St. Albans School (STA) is an independent college preparatory day and boarding school for boys in grades 4–12, located in Washington, D.C. The school is named after Saint Alban, traditionally regarded as the first British martyr.
The school enrolls approximately 570 day students in grades 4–12, and 30 additional boarding students in grades 9–12. It is affiliated with the National Cathedral School and the co-ed Beauvoir School, all of which are located on the grounds of the Washington National Cathedral. All the affiliated schools named are members of the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral Foundation.
History Early years
The principal investment for St. Albans was bequeathed by Harriet Lane Johnston, the niece and first lady of President James Buchanan and prominent Washington socialite. A devout Episcopalian throughout her life, Lane Johnston added a codicil to her will in 1899 directing the establishment of a boys school on the grounds of the Washington National Cathedral “in loving memory of [her] sons.” A subsequent codicil four years later raised the financial endowment to $300,000 (nearly $11 million in 2025 dollars), and stipulated that half of the funds should be used for the building’s construction, and the other half for the education of the boy choristers at the Washington National Cathedral.
Soon after her death in 1903, a site was chosen for the Lane-Johnston Building, and the foundation stone was laid in June 1905. By 1907, construction was virtually complete on the new building, which housed everything—classrooms, the dining hall, the headmaster’s study, and a 40-bed dormitory—but the chapel: the Bishop of Washington repurposed an adjacent repository for cathedral furnishings into the Little Sanctuary, adding a bell tower and an archway.
St. Albans, called the National Cathedral School for Boys until 1914, officially opened its doors in October 1909, with 34 students registered. Enrollment rose to 59 by the end of the first academic year, and surpassed 100 by the end of the second. A large portion of these initial students had transferred from a grammar school in Wisconsin, following their teacher and coach, Earl Lamont Gregg, who became the first headmaster of St. Albans. The school also received a boost in enrollment following the collapse of the Washington School in 1911, headquartered near the present location of Sidwell Friends School. Facing cramped accommodations during its second year, St. Albans subsequently purchased a nearby Queen Anne-style mansion left vacant by the defunct institution to house its Lower School.
Throughout the remainder of Gregg’s term, the school continued to expand. St. Albans attracted numerous teachers and coaches, offering a variety of course offerings and varsity sports to students of all forms. The school’s track program received national attention during this period, largely attributed to sprinter Brooke Brewer. Although membership in the Episcopal Church was not required to attend the school, three-fourths of the student body belonged to the faith and several faculty members were clergy members. The school also required attendance at two daily services for boarders. Additionally, several traditions appeared during these early years that continue to this day: an end-of-year field day, consisting of a blue team and a white team; student elections of prefects; and the donation of a stained-glass window by each graduating senior class to the school’s refectory.
Although most graduates during the school’s early years matriculated to the Ivy League and other highly esteemed universities, St. Albans struggled to retain students in its Upper School, with many transferring to well-established boarding schools in New England. Efforts to fill the upper forms included reducing the tuition for boarding students. In addition to the already liberal scholarships for athletes, choir boys, and the children of clergy, the school’s finances consistently ran at a deficit, and in 1915, Gregg resigned upon request of the Bishop.
William Howell Church was appointed the next headmaster of St. Albans, and promptly oversaw substantial financial reforms to resolve the school’s debt. Church also implemented a rigorous academic program to raise the educational standard at St. Albans, introducing compulsory college board exams and eliminating athletic scholarships. Student retention in the Upper School, however, remained an issue through the end of Church’s tenure.
Challenges continued to mount for the school in the latter half of the 1910s. Several teachers were called to action during World War I, joining 80 former students who served, and the influenza pandemic resulted in over a hundred cases among students and forced the school to close its doors for two weeks. Notwithstanding these setbacks, St. Albans emerged in the 1920s with much stronger academic and extracurricular records, attracting a handful of students from prominent Washington social and political families, especially in the Lower School. The choral program remained a focal point and continued to draw a large cohort of boy choristers, despite the two hours of daily rehearsal, four weekly evensongs, and three Sunday services, all on top of school work. Other students wrote for the school’s two newspapers, The Albanian and The Albanac. The publications evolved into their modern iterations—a yearbook of the same name and The Saint Albans News, respectively—early in the next decade.
By 1928, the increasing traffic on Massachusetts Avenue proved dangerous for Lower School students, who had to cross the street to attend chapel and meals. The school contracted Ralph Adams Cram, an architectural consultant for the Cathedral, to conceive plans for a new Lower School building. The three-story facility was completed within a few years and contained new classrooms, faculty living quarters, and music practice rooms.
