Bradford Academy Part II
- westmohney

- Aug 14, 2025
- 8 min read
Updated: Aug 16, 2025
Mr. Greenleaf to the charge of the Male Department in 1814 and Miss Haseltine to the charge of the Female Department in 1815 is to be regarded as the commencement of a new era. ~ Jean S. Pond

In this post, we continue the story of the Bradford Academy and our relatives associated with it.
a hard year and recovery
1807-1808 was a hard season financially for the school. Treasurer James Kimball (4C7X) had difficulty collecting even the mere $80 worth of subscriptions left in the fund. Monetary matters were so bad that talk of the school closing had been bandied about. The school trustees ran a piece in various newspapers advising that those rumors were not true:
In the Merrimack Intelligencer of August 13, 1808, we read:
BRADFORD ACADEMY. As a report has been circulated that Bradford Academy has been closed, the public are hereby informed that the second term will begin August 10, and that it will open for the admission of young ladies and gentlemen as usual.
During this hard year, the Board of Trustees also lost several of its charter members. Nathaniel Thurston's place, however, "was very ably filled by John Hasseltine (32C8X), now Deacon Hasseltine." Our cousin Moses Kimball (4C7X) also filled one of the spots.
Luckily, matters steadily improved,and the school did, in fact fact, stay open. Shown below is Lucretia Kimball's (3C6X) arithmetic book of the year 1811.

convoluted Kimball and Haseltine marriages
Lucretia Kimball was the daughter of two of our cousins, James Kimball (4C7X) and Lucretia Haseltine (2C8X). James was born in Haverhill to Richard Kimball (3C8X) in 1858. As a young boy, he went to live in Bradford with his uncle Obadiah (3C8X) who had no children of his own. In 1880, his father Richard died very suddenly in Haverhill at the age of 48. "Having conversed with his family in the evening, he read the last two chapters of Ephesians, then prayed, and retired to his bed and died immediately."
James married three times, twice to Haseltine sisters and once to a Kimball cousin. His first marriage was to Sarah Haseltine (4C8X) in 1783. Sarah had four children before her death in 1790. Two of her children would marry Kimballs.
Shortly after Sarah's death, James married her sister Lucretia Haseltine (4C8X). The couple had three children before Lucretia's death in 1795. Their oldest, Jesse (5C6X) married a Kimball. Their daughter Lucretia married our cousin Benjamin Greenleaf (6C5X) who would become the most celebrated preceptor ever at the Bradford Academy.
James' third marriage was to his (and our) cousin Ruth Kimball (4C8X). Ruth had first been married to her (and our) cousin William Kimball (3C8X) and had two children before her marriage to James. Two more children were born to Ruth and James but their little Ruby (5C7X) died in her first year.
a new era
In 1813, our cousin Richard Kimball (4C7X) became preceptor of the Academy. Richard had the distinction of being the first and only preceptor of the school who had also been a student there, graduating in 1810. Perhaps because of his youth, he only served one term, resigning in 1812. Richard then moved on to Rowley, MA where he taught until his death in 1842.
The hiring of our cousin Benjamin Greenleaf (6C5X) in 1814 and our cousin Abigail Haseltine (3C7X) in 1815 began what became the most fruitful years of the Academy.
Mr. Greenleaf to the charge of the Male Department in 1814 and Miss Haseltine to the charge of the Female Department in 1815 is to be regarded as the commencement of a new era. Under the continued management of these poplular instructors, the school rose rapidly in the public estimation, and soon became crowded with pupils from abroad.
Below is a drawing of the Academy at the time Ben and Abigail took over. On the right is the boarding house.

Benjamin was born in 1786 in Haverhill, New Hampshire. He graduated from Dartmouth in 1813 and the very next year was hired as preceptor at the Bradford Academy where he served for the next 22 years.
His own students remember him nervously pacing back and forth in the schoolroom, his black hair either covering his forehead and temples or rumpled by his hands, while at the back it was braided into a queue of respectable length, and tied with a broad black ribbon. This queue he was constantly tossing back over his shoulder. One of his 1816 students has described him: "Sit or stand he could not; in him experimenters for perpetual motion would have found a solution. So impatient were his thoughts for utterance they set in motion his hands, arms his whole body." It was fortunate for Bradford Academy that his restless ambition and boundless energy were to find expression in teaching as a profession, not as a convenient stepping-stone to some other calling.
The Bradford Academy Catalogue for 1815 shows Benjamin as preceptor, Charlotte Gage as preceptress and Cousin Abigail Haseltine as assistant preceptress. Listed as trustees are our cousins John Haseltine and James, Edward and Moses Kimball.

Pond tells a story about Abigail's first day as assistant preceptress:
Bradford Academy invited her in the spring of 1815 to assist the preceptress, Miss Gage, she accepted. On the first day the boys and girls assembled for the opening exercises in the girls' room, while Mr. Greenleaf and Miss Gage took their places behind the desk. No chair for the new assistant preceptress! The students' desks were fastened to the floor. . Somebody ran out and borrowed a chair, probably from the Hasseltine kitchen, and from this modest seat near the platform Miss Hasseltine made her debut. Her happy combination of natural dignity and sense of humor relieved the situation, and she always enjoyed telling the incident in after years.
All's well that ends well, however. Miss Gage served for only one term and Abigail took her spot as preceptress, a post she held for 38 years.
As enrollment at the school increased, the boarding house proved inadquate to hold all the students. Townspeople and employees as the Academy took up the slack. Benjamin had taken in students even before he became preceptor. In 1821, after his marriage to Lucretia Kimble, he built an even larger house to accomodate more students. Below is a photo of the house.

