Noyes Academy

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 white men of Canaan and neighboring towns who opposed interracial education.

Background

The Noyes Academy was the brainchild of New England abolitionists, and was located within 20 miles of Dartmouth College in Hanover. The last slaves had been freed in 1827 in New York, and the demand for African American educational facilities was growing in the North. The school opened with 28 white students and 14 African-American students. Many of the latter had traveled from all over the Northeast to reach the Noyes Academy, often traveling on segregated steamboats and other transportation. Several future prominent African-American abolitionists, such as Henry Highland Garnet and Alexander Crummell, attended the school during the several months that it was open.

Within several months of its founding, opponents of the school organized hundreds of men; in August they used oxen teams to pull the building off its foundations. They burned the remains. The black students left for their safety.

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).
• Hilary J. Moss, Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).