About NMH History

History of NMH

Northfield Mount Hermon School was founded by noted 19th-century evangelist Dwight Lyman Moody as two separate institutions: Northfield Seminary for Young Ladies (1879) and Mount Hermon School for Boys (1881). Moody wanted to provide an education to young men and women who’d been denied that opportunity, usually due to financial hardship. In doing so, he hoped to create generations of committed Christians who would continue his evangelical efforts.

While the Bible was the primary tool for instruction in the early days, and while both schools’ by-laws demanded that teachers and trustees be members of some evangelical church, the institutions were never doctrinaire. Religious instruction was, without apology, accompanied by a rigorous academic program similar to that of other private secondary schools of the era.

Another factor that distinguished the schools (and continues to do so today) was the manual labor required of all students. At Northfield this was called “Co-operative Housekeeping,” and girls worked ten hours per week helping with meals or cleaning dormitories. At Mount Hermon, boys performed janitorial, laundry, kitchen, and farm work. The work requirement has lessened over the years (it is now 4.5 hours per week); while students still help in the dining hall and on NMH’s small farm, they also work in roles such as library aides, computer lab monitors, and orchestra assistants.

Moody’s commitment to providing education to those who had been systematically denied it produced remarkable diversity among students. The schools matriculated students from all races and ethnicities: 16 Native Americans were among the first 100 students at Northfield, and Mount Hermon’s first graduates included a former slave as well as students from China, Sweden, England, Ireland, Canada, and Japan.

Through their first half century, the schools followed the path set out by D. L. Moody. The minimum age for admission continued to be 16; the average age of students at both schools hovered over 20 well into the third decade of the 20th century. Omnipresent financial hardship contributed to low graduation rates, which ranged no higher than 20 percent through the 1910s, when they slowly began to climb.

After Moody’s death in 1899, his eldest son, William, continued his father’s work at the schools. The younger Moody pushed for consolidating the two schools into a single corporation called the Northfield Schools. This provided buying power and a unified institutional voice, and gave a single board of trustees oversight of the schools.

If the schools didn’t seem to change much—a fact underscored by the 42-year tenure of Henry Cutler (1890–1932) as headmaster at Mount Hermon and the 28 years served by Evelyn Hall (1883–1911) in the same position at Northfield—the outside world brought its own pressures to bear. A new Christian view stressing social justice and good works in place of personal salvation grew not only in the world but on the board of trustees. This change was personified in Elliott Speer, who was only 27 when appointed president of the Northfield Schools. Bright and forward-thinking, Speer sought to reshape the schools, stepping down from his post as president to succeed Cutler at Mount Hermon’s helm. Having hired the like-minded Mira Wilson three years before to head Northfield, Speer set to work. In his two years as headmaster, he reinstated interscholastic athletics, worked with Wilson on increased social interaction between the schools, and, symbolically, asked Christian socialist Norman Thomas to speak at commencement in 1934. Speer’s murder in September of that year did not slow the changes he had set in motion.

If the revolutionary decade between 1925 and 1935 finally brought the schools into the new century, it had the unintended effect of making the student population whiter and more middle class. From the 1940s on, the schools worked to overcome this, first establishing a relationship with the National Scholarship Service and Fund for Negro Students (NSSFNS). In 1962, as this relationship faltered, Arthur Kiendl, headmaster at Mount Hermon, and Edmond Meany Jr., headmaster at Northfield, met with John Dickey of Dartmouth to discuss how students of color could more easily make the transition from home to prep school. A Better Chance (ABC), now a national program, was born of these discussions. A 40-year relationship with Upward Bound also serves as testament to this commitment to helping the disadvantaged.

In October 1970, Northfield and Mount Hermon made the controversial decision to become a single coeducational school, effective fall 1971. The first few years of coeducation were halting, in part because for three years the school tried to do without a headmaster. Finding someone who could successfully run what had become the largest secondary boarding school in the country proved difficult, until Richard P. Unsworth, a 1945 graduate of Mount Hermon, accepted the position in 1980. He brought stability to the school and promoted efforts to recruit international students and add study abroad programs. Unsworth’s successor, Jacqueline Smethurst, instituted longer classes, a trimester schedule, and increased use of technology. Arriving in 1998, new head Richard Mueller, an alumnus and former diplomat, worked to further the school’s international programs and perspectives. He also opened the discussion that led to the campus consolidation in September 2005.

For more than 30 years, the school had operated as a single institution on two campuses, but the capital resources required to maintain duplicate facilities on each campus, combined with the logistics of shuttling students between two campuses five miles apart, caused the trustees to close the Northfield campus at the end of the 2004–05 school year, noting that students would benefit educationally and socially in a smaller, more close-knit community.

The current head, Thomas K. Sturtevant, arrived at NMH with extensive experience in secondary school education and administration. A 1980 graduate of Westminster School, he began teaching at Tabor Academy in 1985, then worked for nearly ten years at St. Andrew’s School in Delaware, where he served as director of college counseling, English and math teacher, advisor, dorm parent, and varsity soccer and lacrosse coach. In 1999 he became upper school principal at Friends Academy in New York. Sturtevant came to NMH as associate head of school in 2003 and was appointed head of school one year later.

School archivist Peter Weis ’78 is the author of this brief history.

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