Winter 2024 · Torch: U.S. · PINKERTON ACADEMY
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The 2024-2025 school year finds the Classical Society of Pinkerton Academy in Derry, New Hampshire, Societās Classica Acadēmīæ Pinkertōniæ, celebrating her centennial year, surely a true rarity for a high school club! Founded under Pinkerton’s Latin and Ancient Greek teacher Helen Conant Munroe, A.B. (Radcliffe), Henry Newell and Helen Grady served as the first Senior and Junior Consuls of the Club, with lower offices similarly named to emulate Rome’s Cursus Honōrum. The Classical Society istoday, at a hundred years of age, conceivably the oldest extant high school Latin club in America.
Pinkerton had always had a long and distinguished history with regard to the study of the Classical Latin and Greek languages. In fact, from even before the founding of the Academy itself, the importance of a strong Classical education seems to have been paramount to our community, beginning with the establishment in Derry in the 1780s of the Classical High School, Pinkerton’s direct antecessor. As finances became shaky, the Pinkertons came to the rescue; thus was permanently founded PA, inheriting the Classical High School’s educational tradition (as well as even the Preceptor). As the Trustee Carl Forsaith notes in his 1964 sesquicentennial history, “Article Ten of the rules governing the early operation of the Academy ‘informs the faculty that they are to teach correct and graceful reading of the English, Latin, and Greek languages.’” John M. Pinkerton himself apparently thought the study of Greek so important as to have read the New Testament, in the original, seven times within a span of twenty years.
While male and female students were traditionally taught separately at Pinkerton, the Latin and Greek classes were the only ones in which both boys and girls attended class together until as late as 1876. Then! In the 1910s and 1920s, as club fever ran as rampant as scarlet fever in American schools, Pinkerton succumbed, with several clubs coming and going until the Classical Society arose in the 1924-1925 school year.
The December 9th edition of Pinkerton’s Critic of 1924 proclaims that: “The members of the Classical Club enjoyed the Roman Banquet held in Hildreth Hall Monday, November 23rd... Everything was done in Roman style. Only spoons or fingers could be used, as the Romans had no forks or knives.”
The 1927-1928 Course Catalogue describes the Club: “In connection with the Latin and Greek courses there is a Classical Club to which those who have a grade of eighty per cent or above in Latin and Greek are entitled to belong. The object of the club is to inculcate a greater interest in classical studies by the aid of Latin plays and other supplementary work.”
The Club has undergone several name changes; originally styled with a Hellenized possessive Acadēmīās, befitting the word's etymology, it was soon Latinized as Societās Classica Acadēmīæ Pinkertōniæ. Classical Club followed and, due presumably to the loss of Greek at Pinkerton by the 1928-1929 school year, a total nomenclatural overhaul was felt warranted. Forsaith laconically sums it up thus, “Societas Classica burst forth in 1925, to be followed five years later by a Latin Club.” Helen Munroe, the founding advisor, therefore also taught the Academy’s last credit-bearing Greek class, ēheu!
Robert Frost is locally remembered to have taught at Pinkerton from 1906 to 1911 (his classroom is one of the Latin classrooms today!), when the atmosphere of the school felt most like a private school’s. PA’s status is complicated; though established by the New Hampshire Legislature with direct taxation of the town paying for its operation, along with tuition and donations, the “Public School or Academy” was a semi-boarding, semi-day school that, while non-sectarian, was fundamentally a Christian religious school. Pinkerton has, to slightly misquote Crassus in Spartacus, trodden the ridge between public and private schools with the skill of a mountain goat! In the 1950s, Pinkerton contracted to accept all public students from Derry, and subsequently a number of those from surrounding towns as well, such that Pinkerton today, a public academy, is both the school of record for public school students of five towns, while also a private employer with a self-electing Board of Trustees.
As of the mid-20th Century, the Latin Club, with various routine events of Classically-inspired crafts, creative observations of Roman
holidays, surely oodles more Roman banquets, and even a Classical shadow play once at assembly, hasalso participated in Junior Classical
Leagueevents, sending students to the national conventions as early as the 1960s. Thankfully, the Classical Society’s willfully obtuse “slave
auctions” were left behind in the 20th Century. But on a cheerier note, a fact long-forgotten: Christine (Fernald) Sleeper, one of the
Founding Mothers of the National Latin Exam, taught lively and creative classes at Pinkerton and served as Classical Society advisor in the
early 1940s.
From a play: Theseus & the Minotaur!
In the modern era, the Club continues to be a stalwart chapter of the NHJCL (ut grānitum tenācēs!) and has restored and identified ancient
Roman coins, run Mini Latin Club series for middle schoolers at Chester Academy, made Roman-style curse tablets in Latin, held
marathon Classics D&D quests, toured museums (not to mention Italy and Greece), viewed a million or so Classics-oriented films and
documentaries, and has visited many Mediterranean restaurants for her annual Symposium banquet. Among myriad other projects and
whimsical one-offs, like her recent Latin murder mystery afternoon, SCAP conducts Ancient Greek summer classes, occasionally makes
paper from our generous papyrus plant Stu, and competes with vim in the various national JCL contests and competitions.
Founding Societās Classica advisor Helen Munroe,
2nd from left
Of all the founding officers whose portraits we have, Perley Spollett’s surely surpasses all in sheer excellence!