Northfield Mount Hermon School

Northfield Mount Hermon
Address
1 Lamplighter Way Gill , Massachusetts 01354 United States
Coordinates	42°40′03″N 72°29′08″W / 42.66750°N 72.48556°W / 42.66750; -72.48556
Information
School type	Private, boarding
Motto	Education for the Head, Heart, and Hand
Established	1879; 145 years ago (1879)
Founder	Dwight L. Moody
Head of school	Brian H. Hargrove
Faculty	90 (on an FTE basis)
Enrollment	672 total 82% boarding 18% day
Average class size	12
Student to teacher ratio	6:1
Campus size	215 acres (core campus), 1,353 acres (total land holdings)
Campus type	Rural
Color(s)	Maroon and light blue
Song	Jerusalem
Athletics	20 interscholastic sports; 67 teams
Mascot	the Hogger
Endowment	$181 million
Website	www.nmhschool.org

Northfield Mount Hermon School, often abbreviated as NMH, is a co-educational college-preparatory school for boarding and day students in grades 9–12, along with a post-graduate year. Located in Gill, Massachusetts, it is a member of the Eight Schools Association and Six Schools League.

History

The school was founded by Protestant evangelist Dwight Lyman Moody as the Northfield Seminary for Young Ladies in 1879 (later called the Northfield School for Girls) and the Mount Hermon School for Boys in 1881. Moody built the girls' school in Northfield, Massachusetts, the town of his birth, and the boys' school a few miles away in the town of Gill. Both were "opportunity" schools created for the deserving poor who had no other means to acquire an education.

From their beginnings, both schools attracted highly diverse students. Moody's goal was to provide the best possible education for young people without privilege, and he enrolled students whose parents were slaves as well as Native Americans and people from other countries, which was unprecedented among elite private schools at that time. Sixteen of the Northfield students who matriculated in 1880 were Native Americans, as were four Mount Hermon boys in 1882; at Mount Hermon's first commencement in 1887, one student addressed the audience "in his native language, for the representatives of the Sioux, Shawnee, and Alaskan tribes in the school."^[1] An 1887 report lists 8 Chinese, 5 Indians, 2 Negroes, and 1 Japanese student at Mount Hermon; by 1889 their numbers had risen to 37 students from 15 countries, and in 1904 to 113 students from 27 countries ranging from Burma through Denmark.^[2] In the 1940s it was one of a handful of American private schools admitting non-white students.^[3]

Each student is required to hold a job on campus, working three hours a week. This contribution to the operation of the school stems from the school's founder, Dwight Lyman Moody, and his desire for students to understand the value of manual labor.^[4]

In June 2016, The Trust for Public Land and the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation ensured the permanent protection of 1,300 acres of forest land which was previously the Northfield campus and owned by the Northfield Mount Hermon School for over a century. Although now a permanent part of the Northfield State Forest, it had been the largest parcel of unprotected land in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The property includes woodlands, trails, and a reservoir which will be managed by the DCR to ensure public access for recreation as well as serve as habitat for wildlife.^[5]

Athletics

Mount Hermon claims to have invented the sport of Ultimate Frisbee in 1968.^[6]

Arts programs

The 65,000 sq ft (6,000 m²) Gold LEED certified Rhodes Arts Center (at right) is the home of all of the arts programs at NMH. It houses two concert performance spaces, a black-box theater, two dance studios, an art gallery, classrooms, art studios, practice rooms, and faculty offices. Additionally, the RAC is home to a carillon. Memorial Chapel houses the school's own tracker action organ. Andover Organ Company Opus 67, completed in December 1970, is a 2-manual 27-stop, 37-rank tracker organ with a pedal compass of 30, and a manual compass of 56.^[7]

Tuition

Tuition for the 2023-2024 academic year is $72,647 for boarding students, and $48,302 for day students.^[8]

Notable alumni

For a more comprehensive list, see List of Northfield Mount Hermon people.

• Thomas Nelson Baker Sr., 1889, first African-American to receive a PhD in philosophy in the United States
• Juliana Force, 1896 (d.n.g.), director of the Whitney Museum of Art^[9]
• Harry Kemp, tramp poet, c. 1907 (expelled)
• Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 1937, poet^[10]
• Uma Thurman, 1988 (d.n.g.), actor/model
• Valerie Jarrett, 1974, senior advisor to U.S. President Barack Obama

Images

• 
  Campus view
• 
  View of the gymnasium
• 
  Student center
• 
  Topographic map of NMH School environs

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Northfield Mount Hermon School.

• Official website
• Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS) No. MA-1, "Northfield Campus", 14 data pages

This page was last edited on 31 March 2024, at 18:54