Notable Noyes Academy students included Alexander Crummell, credited with helping inspire the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, and Henry Highland Garnet, below, the first black minister to preach before the U.S. House of Representatives. (Photos courtesy of the Canaan Historical Society).
CANAAN – Alexander Crummell was a determined 15-year-old fresh out of secondary school in New York with dreams of a free and prosperous future when he arrived on Canaan Street atop a stagecoach one icy January evening.
The year was 1835, and Crummell, the son of a former slave and one of 13 boys of African American descent to arrive in Canaan that winter, was about to take part in a brave new experiment. There in tiny Canaan, in the snowy shade of birches and the outsize shadow of Cardigan Mountain, the nation’s first integrated, co-ed college prep school had been built – a small, whitewash clapboard structure erected by town leaders and abolitionists and held together with hope and a belief that the path to freedom and equality came through education.
The dream, known as Noyes Academy, would last all of eight months. Eight months, before a mob, aided by oxen and fueled by rum, lingering racist sentiment and an incendiary series of newspaper editorials, tore the school from its foundation and drug it back down Canaan Street to the town swamp.
For folks around here, the short life of Noyes Academy – named for local farmer and co-founder Samuel Noyes – is one that inspires any number of emotions. Sadness, to be sure, for the way it all came to end. But pride and hope as well, for the path it helped pave on the road to abolition, the willingness of Canaan residents to open their homes and hearts and take a chance, and for the extraordinary individuals and lives that emerged from Noyes Academy after those few short months.
“It was a sad ending to what should have been a proud beginning for Canaan,” says Donna Zani-Dunkerton, Canaan’s town historian and the great-great-great granddaughter of Noyes Academy co-founder Nathaniel Currier. “It’s also an extraordinary story that more people should know, and an important part of our national development.”
In the weeks after the destruction of Noyes Academy, cofounder Nathaniel Currier attempted, unsuccessfully, to reopen the school on the second floor of his home which still stands on Canaan Street (Photo courtesy of the Canaan Historical Society; Photo: David Lazar).
To walk up Canaan Street today is to witness a place that time has barely touched. While the clip-clop of horses and stagecoaches have long since been replaced by the crush of cars on the lawn by Canaan Street Lake on a sunny afternoon, much of the tree-canopied drive remains a window into life as it was more than a century-and-a-half ago – and into the timeline that unfolded one sweltering August afternoon.
There are the homes of Nathaniel Currier, a shopkeeper, abolitionist and host along the Underground Railroad; and George Kimball, also an abolitionist and Dartmouth-educated lawyer who bought the red clapboard colonial on Prospect Hill to house Noyes’ black male students alongside his own family. There is the old Canaan Street graveyard, with its cascade of crooked, weathered headstones bearing the names of those who dared to launch the experiment – names like Dr. Timothy Tilton, the town magistrate, whose stone simply reads, “The Slave’s Friend.” Across the street there is the Old North Church, where folks of both colors came to pray each Sunday, albeit in separate quarters, and where former Noyes students would come back to speak many years later. Finally, next door to the church is a small shaded patch of overgrowth and weeds – a perfect lot size for a house. Or a small school. For 174 summers since that sweltering day in August, the lot next to the Old North Church has sat bare, conspicuous in its emptiness, like a page torn from a scrapbook.
In 1835, the vacant lot on Canaan Street was anything but. For 40-plus teenage students, black and white, the lot was brimming with life and hope and potential. For the school’s founders – a collection of prominent abolitionists including some from as far away as New York, Boston and Portland, ME – Noyes Academy was a bold step forward, a statement in wood and paint and glass of opportunity through academic achievement.
Funded by the New England Anti-Slavery Society for $15,000 and with an English and classical curriculum competitive with top schools, founders chose Canaan to launch their academy for its perceived openness to the concept and for its closeness to Hanover and Dartmouth. Though not all Noyes graduates were expected to attend Dartmouth, the two seemed an ideal match: Dartmouth president Nathan Lord had been a founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society and was the only New England administrator willing to admit black students and not embrace the colonizationalist stance of educating blacks only to then mandate their deportation to the new African colony of Liberia.
The Kimball Boarding House, shown here in 1835 and in present day, is the only remaining structure of the Noyes Academy campus. Canaan town officials are negotiating to preserve it as a monument to the school and prevent it from being torn down. (Photo courtesy of the Canaan Historical Society; Photo: David Lazar).
Founders circulated advertisements in anti-slavery newspapers throughout the region and went on recruiting trips to find students from as far away as New York. Tuition would be $12 per year and board $1.25 per week. The student roll included names like Crummell – whose father, the former slave, had launched the nation’s first black newspaper – and Henry Highland Garnet, a fellow New Yorker and aspiring theologian. Among the white students arriving in Canaan that winter were Richard Rust, a former Phillips Andover student asked to leave that prestigious academy for starting an anti-slavery club inspired by British abolitionist William Wilberforce.
The town of Canaan’s decision to allow the school came on a convincing 36-14 town wide vote. In Canaan, the school’s black students – most of whom had endured difficult travels without lodging or food in the icy winter to arrive – had found a place where people willingly opened their homes and supper tables to them. Underneath, however, tensions steadily simmered. The nation’s progression toward equal rights and abolition was a slow journey, and New Hampshire in the 1830s still relied on the antebellum South for much of its economic livelihood. Elsewhere across the region, a pair of Anti-Slavery Society attempts to set up black colleges in New Haven and Canterbury, CT, had been quashed, and the infamous Nat Turner Rebellion against slave owners in Southampton, VA, failed leading to the deaths of 60 white men, women and children.