Benjamin was a man of many facets. About him, Pond wrote:
. . .his success as a teacher was due to his accurate memory, his own zest for knowledge, his kindly interest for his students, and to his sense of humor. Students didn't alway appreciate: some of whom heard their own compositions read on Saturday mornings when Mr. Greenleaf brought the boys into the girls' room for the closing exercises of the week. That was an ordeal, especially for the girls, for the master was skilled in ironical criticism.
The story is also told that, at a Teachers Convention, when he had listened for an hour to the vague remarks of a callow young teacher, he rose and said, "Mr. Chairman, I can tell all I know in five minutes.
Two letters home by student Horatio Hale of New Hampshire indicate two different sides to life at the Academy during Benjamin's tenure. From the first letter:
I have got a very good boarding house have everything that is good to eat and drink and company enough both of gentlemen and ladies. Our preceptor appears to be a very fine man, but he has so much to attend to that he is almost crazy. . .I should have written to you before but I could not get time, for the preceptor will not let anyone write a letter in school, he gave me a lesson to get last evening much longer than I ever got before in a week I made out to get it but it took me till midnight. . .
From the second letter:
It seems as if I had been here at least seven years and have not heard from any of my friends or relations. I was never so disappointed in any place in my life as I am in Bradford, they told me that it was a pleasant village but instead of that there is no village here and it seems to me the most lonesome place that I was ever in, there is not an apple in town that is fit to eat . . .I almost wish I had gone to some other academy for there is so many studying latin that there cannot be due attention paid to English scholars, we have one hundred and forty schollars, sixty one gentlemen and seventy nine ladies and twenty three latin schollars.
Clearly, Benjamin had a lot on his plate as preceptor of the Academy. But he kept himself busy in other ways as well. Another talent of his was mapmaking. Below is an 1831 map of Bradford that he made with our cousin Jeremiah Spofford (3C9X).

Note: Jeremiah descended from John Spofford (10U) who was the brother of our grandmother Anna Spofford (10GGM). Anna married our grandfather Richard Swan (10GGF) ca. 1626.
Benjamin was highly sought after by other schools but "he recognized his opportunity in Bradford and the advantages of working with Abigail Hasseltine whose aims in academic and religious education were so like his own."
the preceptress
Abigail served at the Bradford Academy alongside Benjamin Greenleaf for twenty-one years. Though they were of "equal rank" a distinction that "Mr. Greeleaf being Principal" was definitely made. While "nominally subordinate" to Ben, Abigail "taught without assistance seventy-seven girls, packed into one small room, the common English subjects, with history, needlework and drawing." Since there was only a summer term for the girls, Abigail's class load was always greater than Benjamin's. In the winter, she made herself available if he ever needed her.
Two years into Abigail's term a preceptress, the girl's school had become so popular that
"the trustees were forced to double the size of the room so that a hundred girls could be accommodated there. . ."
Benjamin's daughter Betsey (7C4X) was one of Abigail's pupils. She later wrote a memory of her teacher:
Miss Hasseltine often stood at her desk through the first part of the exercises, clad in her blue-black silk, with spotted lace folded about her neck, her face shaded by a new cap. . .
Some of the changes that Abigail was slowly bringing about at the school were inspired by the female seminary her brother-in-law, Joseph Emerson, had begun in Byfield.
In this undertaking his wife Rebecca (3C7X) had a large share both in the management of the school and the teaching. In the three years he kept the Byfield Seminary Mr. Emerson attacked vigorously the practice of memorizing lessons and substituted topical study and discussion. . .Topics now came into vogue, and appeared as a method of recitation in the Bradford catalogues.
Even as attendance at the boys' school was dwindling every year, at the girls' school it burgeoned.
Miss Hasseltine was struggling with her own practical problems of space for teaching and for boarding facilities for her girls. Even in her enlarged room she and her two assistants could not hold simultaneous recitations.
There were two other related needs which Miss Hasseltine frequently pressed upon the attention of the trustees. One was the complete separation of the two departments, and the other was a dormitory for the increasing number of girls who came from a distance.
A letter home from one of the female students, Abigail Wight of Bristol, Rhode Island, was indicative of the quality of education at the Academy:
The school here is really excellent. The more I go the better I am pleased with it. There have been upwards of a hundred young ladies here this term, and I never was in a school where the scholars attended to so many studies and are so studious as they are here. Such a large number of scholars employed in such a variety of occupations one would suppose would cause some noise, but there is very little. The rules of the school are very strict and are observed without difficulty.
After this term, the girls will go into Mr. Greenleaf 's apartment, as there is no female instructress in the winter. . .I wish often that Martha was here with me. I know she would love Miss Hasseltine and Miss Parker, the more I am with them the better I like them.
By November of 1830, the new girls' dormitory was complete and the number of female students made it possible to continue the girls' department even through the winter. In six years time, the boys school would fail completely and a new era would begin for Abigail.
The story of the Bradford Academy will continue in our next post.




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