page_title: Buckingham Browne & Nichols School
section_title: School buildings and campuses
hierarchical_section_title: Buckingham Browne & Nichols School / School buildings and campuses
caption_attribution_description: Buckingham Browne &amp; Nichols - Upper School, 80 Gerry's Landing Road, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
context_page_description: Buckingham Browne & Nichols School, often referred to as BB&N, is an independent co-educational day school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, educating students from pre-kindergarten through twelfth grade. BB&N is regularly ranked among the top independent schools in the United States. The School has produced three of the 27 Presidential Scholars from Massachusetts since the inception of the program in 1964 and is a member of the G20 Schools group and the Round Square global education association. BB&N includes six Rhodes Scholars among its graduates.
  The School occupies four campuses: a Lower School on Buckingham Street, a Middle School on Sparks Street, an Upper School on Gerry's Landing Road, and an office building on Belmont Street. In 2017 the school consisted of 1017 students, 146 faculty, and 148 administrators and staff.
  BB&N was founded in 1974 from the merger of two schools, Browne & Nichols School and the Buckingham School. Prior to the merger, Browne & Nichols was a boys school consisting of grades 7-12; Buckingham School enrolled students in grades K-12: boys and girls in grades K-6 and girls only in grades 7-12.
  Federal judge Nathaniel M.
context_section_description: During the year 1882–1883, before Browne & Nichols came into formal existence, founder George H. Browne taught his small group of students in two rooms in Harvard's Felton Hall. With the formation of the school in 1883, instruction took place at 11 Appian Way, with the addition of another building at 8 Garden Street. Radcliffe College, which now occupies this land, wished to expand here, and so it made an exchange with B&N, which relocated in 1897 to a new brick building at 20 Garden Street.  That building was designed by Edgar Nichols's sister-in-law, Minerva Parker Nichols, and is said to be "the first important building by a woman architect." None of these buildings remains today, except for the 11 Appian Way building, relocated around the corner to 3 Garden Street and now serving as an Episcopal Church rectory.
  In 1911–1913 the school was incorporated and acquired several acres of farmland near Gerry's Landing, a property dedicated as the "Nichols Athletic Field," a name by which it is still known. In 1924 the school acquired the contiguous three acres with a gift from Mrs. Kuno Francke in memory of her son Hugo, after whom the field is still named.  Francke Field was expanded to its present dimensions through an exchange of property with the Shady Hill School, which by this time had moved to its current location directly next to B&N's two athletic fields.
  A 1928 plan to move B&N to the Gerry's Landing property foundered in the wake of the Great Depression, but enough money was raised to relocate the Lower School there. Finally, in 1948, a large donation allowed the rest of the school to follow, and the Garden Street campus was sold. Major additions to the new campus's structure followed: a gymnasium and locker room in 1952; the Almy Building in 1956, initially constructed to house grades 7–9; an expansion of the 1928 boathouse in 1959; the Pratt Building in 1960 for the lower school; the Bradford Building in 1962, which included an auditorium and the school's first library; and the enclosed Bright Hockey-Tennis facility in 1966, all of them now part of the Upper School campus.  Multiple additional renovations and expansions have occurred over the past 50 years, most notably the Nicholas Athletic Center and Renaissance Hall.
  The Buckingham School started in a wooden two-story building constructed on the site of a pear orchard at the corner of Buckingham Street and Buckingham Place and opened in 1892. That building, today known as Markham House, still stands. In 1921 the school expanded three additional grades to include college preparation and needing additional space acquired the contiguous property along Parker Street, where it built the large brick building that still occupies the site. In 1924 the school purchased four acres of land on Larch Road, near Fresh Pond, for use in physical education, which continues to serve BB&N's athletic program despite the City of Cambridge House Authority's narrowly averted attempt in 1968 to seize the land by eminent domain to build housing for the aged.  In 1929 the school acquired another private home known then and ever since as Kelsey House.
  Just one year after B&N made its most important expansion, the Buckingham School did the same, with the purchase of a large residence, constructed in 1859, on nearby Sparks Street. This became Buckingham's Upper School. In 1954 it was expanded with a new wing, named after former headmistress Marian Vaillant when the wing was again expanded in 1969. That same year the acquisition of property along Craigie Street provided space for the kindergarten and grades one and two in the newly constructed Morse Building.
caption: Upper School
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