Dixwell's Private Latin School, also known as the Dixwell School and later renamed Hopkinson School and Legate's Private Classical School, was a college-preparatory school in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, which operated from 1851 to roughly 1937. It was one of America's first modern private day schools. During its heyday in the second half of the nineteenth century, Dixwell's was one of Harvard College's most important feeder schools. Its rise paralleled Harvard's transition from a training ground for clergymen to a socially elite institution primarily patronized by the sons of wealthy businessmen.
Dixwell's was closely associated with the Boston Brahmin elite. It trained many notable alumni, including Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Secretary of State Robert Bacon, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Sr., Massachusetts Governor Roger Wolcott, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Henry Adams.
The school's alumni made significant contributions to the development of tennis and American football. In 1876, Dixwell men organized and hosted the first American lawn tennis tournament. The school produced many of the sport's first American stars, including Richard Dudley Sears, Malcolm Whitman, and James Dwight. Dixwell students were the primary force behind the Oneida Football Club, the first organized American football team. Other athletes include two-time Olympic gold medalist Ellery Harding Clark and 1920 America's Cup-winning skipper Charles Francis Adams III.
Background
Latin schools, academies, and public schools
Until the second half of the nineteenth century, American secondary education was divided into two tracks: classical-ministerial and business-vocational. In the seventeenth century, when the first secondary schools were set up in the colonies, "preparation for college ... was practically preparation for the ministry." At the time, ministers were expected to learn Latin and Greek. The colleges refused to admit students who had not studied those subjects. As a result, aspiring college students were generally channeled to Latin schools and grammar schools.
The primary alternative to the Latin school was the academy, which offered Latin and Greek courses for college-bound students but also included topics practical for non-clerics who were not interested in college, like mathematics, English, and French. Academies were principally set up in the countryside to educate students from the surrounding area in lieu of a public school. In some cases, they were chartered and subsidized by the state, and acted as predecessors of county high schools. Academies such as Phillips Andover and Phillips Exeter largely displaced the old Latin schools. By the 1850s, only a few Latin schools remained, mainly in the larger cities. One surviving classical school was Boston Latin School (BLS), which eventually gave rise to Dixwell's.
Starting around 1850, the rise of free, taxpayer-funded public high schools largely displaced the academies' role as vocational educators. This process picked up at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1889, 31.87% of American high school students went to private school. By 1912, public school enrollment rose fivefold. Although private school enrollment grew in absolute terms, its share of the industry shrank to 11.55%.
Admissions requirements at Harvard College In the nineteenth century, Harvard College grew secular and wealthy. As early as the 1830s, Harvard-watchers noticed that Harvard's student body was trending socially elite and exclusive. Dixwell alumnus Henry Adams wrote that when he attended Harvard in the 1850s, the Boston elite was already "sending their children to Harvard College for the sake of its social advantages." George Santayana graduated from Harvard in 1886 and called the new Harvard a "seminary and academy for the inner circle of Bostonians."
These changes disrupted Harvard's curriculum, but not its admissions practices. The sons of wealthy businessmen often went into business themselves, and to cater to these students, Harvard modified its curriculum to teach "mercantile and active" subjects. From 1798 to 1830, 24% of Harvard students went into the ministry and 17% into business. The professions of law and medicine were also popular. From 1835 to 1860, ministry and business' shares of graduates flipped to 9% and 24%, respectively. As a result of these changes, some members of the Harvard community protested that Latin and Greek had little direct practical utility for the modern Harvard student. Even so, Harvard continued to require applicants to study both Latin and Greek until 1887.
In fact, in the first half of the nineteenth century, Harvard tightened its admission requirements, which still prioritized Latin and Greek. Students "began to fail the [entrance] examination in significant numbers" starting in the 1830s. Applicants began spending more time in secondary school to prepare for Harvard, and the average age of matriculants increased from 15.5 in 1810 to 17.5 in 1850. Harvard's selectivity advanced in tandem with its social stature.
Ronald Story of the University of Massachusetts attributes Harvard's decision to changes in its governance, which allowed Boston's commercial elite to influence Harvard's admissions requirements, while at the same time generously funding high schools whose curricula were tailored to those requirements. Around this time, the Boston elite was bankrolling a wide range of cultural institutions, including the universities, the Boston Public Library, and the Harvard Museum of Natural History. In 1892, the New York Tribune discovered that a third of Boston's millionaires had Harvard degrees.
Critics protested that the stricter requirements favored students at the leading prep schools, such as BLS, Roxbury Latin, Exeter, Andover, and Round Hill. By contrast, the new crop of public schools generally lacked the resources to employ a classics teacher.
