Buckingham Browne & Nichols School

Origins

1883, George Henry Browne's 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. 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.

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."

1889, Jeanette Markham's School

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.

Athletics

Rowing

The name of the school's athletic teams, "the Knights", has its origins in a 1920s Boston Globe article which referred to the rowing team in particular, undefeated against the likes of Harvard, MIT and Kent School, as "the Black Knights of the Charles", itself a reference to the Army Black Knights. In addition to taking the team name, Browne & Nichols also took black and white as its colors after the article. The Buckingham School's colors, blue and gold, were made the combined school's colors after the merger. The school was the first American schoolboy crew to win the Henley Royal Regatta in Henley-on-Thames, England, winning the Thames Challenge Cup in 1929. The Washington Post commented:

"The Thames Challenge Cup, prize of England's famous rowing tournament, was captured today by eight young oarsmen from the Browne and Nichols School...The American boys, after each victory, gave a fine display of school spirit and overflowing "pep" which added to their already great popularity on the river...Their success was the more impressive when it is considered that the average age of the oarsmen is younger than the average of their defeated rivals. The boys will be received by the American Ambassador at London Monday and then will begin an educational tour of England."

Tennis

In 2004, the girls varsity tennis team became ISL Champions for the first time in school history. The boys varsity tennis team won the New England Class B Tournament in 2004, the 2005 ISL Championship, and finished second in the 2007 New England Class B Tournament.

Other sports

BB&N also has both girls' and boys' hockey teams.

Notable alumni

Browne & Nichols

Edward Burlingame Hill, class of 1888, American composer

Langdon Warner, class of 1898, archaeologist, art historian, and member of World War II Monuments Men

Richard Norton, archaeologist, professor, director of the Archaeological Institute of America

Arthur L. Conger, class of 1899, noted theosophist and writer

Alfred V. Kidder, class of 1903, preeminent early twentieth century archaeologist of the American Southwest and Mesoamerica

Thomas Dudley Cabot, class of 1913, American businessman and philanthropist

William Bosworth Castle, class of 1914, American physician and pioneer in field of hematology

Tadeusz Adamowski, class of 1918, hockey player on Polish Olympic Team (1928), coach of national team

Sherwin Badger, class of 1918, national figure skating champion and Silver Medal Olympian

John Moors Cabot, class of 1919, U.S. Ambassador to five nations, Georgetown University professor

Robert Bradford, class of 1920, Governor of Massachusetts

Thomas Hopkinson Eliot, class of 1924, congressman from Massachusetts and chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis, politician and major figure behind the Social Security Act

Eliot Noyes, class of 1927, architect and industrial designer

Buckingham

Katharine Sergeant Angell White, class of 1910, writer and fiction editor for The New Yorker magazine, 1925–1960

Helen B. Taussig, class of 1912, cardiologist and founder of field of pediatric cardiology

Helenka Pantaleoni, class of 1914, silent film actress and humanitarian

Eleanor Sayre, class of 1934, museum curator and authority on prints of Francisco Goya

Joanne Simpson, class of 1940, NASA's lead weather researcher and first woman to earn a Ph.D. in meteorology

Eleanor Sanger, class of 1946, Emmy Award-winning TV sports producer

Margaret Bryan Davis, class of 1949, distinguished ecologist specializing in palynology and paleoecology

Svetlana Alpers, class of 1953, noted art historian and author of The Art of Describing

Susan Howe, class of 1955, poet, scholar, essayist, and critic

Jane Holtz Kay, class of 1956, urban design and architecture critic

Fanny Howe, class of 1958, poet, short story writer, and novelist

Toby Lerner Ansin, Class of 1959, Founder, Miami City Ballet

Ellen Goodman, class of 1959, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist

Margaret Atherton, Class of 1961, historian and philosopher

BB&N

John Grayken, class of 1974, founder and chairman of Lone Star funds

André Balazs, class of 1975, hotelier and residential developer

Hilary Bok, class of 1976, Henry R. Luce Professor of Bioethics and Moral & Political Theory at the Johns Hopkins University

Charles Bailyn, class of 1977, the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of Astronomy and Physics at Yale University and inaugural dean of faculty at Yale-NUS College

David Fialkow, class of 1977, venture capitalist

James E. Baker, class of 1978, former Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces

Kate Davis, class of 1978, documentary filmmaker

Reed Hastings, class of 1978, founder and CEO of Netflix

Jonathan Collier, class of 1979, television writer for The Simpsons and others

Abigail Johnson, class of 1980, Fidelity Investments

Wendy Artin, class of 1980, internationally exhibited painter

David Cohen, class of 1981, attorney and Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2015–17

Melinda McGraw, class of 1981, film and television actress

Michael Sloan, class of 1981, Pulitzer Prize-winning illustrator and co-creator of comic Welcome to the New World