Buckingham Browne & Nichols School

Browne & Nichols School (B&N) was founded in 1883 by George Henry Browne, a 25-year-old Harvard graduate who, having embarked on a career as a teacher of Latin and English literature, attracted the attention of his former professors Francis J. Child and Charles Eliot Norton. Seeking an alternative to the Cambridge public schools, Child and Norton recruited Browne to teach their three sons and two other boys. At the end of that year, Browne enlisted his Harvard classmate Edgar H. Nichols to join him as the co-head of a new college preparatory school, which opened in the fall with an enrollment of 17, a number that quickly expanded.

The Buckingham School was named and incorporated in 1902, but the first schoolhouse was opened in 1892, known as Miss Markham's School after its founding headmistress. Because Jeanette Markham had been conducting classes for small children in a private school since at least 1889, that is the year from which Buckingham dates its beginning.

Markham came to Cambridge from Atchison, Kansas to pursue an education at the recently founded women's college later named Radcliffe. Upon arriving in Cambridge, she found a home with Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson on Buckingham Street, to whom she is said to have become “virtually an elder daughter” (59). After she began teaching in a neighbor's home, another neighbor, Mrs. Richard H. Dana, offered to build a schoolhouse and living quarters nearby, where the school began with 12 students. That schoolhouse continues to be part of BB&N's Lower School campus to this day.

Upper School

During the year 1882-1883, before Browne & Nichols came into formal existence, founder George H. Browne taught his small group of students in two rooms in Harvard's Felton Hall. With the formation of the school in 1883, instruction took place at 11 Appian Way, with the addition of another building at 8 Garden Street. Radcliffe College, which now occupies this land, wished to expand here, and so it made an exchange with B&N, which relocated in 1897 to a new brick building at 20 Garden Street. That building was designed by Edgar Nichols's sister-in-law, Minerva Parker Nichols, and is said to be “the first important building by a woman architect.”[4] None of these buildings remains today, except for the 11 Appian Way building, relocated around the corner to 3 Garden Street and now serving as an Episcopal Church rectory.

In 1911-1913 the school was incorporated and acquired several acres of farmland near Gerry's Landing, a property dedicated as the “Nichols Athletic Field,” a name by which it is still known. In 1924 the school acquired the contiguous three acres with a gift from Mrs. Kuno Francke in memory of her son Hugo, after whom the field is still named. Francke Field was expanded to its present dimensions through an exchange of property with the Shady Hill School, which by this time had moved to its current location directly next to B&N's two athletic fields.

A 1928 plan to move B&N to the Gerry's Landing property foundered in the wake of the Great Depression, but enough money was raised to relocate the Lower School there. Finally, in 1948, a large donation allowed the rest of the school to follow, and the Garden Street campus was sold. Major additions to the new campus's structure followed: a gymnasium and locker room in 1952; the Almy Building in 1956, initially constructed to house grades 7-9; an expansion of the 1928 boathouse in 1959; the Pratt Building in 1960 for the lower school; the Bradford Building in 1962, which included an auditorium and the school's first library; and the enclosed Bright Hockey-Tennis facility in 1966, all of them now part of the Upper School campus. Multiple additional renovations and expansions have occurred over the past 50 years, most notably the Nicholas Athletic Center and Renaissance Hall.

The Buckingham School started in a wooden two-story building constructed on the site of a pear orchard at the corner of Buckingham Street and Buckingham Place and opened in 1892. That building, today known as Markham House, still stands. In 1921 the school expanded three additional grades to include college preparation and needing additional space acquired the contiguous property along Parker Street, where it built the large brick building that still occupies the site. In 1924 the school purchased four acres of land on Larch Road, near Fresh Pond, for use in physical education, which continues to serve BB&N's athletic program despite the City of Cambridge House Authority's narrowly averted attempt in 1968 to seize the land by eminent domain to build housing for the aged. In 1929 the school acquired another private home known then and ever since as Kelsey House.

Just one year after B&N made its most important expansion, the Buckingham School did the same, with the purchase of a large residence, constructed in 1859, on nearby Sparks Street. This became Buckingham's Upper School. In 1954 it was expanded with a new wing, named after former headmistress Marian Vaillant when the wing was again expanded in 1969. That same year the acquisition of property along Craigie Street provided space for the kindergarten and grades one and two in the newly constructed Morse Building.

When Peter K. Gunness, Director of Financial Aid at Harvard, was appointed to succeed Edwin Pratt, who retired after twenty years as B&N's headmaster in 1969, Buckingham headmistress Elizabeth Stowe suggested that the two schools should begin exploring cooperative opportunities beyond the joint musical and dramatic ventures that had begun during the Pratt years. For the next two years the schools collaborated on several classes on the two campuses, and the drama clubs formally merged.

