Groton School

The Peabody era, 1884–1940

Groton School was founded in 1884 by Endicott Peabody, an Episcopal priest. Peabody was backed by Harvard president Charles Eliot and affluent figures of the time, such as Peabody's father Samuel Peabody, Phillips Brooks, William Lawrence, William Crowninshield Endicott, and J. P. Morgan. The school also enjoyed the patronage of the Roosevelt family, as Theodore Roosevelt was one of Peabody's close friends. Groton's founding was part of a larger nineteenth-century effort to establish more Episcopal prep schools in the United States. Motivated by the Oxford Movement, founders of Saint James in Maryland, St. Paul's in New Hampshire, and St. Mark's in Southborough sought to emulate English-style schools in the Anglo-Catholic tradition.

Peabody served as headmaster for 56 years. A proponent of "muscular Christianity," he instituted a Spartan educational system that included cold showers and dormitory cubicles instead of individual bedrooms. He successfully attracted the children of wealthy families, whom he hoped to toughen up through this program of "corrective salutary deprivation."

Under Peabody, Groton sought to inspire its students to serve the public good, rather than enter professional life. In peacetime, many graduates were involved in public affairs, but the alumni typically gravitated to business, finance, law, or similar professional positions. In wartime, the school's ethos of public service played a more prominent role. Of Groton's 580 military-age alumni, 475 served in World War I; 24 died and another 36 were wounded, at a time when the graduating class contained roughly 27 students. Roughly 700 alumni served in World War II, with 31 deaths.

Peabody also expected his students to "be ready for advanced courses at the universities." He sought to improve the academic qualities of the student body, introducing competitive entrance examinations and a scholarship program in 1907. (One such scholarship student, Henry Chauncey '23, went on to popularize the Scholastic Aptitude Test with American universities.) Since even Ivy League universities could not always be counted on for financial aid at the time, Peabody also helped certain students pay for college. Chauncey was able to transfer from Ohio State to Harvard after Peabody arranged for a Groton donor to subsidize the cost, and Peabody gave the 1940 valedictorian and future Nobel laureate John B. Goodenough a tutoring job to help make ends meet after the latter was admitted to Yale.

The Crocker era, 1940–65

Peabody was succeeded by John Crocker '18, the Episcopal chaplain at Princeton University. Crocker's 25-year tenure overlapped with the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1952, Groton accepted its first African-American student. In April 1965, Crocker and his wife—accompanied by 85 Groton students—marched with Martin Luther King Jr. during a civil rights demonstration in Boston. (Four years earlier, Southern authorities had arrested Crocker's son John Jr. '42 during the Freedom Rides, leading to the Supreme Court case Pierson v. Ray.) Crocker also significantly expanded the school's financial aid program; by his retirement in 1965 approximately 30% of Groton students were on scholarship.

Co-education and change, 1965–77

After Crocker, Groton cycled through three brief Headmasterships: Bertrand Honea Jr. (1965–69), Paul Wright (1969–74), and Rowland Cox (1974–77). These years were marked by disputes over how (if at all) to implement co-education at Groton. Honea proposed either merging with a girls' school or formalizing a sister-school relationship with Concord Academy, a well-regarded girls' school twenty miles away. (Concord declined Groton's offer to help relocate the academy to the town of Groton, and mooted the issue by opening its doors to boys in 1971.) Following Honea's departure, Wright successfully proposed an organic transition to co-education by expanding the student body from 225 to 300 students; this plan limited the number of boys that would be rejected under the new system. After Wright reached Groton's mandatory retirement age, the school tapped Cox to implement the plan. Groton welcomed its first female students in 1975. Applications tripled, and today, Groton's student body is evenly split between boys and girls.

The new headmasters also relaxed some of the more Spartan aspects of Peabody's Groton in response to changing preferences within the American upper class, which increasingly favored private day schools over boarding schools. They replaced the sleeping cubicles with proper bedrooms, added more holidays to the academic calendar, relaxed the dress code, authorized a school newspaper, and gave students more free time over the weekends to explore the town of Groton or their own personal interests. However, some traditions remain, such as the school's commitment to public service, its small community, and its attachment to the Episcopal Church.

Contemporary Groton, 1977–present

Groton reached its modern form under William Polk '58 (1978–2003) and Richard Commons (2003–13), who significantly upgraded the campus' buildings and grounds and internationalized the admissions process; and the current Headmaster, the South African Temba Maqubela (2013–present). In recent years the school has focused on broadening affordability. In 2008, Groton, Andover, and Exeter began offering free tuition to families with household incomes below a certain threshold, initially set at $75,000. From 2014 to 2018, the school conducted a $74 million fundraising campaign that allowed it to begin admitting students on a need-blind basis.