The Eliot School is known for its iconic schoolhouse building, but its history is even longer and more remarkable than that antique structure suggests.  Over hundreds of years, it has been an important institution in our community.  Its role has shifted somewhat, but its mission has remained steady. 

Today, the Eliot School of Fine and Applied Arts is recognized as one of the best places for adults and children to learn and practice skills in such “manual arts” as painting, fiber arts and woodworking.  It won Boston Magazine's Best of Boston in 2010 in the category of Art Activity for Kids.

I spoke with Abigail Norman, executive director, and Charlie Sandler, who has worked at the Eliot School since 1969 as director, instructor, and currently as superintendent.

As Norman says, the Eliot School “grew up with JP” and in many ways it embodies the spirit of JP—perhaps it even helped shape the special place we know and love today.

What is the history of the Eliot School?

Sandler:  The school was started in 1676 as a grammar school to educate Africans and native American Indians as well as colonial children. 

Norman:  It was named for John Eliot—who was pastor of First Church in Roxbury and who translated the Bible into the Algonquin language.  He provided an endowment in 1689 by donating a large tract of land that stretched to the Dedham line.  Over the centuries (into the 20th century) the land was sold off to support the school. 

Sandler:  Teachers were paid in bushels of corn.  At that time, the area sometimes known as Pond Plain, wasn’t laid out like Dorchester was—it was mostly farm land. 

Over the years, the target population for the school has shifted.  The Eliot School housed JP high school students for a time.  During the Industrial Revolution, it became a school of industrial education— providing instruction in manual arts for adults and children and preparing teachers to teach industrial education in the Boston Public Schools — but the Eliot School always maintained its board of directors, its nonprofit status, and its independence as an organization.

The father of “shop” and the mother of “home ec,” Robert and Ellen Swallow Richards, were influential at the Eliot School during its transition to its 20th Century incarnation.  Both were MIT professors and proponents of vocational education.  Robert Richards sat on the Eliot board for over 60 years until 1944.

 In the 1880s, the school dropped the more industrial arts, such as sheet metal work, and began focusing on crafts.  Throughout the entire 20th Century it was a crafts school.

Since 1832, the school has been in the current schoolhouse on Eliot Street.  It is actually the third building—the original stood where The Monument is now. 

Norman:  Because the history goes back so far, we are still learning about it and revising our understanding.  We now know The Eliot School is not the oldest continuously operating school in what is now the US.  Roxbury Latin is older and there were schools in Virginia as well.  It certainly is one of the oldest continuously operating schools in the country, however.

(The school’s archives are housed at the Massachusetts Historical Society and interested readers can find links to various essays on its history on the school’s website)

What programs does the Eliot School offer today?

Norman:  We have two programs: our classes here for adults and children and our School Partnership Program, through which we send our instructors into 12 BPS schools and to two after-school programs: Sociedad Latina and the Science Club for Girls.

Here, people from the community can sign up for classes in woodworking (our biggest program, which includes classes and open shop sessions);  furniture design; book and paper arts; painting, drawing and assemblage; soap-making and photography.  Our developing fiber arts program includes sewing, fibers, and yarn.  The opening of JP Knit and Stitch will be a nice complement to this program.

In all, the Eliot School serves over 2,000 students each year.

When I first came, The Eliot School was running under the radar.  The better known we become, the more we get requests:  can you teach this, can you teach that?  We continue to be responsive to those requests.  Classes in assemblage, knitting, crochet and woodworking for young kids were all added at the request of community members.

Why is JP a good home for The Eliot School?

Norman:  The school has been here since 1676, so it’s hard to think of JP without it.  The Eliot School and JP really grew up together.  It has shifted and changed with the times but, like JP itself, even after 3 1/2 centuries, the Eliot School has remained distinctive. 

What is the best thing The Eliot School has done for JP?

Norman:  It maintains the commitment to diversity and accessibility that was part of its original charter.  The Eliot School is still an open and accessible place where people can come to make things and be creative.

JP is still a community with many artists and people who value a homemade aesthetic.  We’d like to be a kind of go-to place for making things by hand.

Our society is so saturated by technology.  I think people come here to get away from their computers for a while.  It’s a different thing to understand what it is for the tree to become a board, to make something with your own hands and to live with it, to feel like you’re part of the human tribe that makes its world.  Maybe that’s why arts and craft organizations like Stonybrook Fine Arts, Diablo Glass School, BalletRox and The Eliot School are all thriving now.

Offerings vary by semester.  Catalogs are available at The Eliot School and around the neighborhood.  Information is available at www.eliotschool.org and registration can be done online.  The annual Student and Faculty Show will be held on June 5 and 6.