“The years between 1830 and 1835 were a lightning bolt for martyrdom,” says Dr. Russell Irvine, a retired Sociology of Education professor at Georgia State University authoring his own book on the history of black education. “Emotions over the race issue were whipped to fever pitch levels. There was a significant battle over schools – namely how and where blacks were to be educated. And for a short period, Canaan, New Hampshire was at the center of that storm.”
Shortly after Noyes Academy opened in March 1835, editorials began to circulate in statewide newspapers warning of mixed relationships in Canaan, the prospect of white children serving black people in local restaurants, and the town being overrun by “vagrants.” The hysteria reached a head on July 4 when a mob, led by a local clergyman and attorney – and responding in part to a fiery speech a Noyes student had delivered in Plymouth chastising Christian America for its support of slavery – arrived at the academy intending to tear it down. The group was turned back that day by Dr. Tilton, the town magistrate, who threatened from the school’s window to take down the name of each mob member and have them arrested.
On August 10, however, the group would return, not to be deterred. According to the town’s official history, an estimated 500 men gathered at the school’s entrance, some from as far away as Plymouth, with some 95 oxen. As the mercury reached a reported 116 degrees and cicadas buzzed in the background, the men affixed chains to the school and the oxen pulled it off its skids. Students and faculty of Noyes Academy would huddle that afternoon in the Kimball House, as members of the mob – drunk on rum stolen from Nathaniel Currier’s general store – reportedly fired cannons and guns into the homes of abolitionists and those friendly to the school. In all, the process would take more than a day, as chains snapped and man and beast wore down in the heat, before the academy – dilapidated and splintered – was dragged up the road to the town common and to its final resting place by Canaan Street Lake. There would be attempts in the weeks after to reopen Noyes Academy from the second floor of Currier’s store, but most of the students had scattered by then and the town never regained the stomach for it.
The Old North Church, where students of both colors came to pray on Sundays, still stands next to the former Noyes Academy site, which has remained vacant since August 10, 1835. (Photo: David Lazar).
Today, the Kimball House is all that remains of the Noyes Academy campus – a weathered expanse of peeling red paint and missing shingles that sits on the present day campus of the Cardigan Mountain School. For many in town, however, it is a monument to courage worthy of local and national recognition. Negotiations between the Canaan Historical Society and the school are under way to keep the house from being torn down and allow it to stand as a tribute to one community’s valiant attempt to change the face of American education – a project the town will likely need $200,000 in private donations to accomplish.
“It is the last physical connection in our community to this important chapter in American history,” says Chuck Townsend, a State Representative from Canaan helping to spearhead the preservation effort. “It is a piece of a very remarkable story which needs to be told. For us to throw it away would be a sad loss for all of us. I want people to be able to walk by the Kimball House and understand that this is where the students stayed and studied at the first integrated academy in the country. It’s something we should be able to do.”
In the meantime, Townsend and others point to the school’s other lasting legacy: the extraordinary lives many of its students went on to lead – students like Garnet, who met his wife Julia Williams in those short months at Noyes, and went on to become an active abolitionist, an accomplished pastor, the U.S. Minister to Liberia, a college president, and the first black minister to deliver a sermon before the U.S. House of Representatives; students like Rust, who went on to found the nation’s first college dedicated to the education of former slaves, Wilberforce University, and helped establish as many as 14 colleges for black teachers in the South.
Shortly after the destruction of Noyes Academy, Townsend, and Dan Billin for their assistance and generosity with this story. depicted in local artist Mikel Wells’ 1999 portrait “Moo’ving Days,” a near identical replica, the Canaan Academy, was built as an all-white school. Today it houses the town’s historical museum. (Photo: David Lazar).
And students like Crummell, who went on to study at Queen College in Cambridge, England, and work 20 years in Liberia, performing ministerial, academic and missionary work, and authoring two books on religion and Africa. In 1873, Crummell would return to America to become rector of St. Luke’s Church in Washington, DC, and later found the American Negro Academy, an organization of black intellectuals credited with spawning the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. In 1895, he returned to the Old North Church to deliver a speech.
“It was at Canaan,” Crummell said, “that I was first brought into relation with the large generosity and noble Christian sentiments of a section of the Anglo-Saxon race which then was striving to show oblivious of race distinction and give living illustration of ‘the brotherhood of man.’”
It is a living illustration folks in Canaan hope to preserve and pass forward as a living document to future generations – an illustration Zani-Dunkerton’s own daughter Sara, now a 6th grade teacher at Indian River School, incorporates each year into her history curriculum through artwork, reports, tours of the site, and efforts to preserve the Kimball House.
“I’m always teaching my students to stand up for themselves and speak up for what they believe in,” Dunkerton says. “Frederick Douglass would say that ‘education is the pathway to freedom.’ I think this is an incredible story for these students to learn, not only at the local level, but at the national level.”
Thanks to the work of Dunkerton and others, it is a story that won’t be forgotten anytime soon.
Special thanks to Donna Zani-Dunkerton, Sara Dunkerton, Russell Irvine, Chuck Townsend, and Dan Billin for their assistance and generosity with this story.