During the 1971-1972 school year, fifteen classes included students from both schools, and the following year all sixty eleventh and twelfth graders at Buckingham took their classes on the B&N campus with their male counterparts. Discussions about a formal merger began early in 1973, resulting in the creation of the new coeducational school Buckingham Browne & Nichols, effective January 1, 1974. Elizabeth Stowe's retirement resulted in Peter Gunness's appointment as the first head of the new school.

The Gerry's Landing Road campus became BB&N's Upper School, the Sparks Street campus the Middle School, and the Buckingham and Craigie Streets campus the Lower School. They have remained in these locations.

A fourth campus occupies a former parochial school at 46 Belmont Street in Watertown, where BB&N's support staff, including business, human resources, alumni/ae affairs, archives, and other departments are located. In addition, a cooperative day care center, founded by faculty for their children (but also open to others), uses the bottom floor.

A distinctive feature of BB&N's Upper School is the Bivouac program, which B&N inaugurated in 1951 on privately owned land in Temple, Maine. The program's goals, as expressed from the beginning, are to “help students develop a sense of confidence in their own ability to cope with unexpected and challenging situations and to cultivate in the students an awareness of all members of a community.”

Initially reserved for eighth graders, since 1957 the program has included all ninth graders. In 1975 it moved to school property at the former Camp Marienfeld, in Harrisville, New Hampshire.

After the two schools merged, boys and girls participated in separate Bivouacs, until 1980 when they were combined. For eleven days the ninth grade, under the supervision of faculty and eleventh and twelfth grade “junior guides,” lives outdoors, organized in squads of seven or eight students, and participates in courses, team- and trust-building exercises, and elective activities such as going on an overnight solo. Students entering BB&N after ninth grade participate in a shortened version of the program.

The Upper School's academic program includes approximately 150 courses offered each year within six departments. The World Language Department offers courses on at least four levels in six different languages: Arabic, Chinese, French, Latin, Russian, and Spanish. In 2016 seventeen different Advanced Placement courses were offered. Offerings in the Mathematics and Computer Sciences Department run from Algebra I to Linear Algebra and Multivariable Calculus. The History Department includes a global history requirement and multiple elective offerings.

Visual Arts courses include Drawing and Painting, Ceramics, Photography, Art Across Boundaries, Film and Video, Design and Architecture, and Woodworking. Performing Art courses include Chamber Music, Chorale, Drama, a Jazz Ensemble, and a full Orchestra.

Athletics are offered across all three seasons in 25 different sports, most with varsity and junior varsity teams, and some with a third team. The majority of teams compete in the 16-school Independent School League, of which BB&N has been a member since the League was founded in 1948.

After spring break in March, seniors undertake a Spring Project that they designed during the fall and winter. Most projects consist of some ongoing features, such as AP courses or athletics, along with specially designed classes, internships, community service, and numerous other options. Students may also devote their entire projects to ventures off-campus, sometimes in foreign countries.

Complementing the Upper School's language program, each of the six language offerings sponsor annual or biennial travel opportunities to China, France, Greece or Italy (Latin), the Middle East (Arabic), Russia, and Spain. The Russian trip, one of several student exchanges, began in 1988 as a way of easing Cold War tensions. In addition, AP Art History makes an annual trip to Italy, and most spring varsity sports make a spring training trip. A special financial aid program enables students who cannot afford these trips to participate.

Other trip destinations have included Switzerland and Costa Rica.

BB&N's newspaper, the Vanguard.

BB&N's student publications have enjoyed a long history and won many national honors. The official student newspaper, The Vanguard, established at the time of the merger, publishes an issue nearly every month. Its predecessors stretch back to B&N's The Spectator, founded in 1906, which evolved into a literary magazine in 1959 and remains such today.

The CHASM, Current Happenings Across STEM Magazine, is the school's STEM based publication.

The Spectator, BB&N's art and literary magazine, has been in production ever since its foundation in 1906 by two students of Browne and Nichols. In 2017, the magazine was awarded with a gold medal from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association.

In 1950 B&N students published their first annual yearbook, titled The Torch, a reference to B&N's school seal designed by renowned sculptor Cyrus E. Dallin. A yearbook has been produced every year since and is now called The Perspective.

In 2007, a triannual political magazine was founded known as The Point of View. In addition, a satirical newspaper called The Mouthguard and a television news program called The Knightly News are produced intermittently.

For several years Middle School students have also published a newspaper known as The Spark.

BB&N's Nicholas Athletic Center from the side.

The entrance to the Nicholas Athletic Center.

Participation in sports is required at BB&N, though students can obtain waivers for extensive arts commitments or for community service. BB&N is a member of the Independent School League, and the boys' teams have a long-lasting traditional rivalry with the Belmont Hill School.

Soccer

An interior view of the Nicholas Athletic Center.

In 2004, the boys' varsity soccer team, led by head coach Jesse Sarzana, won the New England Class A Championship. The soccer team won the first outright ISL title in school history in 2007 on their way to a Class A finals appearance. The team won their second ISL championship in 2009 but lost in the class A semi-finals.

• Official site