BULF I N CH H A LL & I TS H ERI TA G E In 2013 we celebrate the expansion and renewal of Bulfinch Hall, a building with as many lives as the proverbial cat.
would continue at school; younger students were sent home. All was lost: not only the building, but the library and students’ books and the school museum containing a diversity of curiosities—a bow and arrow, a Chinese lady’s shoe, a giant turtle shell, a French coin from the reign of Louis XIV, a mosaic fragment from Pompeii, a piece of Plymouth Rock.
Bulfinch Hall was built in 1818–1819. It was Phillips Academy’s third schoolhouse. By the 1840s, the “Brick Academy,” as it was then known, became a meeting hall. In the 1860s it was transformed into a gymnasium. Gutted by fire in 1896, the building was patched and used for storage and as warm-up space by athletic teams. Once Borden Gym opened in 1902, Bulfinch was enlarged and fitted out as the school dining hall, only to be replaced in that function in 1930 by what today is Paresky Commons. In 1936, Bulfinch was gutted for a third time and retrofitted as a state-of-the-teaching-arts English department. The 1930s renovation remained essentially unchanged until the summer of 2012, when the project we celebrate began. Bulfinch Hall has been handsomely upgraded and again enlarged to better serve the teaching of English in this new century.
Early in February, part of a residence on campus was transformed into a temporary schoolroom for the seniors. On February 19, the trustees voted to erect a new schoolhouse to be built “with brick and covered with slate.” A building committee was directed to secure plans and cost estimates. Meeting again on March 4, the trustees approved both plan and estimate, voting to begin construction with whatever funds were at hand, supplemented by donations to be raised through the Academy’s first fundraising campaign. A gifts solicitation committee printed and distributed a fundraising circular dated March 25. The appeal concluded: “We do confidently rely that, by your liberality, you will prove yourselves worthy to be enrolled, not only as members, but as Benefactors of Phillips Academy.” Committee members called on alumni and parents in New England and New York. In all, 179 gifts were received. Far and away the largest were donated by Lt. Governor William Phillips Jr., a Boston banker, political figure and philanthropist, the first president of the Massachusetts General Hospital board, and an Andover trustee. He was the last Phillips to play a large role in Andover affairs. A cousin of Samuel Phillips Jr., William Phillips donated a total of $5,000 toward the cost of the brick schoolhouse we know as Bulfinch Hall.
Disaster brought Bulfinch into being. The winter of 1818 was severe, a season of ice-wrecked bridges and buildings consumed by fire. On January 30, a day of bitter cold, the Reverend William Bentley of Salem recorded in his diary that “the boys skate on the surface of the streets and fields.” In Andover that night, the Academy’s second schoolhouse—a frame structure erected in 1785 by the Phillips family—burned to the ground. Sparks from a woodstove caused the blaze. The trustees met the next morning at the home of schoolmaster John Adams (now Shuman Admission Center). “Whereas, by the providence of God, the Academy was last night destroyed by fire,” the meeting minutes report, only the senior class
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