Boston College High School
1863-1983
[From part 1: the First Fifty Years]
Catholics did not form a significant population during the colonial period. A decade before the Revoluation they comprised only 20,000 out of two million colonists -- fewer than one percent -- and most of them had settled in Maryland and Pennsylvania. In Boston, they were not allowed to settle, and many legal penalties could be applied to any Catholics discovered in the city. The 1780 state constitution removed most of these restrictions, but all officeholders had to take an oath with an explicitly anti-Catholic clause until 1822.
Various political and economic upheavals in Europe, and the great Irish potato famine, sent thousands of Catholic refugees to New England. From 1846 to 1856 alone, nearly 130,000 Irish entered Boston. Various parochial schools opened in the city and elsewhere for their education, and the Jesuits established Holy Cross College in Worcester in 1843.
Few of the immigrant working class families could afford the relatively high tuition of Holy Cross ($150 a year) and most of them settled on the public grammar schools for primary education. Catholic students often outnumbered the dominant Protestant minority, hwoever, and this created tensions in the classroom.
In 1859 a teacher in the Eliot School inflicted severe corporal punishment upon a Catholic student who refused, on instruction from his parents, to recite the Protestant version of the commandments. The courts decided in the teacher's favor, and the case received national attention. The Eliot School Controversy led many Boston Catholics to seek an adequate school system of their own.
Born in Ireland, educated at Georgetown College, Father John McElroy was the primary agent in the establishment of Boston College. He had served in the Mexican War as one of two Catholic chaplains appointed by President Polk, and in October of 1847 he was installed as the pastor of St. Mary's Church in the North End [of Boston].
Father McElroy had corresponded with Bishop Fenwick of Boston all through the 1840s about the possibility of opening a new cathedral and a low-tuition college for day scholars. During the 1850s he made various attempts to secure land for the proposed structures. In May 1852, one Andrew Carney purchased the Otis School from the city on Father McElroy's behalf. It stood near St. Mary's and could accommodate 800, but the Sisters of Notre Dame moved in the following year to establish St. Mary's School for Girls.
In late 1851 the city auctioned off land where the city jail had once stood. The plot occupied much of the land between Causeway, Lowell, Leverett, and Wall Streets. Causeway does not extend as far west today, and the other streets no longer exist. Lowell may now go by the name of Lomasney Way: the plot is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of the Longfellow Place towers and the parking garage next to the elevated green line to Lechmere. The buyer, a Colonel Josiah L.C. Amee, built dwelling houses but couldn't sell them, so he sold the land to Father McElroy in 1853.
Although the land had been restricted to dwellings or houses, the city council modified that restriction. When word got out that the land had been sold to a Catholic priest who intended to build a church, however, bigoted citizens pressured the council to enforce the original restrictions. The mayor and the council were all Know-Nothings, members of a new national political party devoted to the suppression of Catholics and foreigners, and they obligingly held up proceedings.
In 1856 Alexander Rice was elecgted mayor, and many of Father McElroy's enemies on the city council were defeated. By that time he had decided to sell the jail lands and look at locations in the developing South End. The friendly Mayor Rice suggested a tract on Harrison Avenue which Father McElroy bought in July 1857. The city charged fifty cents a foot for this initial purchase of 65,100 square feet, which price represented twenty-five cents less than the residential rate....
Ground was broken and the cornerstone for the church laid in April 1858....
The First Years
On the opening day, September 5, 1864, twenty-two boys showed up to register. Father Robert Fulton, the prefect of studies, may have been dismayed at the small turnout but, as Father David Dunigan observed in his history of Boston College:
... in those days, the Catholics of Boston were mostly poor, and were not over-anxious to pay for what could be had for nothing in the schools and academies of the city. Moreover, they shared in the common superstition that nothing superior to the education of the public schools of New England had as yet been discovered.
One by one, additional students appeared throughout the fall term. By January 1, twenty-four more were on the register. Another sixteen arrived during the spring term. About 25 percent of the total did not stick it out, so the first year ended with an enrollment of forty-eight. Three members of the Society of Jesus, including Father Fulton, made up the teaching staff.
As in every other educational institution run by the Jesuits, the new school followed the design of the Ratio Studiorum, a system drawn up by the early Jesuits and completed in 1599. The system aimed to put all the Jesuit schools on a uniform basis because the Society of Jesus had already established colleges in Japan, China, India, and most of Europe by the end of the sixteenth century.
In brief, the Ratio Studiorum harmonized medieval forms of thought with the new humanistic advances of the time: it asserted the authority of the Church but gave a certain free scope to new developments in intellectual activity. Its philosophy came straight from Aristotle, its scholastic theology from St. Thomas Aquinas, and it provided for "Humanities" and "Rhetoric" in the curriculum to develop the formation and expression of ideas. Readings depended heavily on Cicero and Virgil. Thus, well into the twentieth century students at B.C. High read Virgil, Cicero, and Ovid in Latin, and Xenophon and Homer in Greek.
Since the school initially had to work with whatever students it received, the curriculum had to be tailored to fit them instead of starting out fully designed. The course structure was somewhat fluid and incomplete, and no catalogues were published for the first five years of operation. Forty-eight of the first year's sixty-two students were placed in Second Rudiments (somewhat equivalent to eighth grade today), five in First Rudiments (first year high), eight in Grammar (second year high), and one in Second Grammar (third year high). So for the first few years, the "college" had no students or courses which might be comparable to those in a college today.
Henry C. Towle entered the school in its second year, and in an article he wrote for The Stylus he recalled how fluid things were in the pioneer days. "So little difference was there between First and Second Rudiments," he wrote, "that in a class contest about mid-winter of 1866, the lower boys were found so superior to the upper that most of them were drafted into the higher class." As the years passed, students progressed and filled out the student body so that the higher grades could be added and the curriculum made more solid.
To close the first year, Fathers Bapst and Fulton decided to arrange a creditable "exhibition." There was no possibility of a graduation, but the school needed some sort of ceremony to draw attention upon itself and attract future scholars. The first evening consisted of a public examination of the pupils, and the second featured a sacred drama, "Joseph and His Brethren," and the presentation of silver crosses and books to successful students. The ceremony must have satisfied every boy, since sixty-four awards went to a student body of forty-eight!
The following September, seventy students showed up on registration day. Only three of the first year's group failed to return, and the teaching staff expanded from three to eight. The college (and future high school) was off and running.