History
The school was founded in 1820 by local citizens as a "building for higher education." Once called Wolfeboro & Tuftonboro Academy, in 1887 it was renamed Brewster Free Academy in honor of John Brewster, a benefactor. For sixty years it charged no tuition fee to area residents, and from its inception through 1964, the school served as the only high school in Wolfeboro. (The town began to pay local students' tuition starting in 1947.) During the immediate postwar years it was a popular school with military veterans seeking to improve their credentials for a university education under the GI Bill. In 1963 the graduating class consisted of 60 local students, with 30 additional post-graduate students, who boarded on campus. Many of these were there to increase their athletic prowess, and some, including Milt Morin who played in the NFL, had successful college and pro sports careers. The local students were then shifted to Kingswood Regional High School in town, and Brewster became a private boarding school.
In 1985, Digital Equipment Corporation co-founder Ken Olsen donated a number of Digital personal computers to Brewster. The computers were part of a new lab dedicated to Grace Murray Hopper, whose family had a summer house in Wolfeboro. The lab is called the Grace Murray Hopper Center for Computer Learning.
Since 1995, Brewster hosts the Great Waters Music Festival. This summer festival promotes live musical performances including choral, symphonic, folk, pops, jazz, Broadway, dance, and renowned vocal and instrumental artists. Celebrity performers have included Wynton Marsalis, Dave Brubeck, Arlo Guthrie, Chuck Mangione, and the Glenn Miller Orchestra.
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“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
“The history of medicine is the history of the unusual.”
—Robert M. Fresco, and Jack Arnold. Prof. Gerald Deemer (Leo G. Carroll)
“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)