Noyes Academy was an experimental interracial school founded in 1835 in Canaan, New Hampshire, USA. The school was demolished in less than a year by opponents of interracial education. The Noyes Academy was the brainchild of New England abolitionists, and was located within 20 miles of Dartmouth College in Hanover. Slavery was outlawed in New York in 1827, and the demand for African American educational facilities was growing in the North. African American students traveled from all over the Northeast to reach the Noyes Academy, often traveling on segregated steamboats and other transportation. Several prominent African American abolitionists such as Henry Highland Garnet and Alexander Crummell attended the school. Within several months of its founding, opponents of the school started a hysteria involving integrated education and the school was dragged into the swamp by oxen. Eventually the building was set ablaze, permanently destroying the school. Townspeople threatened to fire a cannon at the black students, but a student fired back at the crowd, allowing them enough time to escape. Over the next 100 years similar arson incidents occurred at black and interracial schools all over rural New England including the Parsonsfield Seminary (Bates College) in Maine in 1854 and Watchman Institute in Rhode Island in the 1920s and 1930s.
External links and references
- Dartmouth College info
- Lecture on Noyes Academy
- Emeline Cheney, The Story of the Life and Work of Oren B. Cheney (Boston: Morning Star Publishing, 1907).
