Milton Academy

Early years

Milton Academy was founded by Edward Hutchinson Robbins, the speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, after the General Court of Massachusetts set up a committee to study options for secondary education for residents of Norfolk County. Although the committee considered putting the academy in Braintree, Roxbury, Quincy, Dorchester, and Milton, it chose Milton; Speaker Robbins was a Milton resident. Other founding members of the board of trustees included Fisher Ames, Nathanel Emmons, Thaddeus Mason Harris, Joseph McKean, and Ebenezer Thayer.

According to the official town history, the early Milton Academy, like many other old New England academies, was initially "a state-chartered and partially subsidized institution which, in effect, served as a county high school." In March 1798, the Massachusetts legislature granted the academy a corporate charter and a state-funded endowment (three square miles of land in Maine). However, the academy did not actually open for business until 1807, due to protracted disputes about whether the campus should be located in the center or outskirts of town. In 1807, the academy opened in the center of town with 23 students. Most students were locals, although some out-of-town students boarded with local families.

Few records of the early academy survive. Alumni of the early academy include Major General Edwin Vose Sumner, who commanded Union troops at Antietam and Fredericksburg.

In 1866, the town of Milton effectively bought out the first Milton Academy. It opened Milton High School, a tax-funded, tuition-free public school, and hired the academy's principal to lead it. In response, the academy's board of trustees shut down the academy and sold the campus to the public school. From 1866 to 1884, Milton Academy survived as a paper entity, with a board of trustees but no teachers, students, or campus.

Refounding as college-preparatory private school

In 1879, at the urging of Harvard president Charles Eliot, Milton Academy's board began preparations to re-establish the academy as a fully private school. This was accomplished in 1884, when Milton resident and railroad magnate John Murray Forbes re-established Milton Academy on a new 125-acre site. The academy claims the history of the 1798 institution, and celebrated its 150th anniversary in 1948.

Milton Academy re-opened in September 1885 with four teachers and roughly 40 day students. John Forbes' son William H. Forbes (president of Bell Telephone Company, the predecessor of AT&T) was elected president of the board of trustees. The academy reopened its boarding department in 1888. Although Milton originally educated both boys and girls, in 1901 the Upper School divided into boys' and girls' divisions, each with its own faculty and campus. The boys' and girls' schools reunited in 1981.

The new Milton attracted an affluent clientele and became a notable college-preparatory institution. From 1906 to 1915, Milton sent 179 students to Harvard College, making it Harvard's fifth-largest feeder school, after Boston Latin, Phillips Exeter, Cambridge Latin, and Nobles. In 1996, 33% of Milton graduates went on to Ivy League colleges, second-highest among New England boarding schools. From 2021 to 2023 however, only 14% of Milton graduates landed at Ivy League schools In 2002, Harvard's student newspaper reported that in some years Milton has produced as many as 25% of the students admitted to Harvard through the so-called "Z-list", a set of students who are promised admission to Harvard after taking a gap year; students on the Z-list often have legacy connections to Harvard.

Although Milton was nonsectarian, it traditionally educated large numbers of Unitarian students, in contrast to the many Protestant Episcopalian boarding schools founded at the turn of the 20th century. (In the nineteenth century, the town of Milton was one of the few towns in Massachusetts where Unitarians may have outnumbered trinitarians.) Unitarian Miltonians include poet T. S. Eliot (who later converted to Episcopalianism) and architect Buckminster Fuller. In 1901, several Milton friends and alumni (including William Forbes's son Cameron and Milton trustee Norwood Penrose Hallowell) helped establish Middlesex School, another formally nonsectarian prep school with a large and wealthy Unitarian clientele. Some prominent Catholics were also drawn to Milton's relative lack of Protestant influence. Robert F. Kennedy attended Milton after Rose Kennedy withdrew him from St. Paul's (due to what she believed was SPS' anti-Catholic atmosphere), and his brother Ted also went to Milton.