Loomis Chaffee - History

History

The roots of Loomis Chaffee run as far back as 1639, when Joseph Loomis and his family first settled at the confluence of the Farmington and Connecticut rivers. Several generations later, the inspiration for the school was born out of family tragedy, when, in the early 1870s, four Loomis brothers and their sister had outlived all their children.

As a memorial to their own offspring, and as a gift to future children, they pooled their considerable estates to found a secondary school called The Loomis Institute to educate young persons, "hoping and trusting that some good may come to posterity, from the harvest, poor though it be, of our lives." The original 1640 Loomis Homestead was chosen as the site where their dream would become reality.

James Chaffee Loomis, Hezekiah Bradley Loomis, Osbert Burr Loomis, John Mason Loomis, and Abigail Sarah Loomis Hayden broke new educational ground by planning a school that would offer both vocational and college preparatory courses. (Vocational offerings were discontinued during the later development of the school.)

The founders' enlightened and democratic school would have no religious or political admission criteria. Boys and girls would be given as free an education as the endowment would allow.

The Loomis Institute opened its doors in 1914 to 39 boys and five girls. In 1926, their girls’ division broke off to focus more closely on girls’ educational issues and became The Chaffee School.

Both schools continued to expand. The Loomis Institute built several new facilities in 1967, and the two schools reunited in 1970, forming The Loomis Chaffee School. Six years later it began admitting girls as boarders.

The reunification led to a major revision of the curriculum, which combined a demanding basic program with a broad range of electives in art, music, philosophy, religion and other subjects.

The Loomis Chaffee School has enjoyed a period of unprecedented growth since the 1970s. It strengthened its endowment to bolster financial aid and broadened the diversity of the student body. Recently, it opened new dormitories, an enclosed hockey and skating rink, a brand new athletics center, a visual arts center, a new history & social science facility, an expanded dining hall, and a new student center. Within the most recent years, the Clark Center for Science and Mathematics was completely renovated, and Chaffee Hall was transformed and expanded to house the all new Hubbard Music Center. In the summer of 2012, the first floor of the Katharine Brush Library was extensively renovated, increasing the usable space of the library by 17 percent.