Browsing: Diary of John Adams, Volume 1

1. JA had come to Worcester “about three weeks after [his] commencement” at Harvard to keep a school. (Commencement in 1755 fell on 16 July.) The circumstances of his appointment are related in his Autobiography. The {p. 2  | view } school he kept was the “Center School,” built in 1738 close to the site of the present Worcester County Court House in Lincoln Square, where a plaque now memorializes his brief career as a pedagogue (Daughters of the Amer. Rev., Report of the Committee on Historical Research and Marking Local Sites of the Colonel Timothy Bigelow Chapter, Worcester, 1903, passim). The town appropriated £75 for the support of its center and several outlying schools in 1755, but part of JA’s compensation was his keep (“Worcester Town Records,” Worcester Soc. of Antiquity, Colls., 4 [1882]:20).

During a later visit to Worcester JA recorded the names of some of the pupils he had taught at the Center School (entry of 2 June 1771, below).