Watchman Institute - North Scituate

North Scituate

In 1920, Holland acquired the North Scituate campus of the former Pentecostal Collegiate Institute, which had moved to Wollaston in Quincy, Massachusetts the year before. He moved the Watchman Institute there in 1923.

The buildings were originally designed in 1839 for the Smithville Seminary by Russell Warren, the leading Greek Revival architect in New England in the 19th century. Holland advertised his school as "the ideal Home for Boys and Girls age 14 years and upwards" in the December 1923 edition of The Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

The school had two suspicious fires in 1924 and 1926, and a former student reported seeing a cross being burned on the school lawn in the 1930s. Newspapers reported in the 1920s incidents that the local Ku Klux Klan chapter was suspected, as the KKK had become active in western Rhode Island after World War I, chiefly out of anti-immigration sentiment. No one was ever arrested or charged in the incidents.

After closing the school, Holland continued to operate the summer camp until his death in 1958. After his death, his second wife and widow Viola Grant Holland (1901-1986) took over operation of the camp. She ran it until 1974, when it was forced to close for financial reasons. By 1969, the principal of the camp was Edward T. Duncan.

In 1978 the complex was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The buildings were renovated in the 1970s and converted into apartments known as Scituate Commons. In 1985 the site was designated by Rhode Island as an African-American historic site.