Early center of learning On April 27, 1792, fifty residents of the towns of Groton and
Pepperell formed an association to raise funds for a "Publick School ... in Groton, for the education of youth, of both sexes—in which School are taught the English, Latin and Greek Languages, Writing, Arithmetic, Geography, the Art of Speaking and Writing, with Practical Geometry, and Logic." The founders of the new
Groton Academy included prominent citizens
Oliver Prescott,
Zabdiel Adams,
Samuel Dana, and
Timothy Bigelow.
Samuel Lawrence also contributed funds, thus beginning the school's longstanding relationship with the Lawrence family. The academy is the third-oldest boarding school in Massachusetts. It received its corporate charter in 1793 Its primary purpose was to educate students from the surrounding region; at the time, Groton was the second-largest town in
Middlesex County and the center of the local economy. Although some students came from as far away as North Carolina, the school remained committed to its local base. From 1793 to 1848, thirteen families supplied one out of every six students. In the days before compulsory education, enrollment was unstable and only a small portion of students attended college. Schoolmasters rarely stayed for longer than two years; the first (
Samuel Holyoke) stayed for less than a year. Even so, Groton Academy developed a strong reputation. Between 1801 and 1870, it sent approximately fifty students to
Harvard College, making it one of Harvard's top twelve feeder schools. Turnover at the top meant that several notable individuals taught at Groton Academy after graduating from college, including
Asahel Stearns, the co-founder of
Harvard Law School, and
William Merchant Richardson, the future chief justice of the
New Hampshire Supreme Court. Alumni in the early years included
James Walker, president of
Harvard University;
John Prescott Bigelow, mayor of Boston;
James Gordon Carter, a pioneer in tax-funded
public schools; and Nehemiah Cutter, a co-founder of the
American Psychiatric Association. In addition, in 1879, when the academy was already a mature institution, Lawrence Academy admitted its first black graduate,
Robert H. Terrell. Terrell would later become the third black graduate of Harvard, the first black honors graduate of Harvard, and the first black federal judge.
Lawrence family patronage On February 28, 1846, the Massachusetts legislature granted the Groton Academy board's request to rename the institution to
Lawrence Academy at Groton in recognition of the generosity of the children of Samuel Lawrence, all eight of whom had attended the academy. In 1838, brothers
Amos and William Lawrence—by now wealthy Boston merchants and investors—began their lengthy patronage of the academy, when Amos contributed a gift of "books and philosophical apparatus," followed in 1839 by "a telescope and Bowditch's translation of
Mécanique Céleste by
Laplace," and $2,000 for enlarging the schoolhouse in 1842. In 1844, William donated $10,000 to the endowment "for the advancement of education for all coming time." Over the course of their lives, Amos and William Lawrence donated nearly $65,000 in cash, scholarships, and property to the school (around $2.6 million in 2024 dollars). The Lawrences' funds also helped the academy establish close ties with prominent liberal arts schools, including
Williams College, which historically catered to New England's "older provincial elite." The gifts of the Lawrence brothers established twelve scholarships for Lawrence Academy graduates to attend Williams,
Bowdoin College in Maine, and
Wabash College in Indiana (four each).In the middle of the nineteenth century, Lawrence Academy's future was jeopardized by religious disputes. Groton's population was divided between trinitarian
Congregationalists (often
Evangelicals) and
Unitarians, and the Unitarians outnumbered the trinitarians. and board members suspected that Unitarians in town were trying to deter local students from attending the academy. (Despite the academy's reliance on local students, its charter required "a majority of trustees [to] be non-residents of Groton.") In the 1850s and 1880s, the town of Groton sought to make Lawrence Academy a public high school under town control, but the trustees rejected both proposals. In 1860, the town opened
Groton High School, providing the first secular alternative to Lawrence Academy. In addition, in 1884, the now-
Episcopalian Lawrence family helped establish
Groton School, an Episcopal boarding school, which periodically attempted to convert its neighbor to Anglicanism. Enrollment bottomed out at 26 students in 1889. In 1899, Lawrence Academy reinvented itself as a traditional college-preparatory boarding school. It raised tuition to $430 (it was $200 fifteen years earlier) and revised the curriculum to focus on college entrance examinations. It stopped admitting girls, and it prioritized boarding students over day students. The school remained formally nonsectarian, but the new principal was the son of an Episcopal priest. Anglicisms such as "Third Form" (freshmen) and "headmaster" (principal) were briefly imported, though later discarded. During this period, the academy endured a long stretch of financial difficulties and shut down twice. The academy first closed from 1869 to 1871 after its schoolhouse burned down during a Fourth of July celebration; it cost $24,000 to replace (nearly $600,000 in 2024). Although the academy returned to financial health in the 1940s, the campus burned down again in 1956. The academy resumed co-education in 1971. Improved fundraising in the 1980s and 1990s, including an $8 million capital campaign, significantly improved the academy's financial health. Today, Lawrence Academy's student body is both heavily local and heavily international. 58% of students are day students. A quarter of the boarding students (12%) come from abroad. The academy enrolled 424 students in the 2021–22 school year, of whom 306 (72.2%) were white, 49 (11.6%) were Asian, 26 (6.1%) were black, 16 (3.8%) were Hispanic, 1 (0.2%) was Native American, 1 (0.2%) was Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and 25 (6.0%) were multiracial; the national survey in question required each student to choose only one category. == Athletics ==