(This is the first in a three-part series about Berwick Academy that explores the town’s 234-year relationship with Maine’s oldest school. This article looks at the history of the school in South Berwick, while parts 2 and 3 will explore the impacts on a town hosting a well-known independent private school.)
Drivers cresting the hill before crossing the Salmon Falls River into South Berwick see the gleaming gold dome of Fogg Memorial where it rises above the trees, a familiar sight, but all that most town residents these days know about Berwick Academy, the private school that dominates the middle of their town.
The town of South Berwick and Berwick Academy have grown side by side for 234 years, connected for centuries in mutually beneficial ways.
Maine’s oldest school, Berwick Academy is a proud focal point for the community, along with the town’s claim to be the site of the first waterpower site in America; and its sturdy, rural townsfolk who inspired the work of our famous regional writers, Sarah Orne Jewett and Gladys Hasty Carroll.
The academy was intricately linked with the town from the late 1700s when it served as a public high school and later, the town library. The shared history and place remain, but in the last 50 years the two have become disconnected, with fewer meaningful ties in this multifaceted relationship.
The 1958 decision by the Berwick Academy Board of Trustees to become entirely private severed the primary tie between town and school. The community that once revolved around their children – those from South Berwick and those of tuition-paying families from the Seacoast – no longer mingled at sporting events and graduations.
Use of the library, gym and other facilities by town residents faded away, and now signage at the campus tennis courts and playground further discourages the public from visiting. Like a couple who have separated but are still sharing a house, South Berwick and Berwick Academy share a space but are reluctant to accept they have gone their separate ways.
South Berwick was a rural community with a fluctuating population until the 1960s, when the numbers doubled from the first recorded census of 1,475 inhabitants in the 1820s. The population has risen ever since, doubling again in the 1990s and only now showing slower growth.
After the last mill, Duchess Shoe -now the Cummings Mill Apartments – closed in the early 1990s, South Berwick transformed largely into a bedroom community, with the public school system becoming the largest employer.
B.A., as the school is called locally, has seen equally dramatic changes over the decades, going from private school to a private/public hybrid, a private boarding school, and in the last 45 years, an independent private school.
In 2025, B.A. is a thriving country day school with 520 K-12 students who come from three states and several countries and are served in lower, middle and upper school programs. The academy sits on the slope of Powderhouse Hill in the heart of the village; it used to lie at the heart of the community.
“Going halfway to heaven”
The gold dome crowns Fogg Memorial, a magnificent stone Romanesque Revival hall built in 1894. Sited at the center of the B.A. campus, Fogg Memorial housed a library that served students and teachers of the school and all South Berwick residents.
Classes from Central School, which was built in 1925 to serve grades 1 through 8, used to walk up the hill to visit Fogg Memorial Library, recalled by the late Joyce Borkowski, B.A. class of 1946, and other local residents as impressive.
“Ascending the long flight of stairs in the palatial Fogg building felt like you may be going halfway to heaven,” Borkowski reminisced in a video by Tim Benoit made for the Friends of the South Berwick Library’s fundraising campaign in 2011.
For hundreds of years B.A. was South Berwick’s only high school, open to any resident. From 1873, when the Maine Free High School Act was passed, until 1960, the town paid annual tuition to the academy trustees for its youth to attend.
In fact, B.A. was educating the town’s youth before South Berwick was even a town, when Maine was still part of Massachusetts and South Berwick was part of Berwick.
Established in 1791, the academy was organized when the citizens of Berwick, York, Kittery, Rollinsford, Portsmouth and Wells raised 500 British pounds to educate local boys, likely a mix of boarders and day students. Enlightened leadership allowed girls to attend as day students after 1828, though it wasn’t until 1854 they were awarded diplomas.
By 1826 the academy outgrew the original 1791 schoolhouse built “with room for 45 scholars.” Though that building stands today on the school campus, for 140 years it was in exile at the bottom of the hill after being moved to 73 Main St. and used as a private residence.
Local resident Dana Johnson, now living on Harvey Road, spent eight years of his childhood in the 1791 building his uncle, George Elbert Boston, bought during the Great Depression and in 1949 let Johnson’s mother and her three children live in the building for free.
