City of Newton, MA
Home MenuA Nexus for Education Reform
West Newton became a center for educational reform in the mid-19th century, attracting ideas, talent and new families to move here. Horace Mann (1796-1859) was an educational reformer who lived on West Newton Hill, on Chestnut Street. He became the first Secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education and the impact of his ideas was felt nationwide. Mann was a champion of the Normal School, or teacher training college, and brought it from Lexington to an expanded site in West Newton. He invited Reverend Cyrus Peirce (1790-1860) to lead what is thought to be the first college for women in the United States.
Nathaniel Topliff Allen (1823-1903) was recruited by Horace Mann to head the Normal School's Model School, located on the corner of Washington and Highland Streets, where the teachers in training could practice their new methods. In 1854, after the Normal School moved to Framingham, Nathaniel Allen and Cyrus Peirce opened a new school, the West Newton English and Classical School, in the old Model School building. Allen's three brothers and several other family members taught at the school, which became known as the Allen School. The school's approach to pedagogy was far ahead of its time, emphasizing experiential learning, and the school welcomed all races in co-educational classrooms.
Allen became a well-known abolitionist. His opponents called Allen and his neighbors “the radicals and incendiaries of West Newton.” Allen befriended and housed a former enslaved man, Arthur Crumpler, who faced negative publicity in the Boston newspapers in 1863 when he cast his first vote. Crumpler married a student at the school named Rebecca Davis Lee who became the first African-American woman physician in the United States. Another graduate of the Allen School, Elizabeth Piper Ensley, became a teacher and an activist for African-American and suffrage rights.
The Allen House at 35 Webster Street dates in its present form to circa 1840. Nathaniel Allen and his wife, the former Carrie Swift Bassett, moved into the house after their marriage in 1853. After Allen's death in 1903, his daughters continued to live in the house. In 1915, they opened a girls' school, the Misses Allen School. This structure in the Greek Revival style, with an impressive columned front, is a Newton City Landmark. The Newton Cultural Alliance has converted the barn into a community theater space.
Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (1804-1894), who is credited with her strong advocacy for kindergartens, gave lectures around the Northeast and lived at 34 Temple Street on West Newton Hill in 1850-51. Drawing on German pedagogy, she promoted the process of learning through play for young children, which was not widespread in the United States at that time. She was also a Transcendentalist and a publisher.
Elizabeth’s sister, Mary Peabody, was the wife of Horace Mann; the Mann family had their home at 155 Chestnut Street. (That house was demolished but the carriage house remains at Crocker Circle.) They occasionally hosted Mary’s sister, Sophia, and her husband, Nathaniel Hawthorne who is said to have written The Blithedale Romance at their home in 1851. Horace Mann became a US Congressman in 1848, appointed to fill the seat after the death of John Quincy Adams.
Reverend Henry Lambert, living at 128 Chestnut Street from 1854-1900, was also a strong voice for abolition along with his daughter Mary T. Lambert and son-in-law William Francis Allen. The Lambert House is a Newton City Landmark and is associated with the fountain at the corner of Chestnut and Highland Streets, created in 1903 by sculptor Anne Whitney in memory of Catherine Porter Lambert.
The Lamberts had many guests at their house, including Ralph Waldo Emerson. These individuals and other West Newton residents met frequently in a reading and discussion society called the Athenaeum.