Williams High School (Stockbridge, Massachusetts)

Williams High School was a public high school located in the town of Stockbridge in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. Its history evolved from the town’s earliest schools founded before and shortly after the American Revolutionary War. Students from Stockbridge, its small villages of Interlaken, Glendale and Larrywaug, and from the nearby town of West Stockbridge attended Williams High School. In April 1968 the school closed, when its students transferred to a new regional high school located in the town of Great Barrington.HistoryThe first school in Stockbridge was erected in 1737 under the supervision of John Sergeant, a missionary to the local Mohican indians. It served as a school for the Christian education of indian children. Through the pre-Revolutionary War years several small schools were opened to serve the children of newly arriving settlers scattered between the distant boundaries of adjoining towns. The founding of the semi-private Academy after the Revolutionary War marked the beginning of a more structured commitment to secondary education in the town. Three of the four students in the first graduating class of Williams College in 1795 were alumni of the Academy. The school’s reputation attracted students from outside the area who boarded with local families. In 1829 the ‘Stockbridge Academy’ was incorporated and sometimes referred to as the ‘New Academy’.