“There was a marble door knob and a marble doorbell pull that attached to the bell inside. I still have the bell,” Johnson said recently, describing his connection to B.A. The door knob and bell pull are gone but the “secret spiral staircase” he remembers is still in place, rising so steeply it is more ladder than staircase.
In 1891, at the school’s 100th birthday, Headmaster George A. Dickey praised the town for making it possible for all children to attend the academy. For his part, Rev. George Lewis, pastor of the Congregational Church, “lauded the Academy for the refining influence it had on the town” before a crowd of 1,200 alumni, faculty, students and guests, Marie Donohue wrote in “The Old Academy on the Hill.”
When academy trustees planned a celebration for the institution’s 175th birthday in 1966, the 1791 building was purchased and moved back up the hill to be restored as today’s Berwick Academy Business Office.
“Announcement stuns town residents”
For the next five decades after its 100th birthday, the B.A. campus was relatively unchanged, as was the nature of the school and town residents’ relationship.
But on Feb. 9, 1958, South Berwick residents were stunned to read the South Berwick Chronicle headline, “Berwick Academy to revert to private school status.”
A letter to the citizens from B.A. Board of Trustees president Harold L. Goodwin explained the reason for the board’s decision: to transition “in accordance with the intent of the School’s founders to educate in the Liberal Arts and Sciences.”
The school would be closed to town residents “except perhaps the top 10% scholastically of South Berwick’s youth,” a statement to the South Berwick school committee that locals found exceptionally galling. Students already enrolled were allowed to graduate.
Townspeople also resented the statement that the academy had been providing a “free public education,” given that “this year we will pay Berwick Academy $55,330 (equivalent of $600,000 in 2025) in tuition over which we, the taxpayers, have no voice as to how it is spent.”
By 1960, the South Berwick school committee had lost its fight to keep B.A. open to all local secondary school students, and the town started a school building fund. A new school union, No. 5, was formed by Eliot and South Berwick. Town records the following year show a report from the first South Berwick High School, now Great Works School.
At the end of that era, names of graduating B.A. seniors fit on two short columns on letter size paper. Familiar local surnames sprinkle the pages: Gorman, Flynn, Lord, Tuttle, Blaisdell, Boston, Turnbull, Hasty and Mayo.
Rosalie Scharf (nee Goodwin), a fourth generation graduate of the academy, was in the class of 1958. She doesn’t remember much about the controversy, though she was aware people were unhappy. “I was busy being 17,” she said.
The trustees of B.A. bought properties on Academy Street for dormitories to house students, and began taking in boarders in 1958. Most of the new students were from Massachusetts.
In the 1960s the original gym was built; there were land acquisitions for playing fields and tennis courts; and the Commons, a dining hall with science labs, was constructed.
By 1970, however, the school was in such financial trouble the trustees voted to close it. For half an hour in 1970, Berwick Academy ceased to exist.
Academy archivist Melissa Williams is unable to find information that would explain what precipitated the crisis, but the B.A. community rallied immediately. That night the trustees reversed their decision and began fundraising.
A year later a Middle School was added, and in 1976 the school stopped taking boarders, sold some properties, and became a K-12 country day school.
The loss of access to Fogg Memorial as the town’s public library happened in the same time period, but it does not seem to have been an active decision by the board of trustees. Library reports in the academy archives show townspeople using Fogg up until 1969, said Williams.
Even in 1991, two decades later, according to former South Berwick resident Wendy Pirsig who researched the town’s library history, “So sensitive was the issue of the library’s departure” that Carolyn Blouin, a prominent resident advocating for a town library, wrote in a brief history, “By 1970, after using a community resource in the past, South Berwick found it had no library the public could use.” Her statement made no mention of Fogg Memorial.
People were angry about many aspects of the academy going private, Pirsig said, reflecting on all she had read and heard from residents who lived through the era of heated arguments about it.
Several generations of residents witnessed the changes in the relationship as the two communities became increasingly distanced from each other, but now residents have little knowledge of or contact with the school.
Part two of this series will focus on the impact of a private school in a small town.
