Northfield Mount Hermon School

Northfield Mount Hermon School, often abbreviated as NMH, is a co-educational college-preparatory school for boarding and day students in grades 9–12, along with a post-graduate year. Located in Gill, Massachusetts, it is a member of the Eight Schools Association and Six Schools League. History The school was founded by Protestant evangelist Dwight Lyman Moody as the Northfield Seminary for Young Ladies in 1879 (later called the Northfield School for Girls) and the Mount Hermon School for Boys in 1881. Moody built the girls' school in Northfield, Massachusetts, the town of his birth, and the boys' school a few miles away in the town of Gill. Both were "opportunity" schools created for the deserving poor who had no other means to acquire an education. From their beginnings, both schools attracted highly diverse students. Moody's goal was to provide the best possible education for young people without privilege, and he enrolled students whose parents were slaves as well as Native Americans and people from other countries, which was unprecedented among elite private schools at that time. Sixteen of the Northfield students who matriculated in 1880 were Native Americans, as were four Mount Hermon boys in 1882; at Mount Hermon's first commencement in 1887, one student addressed the audience "in his native language, for the representatives of the Sioux, Shawnee, and Alaskan tribes in the school." An 1887 report lists 8 Chinese, 5 Indians, 2 Negroes, and 1 Japanese student at Mount Hermon; by 1889 their numbers had risen to 37 students from 15 countries, and in 1904 to 113 students from 27 countries ranging from Burma through Denmark. In the 1940s it was one of a handful of American private schools with admissions for non-white students.