BACKGROUND - School's Founding

The Early Years

Samuel Brearley, Jr. was born in Rocky Hill, New Jersey, on December 29th, 1850, and grew up in Canton, Illinois. He graduated form Harvard in 1871, having "fitted" at Phillips Andover, and after several years at a private, and very successful, tutoring, he studied for three years at Balliol College, Oxford, in preparation for a career in journalism. He returned in 1883 to the prospect of the Phillips Exeter headmastership, but learned that this entailed church membership which he was planning but which he had not yet undertaken. Afraid that such a step just then would suggest expediency only, he gave up the entire possibility of Exeter.

Idea for a School

At this moment he met Mrs. Joseph H. Choate. Mrs. Chocate was much interested in education, and she talked a good deal with this young man who wanted to teach in a boys' school. She told him that while there were a number of good schools for boys there were few for girls, an so he was persuaded to try to make the education so freely offered to boys available to their sisters also. Borrowing a few thousand dollars form his Harvard classmate Charles Bonaparte, great-nephew of Napoleon, he set about establishing a school which would "assure for it the devotion of its teachers."

His ambition for his teachers was high scholarship and a little more than adequate recompense, For his pupils he set the Harvard examinations for women as final tests, and from the beginning many of them pioneered to college, chiefly Bryn Mawr. The Brearley was not unique in this. A number of other New York Schools had similar ideals. But Mr. Brearley's school is almost the only one that is still going.