Port Deposit In the early 1890s,
Jacob Tome (1810–1898)—a wealthy railroad and timber magnate who had served in the Maryland State Senate—decided to open a nonsectarian college preparatory school for boys. He founded the Tome School for Boys on Main Street in
Port Deposit, Maryland, on the east bank of the
Susquehanna River. It opened for boarders and received its first students in 1894. It was part of a system of schools collectively known as the Jacob Tome Institute that began with
kindergarten and extended through
high school. Situated in the northeast corner of the state, the Tome School was immediately popular, attracting almost all the students from the town of Port Deposit and many from outside, throughout
Maryland,
Pennsylvania, and neighboring states. Tome left the school an endowment at his death in 1898. Olmsted selected
landscape architect Charles Wellford Leavitt (1871–1928) to design the school's gardens. By 1902, the school had more than a dozen buildings and an endowment of $2 million ($ today). Thirteen of these buildings survive, though some have been damaged or all but destroyed by fire: Memorial Hall, three dormitories (Jackson, Madison, and Harrison), the Chesapeake Inn dormitory and dining hall, the Director's residence, the Monroe Gymnasium, and six Master's cottages. Erika L. Quesenbery, author of
United States Naval Training Center Bainbridge, wrote that Memorial Hall was the school's "centerpiece". In the early 1900s, Tome played football annually against
Baltimore City College, the third-oldest public high school in America, founded 1839, and with an interscholastic football team program dating back to the 1880s and had several other schools and colleges on its schedule. The rivalry was fairly even. The
City's Collegians beat Tome 5–0 in 1903 and 11–8 in 1904, but Tome won 32–0 in 1912 and 37–0 in 1915. Other rivalries also were versus the
Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, the mathematics/science/technology public high school, established 1883 that was also City College's arch-rival. These were the few other public secondary schools, in addition to several other private or religious schools, institutes and academies in the region offering worthy sports and academic competition. In 1906, school director
Abram W. Harris, along with
Phi Beta Kappa members on the Tome School faculty, organized Alpha Delta Tau fraternity, which later became the
Cum Laude Society. The school enjoyed a prestigious reputation for a number of years. Its students included R. J. Reynolds Jr., a son of
R. J. Reynolds; and children of the
Mellon and
Carnegie families. of the property and land from 70 surrounding farms for use by the
United States Navy as a training center. The institute's buildings were renovated for use by the
Naval Academy Preparatory School to prepare future midshipmen for the
U.S. Naval Academy further south at
Annapolis, Maryland. In 2018, a local newspaper wrote of the old campus that Van Buren, Madison, and Monroe Halls remain, while the headmaster's house "is badly vandalized but standing", and Jackson Hall "like Memorial Hall, is a burned-out hulk." On May 6, 2020, a fire burned the former Inn to the ground. The Bainbridge Development Corporation has since installed a security system that is "fully wireless and solar powered" with "cameras at key points on the property, monitoring 24/7." As of September 2022, the company was installing 100 "No Trespassing” signs. ==Academics==