page_title: Thornton Academy
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Thornton Academy / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Thornton Academy ca. 1900. Saco, Maine.
context_page_description: Thornton Academy is a co-educational, independent boarding and day school serving grades 9–12 located in Saco, Maine. Thornton Academy also opened a full-time, private junior high school on its campus, named Thornton Academy Middle School, which serves grades 6-8 for Saco, Dayton, Arundel, Biddeford, and Kennebunk students.
context_section_description: Thornton Academy was first established in 1811, under the name "Saco Academy" in response to a petition by citizens of southern Maine, most of them from Saco, to the Massachusetts legislature, which passed, in both houses, a bill founding the school in February 1811.  The founding legislation also granted, as was common, six square miles of land (16 km²) in northern Maine (most of what is currently the southern part of Greenville) as an endowment so long as the trustees named in the founding charter raised USD $3,000 in funds. After successful fundraising and construction, Saco Academy officially opened on January 4, 1813.
  The school was plagued for years by financial difficulty. The name was officially changed to Thornton Academy in 1821 in gratitude for the gift of $1,000 by Dr. Thomas G. Thornton, also the marshal for the Maine territory, which put the school on solid financial footing.  Depending upon the economic indices used, the gift was worth about $20,300 USD in 2018 dollars.
  The academy was destroyed by fire on July 28, 1848 in what was concluded to be arson, although no culprit was ever found. Almost all records were lost in the fire, and the academy was closed indefinitely. Although the board of trustees continued to meet and discuss the school's future, serious efforts to rebuild the school were not taken until 1884, when investments by trustee James W. Bradbury had more than quintupled the academy's financial endowment.
  In 1886 8 acres (3.2 ha) of land were purchased by the board at the corner of Main Street and Fairfield Street in Saco as the future site of Thornton Academy. On July 27, 1886, Thornton Academy became a legal corporation. The plans for the new school building were designed by H. G. Wadlin. It officially re-opened on September 6, 1889 and began its school year three days later with a class of 108 students.  Today the original building is referred to as the Main Building.
  Over the course of the next fifty years, several buildings were added to the grounds: the Charles Cutts Gookin Thornton Building in 1903, the headmaster's home in 1905, the George Addison Emery Gymnasium in 1913, and the Main Building Annex in 1931.  Starting in the late 1950s and continuing to the early '70s, additional buildings were added because of enrollment increases related to the post-WWII baby boom: the John S. Locke Building, the William Linnell Gymnasium, the Edith Scamman Science Building, and an Industrial Arts Building. In 1996, 54,000 square feet were added, linking the Main Building with the Scamman Science Building, and adding the Mary Hyde Library, the Helen Atkinson Dining Commons, the Harry Garland Auditorium, six arts classrooms and six math classrooms.  Because the Academy has grown to nearly 80 acres (32 ha) and the buildings listed, it more resembles a university campus than a traditional American high school.
caption: Original Thornton Academy building, ca. 1900
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