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The Thacher School is a private co-educational boarding school on 427 acres in Ojai, California. Founded in 1889 as a boys' school, it is now the oldest co-educational boarding school in California. Girls were first admitted in 1977, with the first co-ed graduating class being the class of 1978. Unique to Thacher are its Horse and Outdoors Programs. Its founder, Sherman Day Thacher, believed in the power of the outdoors to help shape students: “Come West, breathe deep, let these hills be your teachers.”
History
Sherman Day Thacher did not arrive on the Casa de Piedra ranch with the intent of creating a school. The son of Yale professor Thomas Anthony Thacher and the former Elizabeth Baldwin Thacher (Sherman) (a granddaughter of American founding father Roger Sherman, he elected to move to California to care for his brother who needed the "fresh air" cure for his tuberculosis. While spending time on the ranch, Thacher was contacted by an old Yale colleague who had a son who desperately wanted to go to Yale but needed tutoring before he would be prepared to attend. Thacher accepted the offer and tutored his colleague's son in both academics and maturity with his unique method of blending studies with outdoor living and horsemanship. Soon other friends were sending their sons out to California to receive Thacher's instruction and a school was born. Though it began as a feeder school to Yale, students were also attracted by the "emphasis on the lessons of the outdoors, hiking and rafting and riding on horseback" and "nearly every boy has a horse of his own and takes full care of it."
Thacher helped expand boarding opportunities for boys in California. Sherman Day Thacher contacted educator Thompson Webb, an instructor at the Webb School of Bell Buckle in Tennessee (founded by his father, William R. Webb), that his school was turning down dozens of qualified students every year, and that an empty school near Claremont was for sale. If Thompson opened a school there, Thacher agreed to refer his applicants. This led to the founding of The Webb School of California in 1922.
Website: https://www.thacher.org
School History: https://www.thacher.org/explore/history-and-heritage