The Cambridge of eighteen hundred and ninety-six: a picture of the city and its industries fifty years after its incorporation
Arthur Gilman, Ed.

From 1840 to 1845 the girls of Old Cambridge fared better than the boys so far as secondary instruction was concerned; but the citizens chafing somewhat under the disadvantages of the boys, the Auburn School in 1845 was made a high school for both sexes, and the Garden Street School, known thereafter as the Washington School, a grammar school, for the first time in the exclusively modern sense, for both sexes. There was some opposition to bringing the sexes together in this way, but Rev. William A. Stearns, chairman of the school committee and subsequently president of Amherst College, voiced the unanimous opinion of the committee that it was wise to do so. ‘In all the other schools of the town,’ he said, ‘boys and girls meet together every day without injury, we believe, to the morals of either.’ The evils feared, if they once existed, had ‘long since been entirely banished from them.’ ‘Children in our high and grammar schools [those of Cambridgeport and East Cambridge] are as decidedly delicate and respectful in their treatment of each other as any similar classes in our adult population.’ Nevertheless, there were parents who withdrew their daughters from the Auburn High School and the Washington Grammar School, whereupon, in 1846, for reasons of economy, the two schools were united in the Auburn building under the name of the ‘Auburn Grammar and High School.’ Thus Elijah Corlett's school was once more under one roof,— partly a grammar school in the old sense, and partly a grammar school in the new sense.

In 1848, there was another and final parting of company, the high school classes being transferred to the central high school, in Cambridgeport, and the other classes remaining under the name of the Auburn Grammar School. In 1851, the Auburn building and the Auburn School entered upon a period of travel, the building going first to North Avenue, and finally to Concord Avenue, where it stands to-day as the Dunster School, the school meanwhile moving into Lyceum Hall, then into its old building again as it stood rejuvenated on North Avenue, then into the vestry of the Baptist church that once stood near the present college gymnasium, and finally, in June, 1852, into its new quarters on Brattle Street, where it became known once more as the Washington Grammar School,