One of Dr. Bigelow’s fellow trustees at Newton Cemetery was Marshall S. Rice. As a young man, Mr. Rice decided to make teaching his profession. After several years in the classroom, he started a private boarding school for boys at his home in Newton Centre in 1824, which he successfully continued for 23 years. The school usually had 30 boarding pupils and later established the Newton Female Academy. According to the History of Middlesex County, published in 1890, “The eminent success of this school was due in great measure to the energy, decision, promptness and sterling character of Mr. Rice, seconded by the motherly care of his excellent wife… Mr. Rice had remarkable tact in the management of boys; his methods of disciplines were various and often original. He created a student-led ‘law committee,’ in which an offender was tried by a court or jury of fellow students and the decisions were respected by Mr. Rice.”

In civic life, Mr. Rice was a founder of the First Methodist Episcopal Church in Newton Upper Falls, and served as superintendent of its Sunday school from 1832 until his death in 1879. In public life, he was selectman, surveyor and the Town Clerk of Newton for 27 years, serving until the town became a city in 1873. 

Rice’s name is now part of the current Mason-Rice School, built in 1959 to replace two individual schools, the Mason School and the Rice School.