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

Years before this date ambitious girls might have been found here and there, more frequently in private schools than in public, working close up to the college doors, although it was hopeless for them to enter there, like Margaret Fuller, of Cambridgeport, subsequently Countess Ossoli, who in 1816, at the age of six, was studying Latin with her father, and whom we see again nine years later reciting Greek in the ‘C. P. P. G. S.,’ that is, in the Cambridge Port Private Grammar School,—a school for classical instruction where Richard Henry Dana and Oliver Wendell Holmes were among her schoolmates. Here was coeducation in secondary subjects, though not in a public school, as early as 1825. In the same year a high school for girls was opened in Boston. Its very success was its defeat. It was crowded to overflowing, and scores were rejected. The citizens became alarmed. The threatened expense was enormous. Moreover, there were those who feared that girls in humble life would be educated beyond their station! In less than two years, in the flush of prosperity, the school was voted out of existence, not to be revived for a quarter of a century. Bishop Clark, of Rhode Island, informs me that the Lowell High School, which was founded in 1831, had girls as well as boys in its membership from the beginning. He was the first principal of the school, and speaks, therefore, with authority. New Bedford opened a high school for both sexes earlier still. Of the fourteen high schools reported to be in existence in 1838 in Massachusetts, there were several where co-education had been the rule for years. The higher education of girls was in the air. It was as much a factor in the conditions that led to the development of high schools as a product of that development.

It is not, therefore, so very surprising after all,—the metamorphosis that came to the Latin Grammar School on Garden Street, Corlett's old school, in 1840, for in that year it was divided, the boys remaining on Garden Street and the girls going to the Auburn School, in School Court, now known as Farwell Place, the schoolhouse for which was built in 1838. The girls were placed under a classical instructor, but not the boys, ‘the girls being more advanced than many of the boys;’ and this school during its brief existence was known as the