The Two Towers: Main

When I entered Harvard no knowledge even of common arithmetic was prerequisite; nor were we required to know any thing of geography, but simply the place of our nativity.
      --Emory Washburn, 1865

ning of the school. This was no idle school-boy venture in which they were involved; it was a serious attempt at educational innovation, and they were willing to pay the price for it.

For the trip abroad, Mr. Thompson was given five hundred dollars in addition to half of his first year's salary of twenty-five hundred dollars, and an extra five hundred with which to buy laboratory equipment. His wife (Maria Goodrich of Ware), whom he had married in 1862, was to spend the summer in Templeton with her uncle's family while Mr. Thompson was overseas and while she awaited the birth of their child. Templeton was a small town; it is impossible not to surmise that the Thompsons were thus well acquainted with John Boynton and David Whitcomb, which may in itself explain the choice of Charles Thompson as principal of the new school.

Charles Thompson sailed in May. He visited every school even remotely resembling the new Institute of which he was to act as principal, then wrote to the trustees at home: "No schools here can be imitated, but the ideas can be Americanized." One of his main impressions was the difference between European boys and American boys. This difference, he wrote with emphasis, must never be ignored.

Mr. Thompson concluded that the Institute's curriculum should offer a four-year course and require a high-school entrance prerequisite. This, however, seemed too ambitious to the trustees, who announced in their first circular that the course would last three years. Students on admission were to give evidence of an acquaintance with the usual studies pursued in the district schools, especially in arithmetic, geography, and history of the United States.

The board followed Mr. Thompson's recommendation, however, in hiring his wife's sister, Harriett Goodrich, to teach mathematics. Although Mrs. Thompson had graduated from the Oread Institute in Worcester, her sister was an alumna of Mount Holyoke and had been Mr. Thompson's assistant in Arlington. George Gladwin, an artist who had studied abroad and worked in Worcester, had also been engaged as a part-time teacher of drawing.

School was to begin in less than a week when George I. Alden of Templeton, only twenty-five years old, was asked to teach theoretical and practical mechanics. How this young man found out about the school, or how the school found out about him, is not known. He had been graduated summa cum laude in June from the Lawrence Scientific School, and for the few months since graduation he had worked at the Harvard Observatory.

It is possible that John Boynton had reserved this teaching berth at the Institute for George Alden. It is certain that Mr. Boynton knew the Alden family and knew them well. In the funds which became a permanent part of the Boynton endowment to the Institute there was evidence of this acquaintance in a hundred-dollar note signed by one of Mr. Alden's uncles in Templeton.

It is just as possible that David Whitcomb remembered and rec-