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St. Paul's School is a highly selective college-preparatory, coeducational boarding school in Concord, New Hampshire, affiliated with the Episcopal Church. The school is one of only six remaining 100% residential boarding schools in the U.S. The 2,000-acre (8 km2) New Hampshire campus currently serves 533 students, who come from all over the United States and the world.
St. Paul's is a member of the Eight Schools Association. It is also a member of the Independent School League, the oldest independent school athletic association in the United States.
In 1856, Harvard-educated Boston Brahmin and physician George Cheyne Shattuck turned his country home in New Hampshire into a school for boys which included his two sons. Shattuck wanted his boys educated in the austere but bucolic countryside. A newly appointed board of trustees chose Henry Coit, a 24-year old clergyman, to preside over the school for its first 39 years.
Throughout the latter half of the 19th century, the school expanded. In 1884, it built the first squash courts in America. During the infancy of ice hockey in the United States, the school established itself as a powerhouse that often played and beat collegiate teams at Harvard and Yale. Its Lower School Pond once held nine hockey rinks.
In 1910, Samuel Drury took over as rector. Drury, who had served as a missionary in the Philippines, found St. Paul’s in almost all aspects–student body, faculty, and curriculum–severely lacking the serious commitment to academic pursuits and moral upstandingness. Accordingly, he presided over, among other things, the hiring of better teachers, the tightening of academic standards, and the dissolution of secret societies and their replacement with a student council. Drury also presided over the school throughout the 1920s and 1930s during what August Hecksher called the school's "Augustan era".
Thirty years later, the 1960s ushered in a turbulent period for St. Paul's. In 1968, students wrote an acerbic manifesto describing the school administration as an oppressive regime. As a result of this manifesto, seated meals were reduced from three times a day to four times a week, courses were shortened to be terms (rather than years) long, Chapel was reduced to four times a week, and the school's grading system was changed to eliminate + and – grades and given its current High Honors, Honors, High Pass, Pass, and Unsatisfactory labels instead of A-F. By the end of the sixties, St. Paul's had begun to admit sizable numbers of minorities in every class, had secularized its previously strict religious schedule considerably, expanded its course offerings, and was poised to begin coeducation. It admitted girls for the first time in 1971.
A new library, designed by Robert A. M. Stern and Carroll Cline, opened in 1991; a $24 million, 95,000 sq ft gym opened in 2004. The school celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2006. The school's new $50 million Science and Math building (Lindsay Center) opened in fall 2011.