History
Founding a new school
Epes Sargent Dixwell attended Boston Latin School (BLS) and Harvard College, graduating from the latter in 1827. After briefly practicing as a lawyer, he became the BLS headmaster in 1836. At BLS, he taught Charles W. Eliot, the future president of Harvard University, and folklorist Francis James Child. He reportedly loaned Child the money to attend Harvard.
In the early 1850s, the City of Boston attempted to cut off city services to families who did not pay property taxes to the city. It ordered employees to move to Boston or quit. It also banned suburban students from attending BLS. Dixwell lived in Cambridge and refused to move. As a result, in 1851, Dixwell left BLS to start a new private school at 2 Boylston Place, near Boston Common and Piano Row. Financial concerns may have also played a role in the move, as Dixwell complained that the City had underpaid him in the past. He ran his new school as a for-profit enterprise, and boasted that running a private school paid better.
The Private Latin School opened on September 29, 1851, with thirty boys. In a stroke of luck, two of Dixwell's first students were also two of his most famous. Henry Adams attended Dixwell's because his suburban address prevented him from attending BLS. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.'s father Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. picked the brand-new Dixwell School due to his disapproval of Dixwell's replacement at BLS.
Pedagogically, the school's curriculum was "based entirely on the entrance requirements of Harvard"—that is, the classics. Dixwell liked science and co-founded the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1848. Even so, when Henry Cabot Lodge Sr. attended Dixwell's in the 1860s, the curriculum focused on Latin and Greek, and also included some mathematics, French, and classical history. Lodge was a mostly-indifferent student in high school, and quipped that to Dixwell, "anything of modern history or of the history of our own country was thought quite needless." Dixwell had some outright critics, including BLS alumnus Charles Francis Adams, who hated Dixwell's BLS and called it a "conventional, mechanical, low-standard day-school and classical grind-mill." However, the system achieved its intended purpose. Dixwell claimed that only one of his students ever failed the Harvard entrance exam, and that student got in on the second attempt.
Wealth, influence, and relationship with Harvard
Dixwell's Boston Latin student Charles W. Eliot remembered the Dixwell School as the start of a new "epoch in the development of secondary education in the city of Boston." Dixwell responded to several major changes in American education and upper-class tastes: the relocation of wealthy men like Dixwell to the suburbs, the rise of college as a socially advantageous training ground for secular careers, and Harvard's decision to retain its increasingly obsolete, Latin-focused admissions criteria even as it gradually secularized its curriculum. Dixwell was not the first man who tried to provide an expensive college-preparatory classical education outside the public school system. However, he was arguably the first teacher to do so successfully, and he paved the way for similar private prep schools.
Dixwell's BLS was a case in point. In Dixwell's day, BLS was itself deemed "principally ... for the rich and exclusive." Dixwell recalled that during his school years, the BLS leadership felt threatened by a rival private school founded by "an Englishman named Fisher", which had "received the patronage of several rich men." Competition from Fisher forced BLS to improve its academic reputation, which allowed BLS to then drive Fisher out of business and claim his students. In turn, Eliot wrote that the Dixwell School was the first private school to rival BLS academically, and that because of Dixwell's success, many other private day schools were established, which drew away "many sons of well-to-do families" from BLS. Robert Grant, whose father bucked upper-class convention by sending his sons to BLS, concluded that Charles Eliot "had no brief for sending a son to a public school for the sake of democracy if the free education provided was inferior to what could be had at a private [school]."
Coming from a socially elite background, Dixwell was well-placed to capitalize on these changes. His family was wealthy. He had read law under Charles Jackson, the father-in-law of Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. He married into another leading Boston family when he wed Mary Ingersoll Bowditch, the daughter of Nathaniel Bowditch. His Harvard roommate was Cornelius Felton, the future president of Harvard University. Two of his daughters married his well-born students: Fanny Dixwell married Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and Mary Dixwell married George Wigglesworth, the future president of the Harvard Board of Overseers and treasurer of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose family gave its name to Wigglesworth Hall at Harvard Yard.
Dixwell cultivated a similarly patrician student body. He set the tuition at $250/year. By contrast, Phillips Exeter charged day students $14 and boarders around $150. In fact, Dixwell's cost at least twice as much as Harvard itself ($75–104). It was the unofficial costs of attending college, such as socially expected luxury apartments, that made Harvard more expensive than Dixwell's in practice. Dixwell limited enrollment to 50 students, set up shop in what was then a "very select" neighborhood, and quickly moved into a purpose-built facility down the road at 20 Boylston Place. He educated many wealthy students from Beacon Hill and the Boston suburbs, and sought to teach his students "the morals and manners befitting sons of Boston's patrician class." One biographer wrote that at Dixwell's, "it was taken for granted that [his students] would attend Harvard College as generations of their fathers had before them."