary to the local Mohican Indians.