The Norwich Free Academy history

The Academy opened with three teachers and 80 students, both male and female; in 1858, NFA's first two students graduated.

Wallace Allis (NFA 1880), one of three female Corporators during the school’s first one hundred years.

In 1884 William Albert Slater, the son of a wealthy Norwich industrialist, offered to memorialize his father, John Fox Slater, with a new building at the Norwich Free Academy.

By 1888, recently appointed Norwich Free Academy Principal Robert Porter Keep convinced Slater to add to his gift of the building with funding adequate to acquire 227 plaster casts of classical and renaissance sculpture.

The Norwich Art School launched in 1890, because the Museum offered a World-class laboratory for art instruction.

Beginning with the Manual Training Building in 1895, later named for Paul Bradlaw, a series of new structures have been built, expanding the campus on land often donated by alumni.

Its space was expanded in 1906 through a gift from Charles A. Converse for the addition of a new building with a large, airy gallery, making changing exhibits more feasible.

In 1911, on the Academy’s 50th anniversary, it was replaced by the Tirrell building, still standing.

The new science center was named in memory of Allen Latham Sr., an NFA teacher and chairman of the science department until 1919.

Allen Latham Jr. (NFA 1926) and family for the new facility.

Ella M. Norton donated funds to the Academy in 1929 to honor her father, Henry B. Norton, for the construction of a health center/ gymnasium.

The Academy purchased the Lafayette Sabine Foster House in 1952 to house the Norton-Peck Library.

In 1992 the Latham Science and Information Center was constructed, incorporating the Foster House into its design.

In 2002, NFA was named a ‘Blue Ribbon School of Excellence’ by the United States Department of Education.

After decades of study to determine a way to make the Slater Building accessible to all, DuBose Architects of Hartford devised an ingenious plan to build the Atrium, completed and dedicated in 2011.