Maturation and Adaptation Due to failing health, Church resigned in 1929 and was succeeded by Albert Hawley Lucas, then a priest and vice principal at Episcopal Academy in Philadelphia. Although much of the school’s religious and academic character predated his tenure, Lucas ushered in a conscious emulation of English public schools, keeping in tradition with the school’s name. St. Albans during Lucas’s two decades sought to emphasize a classical education—with greater focus on mathematics, languages, and history than on social sciences—and the development of character through rigorous, compulsory athletics.
St. Albans was largely unaffected by the Great Depression due to its location in the nation’s capital. Some parents struggled to pay tuition, but the government domination of the city spared many of its residents from the economic slump of the next decade. In fact, faculty and student enrollment grew during this period, both doubling in size by the start of the Second World War. Lucas also managed to find funding for the Activities Building—designed by Waldron Faulkner—which housed a basketball court, a newsroom, carpentry shops, and a library upon its completion at the end of the decade.
An era of intense political upheaval, the decade also yielded the establishment of the Government Club in 1934, among the oldest continuously operating clubs at the school. Divided into Liberal and Conservative parties, the club regularly debates prominent political issues and hosts speakers of national relevance. Notable members include Vice President Al Gore ’65, Senator Michael Bennet ’83, and Representative Harold Ford Jr. '88, all presidents emeriti of the Liberal party.
St. Albans, like most institutions, drastically evolved in the wake of the attacks on Pearl Harbor. By September 1942, 10 faculty members (out of roughly 30) and 125 alumni were already in service, and the school offered new courses in auto mechanics and model aircraft construction. Many students took summer school classes to accelerate their education and attend college early. In the end, 14 alumni died during the war.
Although the remainder of the Lucas years were dominated by the necessity of rebuilding the faculty after the war, the headmaster managed to gain substantial financial independence for St. Albans from the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral Foundation (PECF), establishing an independent board of governors in 1946. Despite the historically hands-off nature of the PECF concerning St. Albans, Lucas sought to avoid future conflict regarding the autonomy of the school to make its own financial decisions. The PECF still retains ultimate decision-making ability—as it does for all institutions on the Close—but it has since very rarely strayed from the verdict of the board.
Lucas retired in 1949, and asked Charles Martin to succeed him as headmaster. Martin, who taught with Lucas at Episcopal Academy, had left academia a few years earlier to become the rector at an Episcopal church in Burlington, Vermont, but was persuaded to accept the position at the urging of Lucas and many St. Albans faculty members. The new headmaster was known for his bulldogs, which replaced the saints as the school’s new mascot over the course of his tenure.
Martin immediately set out to expand the school’s facilities. With 375 students crammed into accommodations built for 250, Martin developed plans for a five-story addition to the southeast end of the building housing the Lower School, set to contain science laboratories, new classrooms, an art studio, and an expanded refectory. Although funding and post-war supply shortages resulted in two stages of construction over the course of the 1950s, the addition rounded out today’s True-Lucas Building.
St. Albans was by no means isolated from the worldly events of the 1950s. The names of several students, in relation to their fathers, were implicated in the investigations by Senator Joseph McCarthy. One student, the son of Army Secretary Robert Stevens, ended up in a fist fight with several of his classmates. Upon the outbreak of the Korean War, St. Albans also developed contingency plans in the event of a nuclear attack. Among them was the crypt of the Cathedral, which was subsequently stocked with emergency supplies.
Modernizing St. Albans
In 1952, the PECF passed a unanimous resolution calling on the three schools under its jurisdiction to admit “children of all races.” With the exception of a few white-passing children of foreign diplomats, the student body at St. Albans had been historically all-white; no records indicated that there had ever even been a non-white applicant. Yet, following the Cathedral’s suggestion, St. Albans implemented a gradual schedule of integration in 1954, becoming one of the first independent schools in the region to desegregate. The school’s first black student, Frank Snowden, entered sixth grade in 1957.
Although some were concerned about parental backlash regarding integration, St. Albans continued to attract the children of prominent Washington business and political families. At one point, the children of four senators and nine representatives simultaneously attended the school. A few of these influential parents even sat on the board. The school’s track record for college matriculation also boosted its national reputation; thirty-six percent of graduating seniors were accepted to Harvard University in 1957.
The school added a new library, theater, and renovated playing fields in the 1960s, accommodating its gradually increasing enrollment. Efforts to expand financial aid also opened the school’s doors to more students of diverse backgrounds. An increasing number of students had divorced parents or lacked ties to the church. In 1970, St. Albans implemented a program called “Risk” to bring in students from underrepresented neighborhoods in the city, now known as the Skip Grant Program.