History

Our Founder, Mrs. Elizabeth Taber

Mrs. Taber had grown up in Marion, Massachusetts, and spent her childhood along the shores of Sippican Harbor. She married Stephen Taber, moved to New Bedford, and became the mother of three children. While her husband achieved considerable wealth as both a clock maker and a whale ship investor, Mrs. Taber’s life was shadowed by sadness. She saw all three of her children die in infancy, and after the Civil War, her husband died as well. For a period of time, Mrs. Taber apparently lived in solitude in a New Bedford mansion. Then, in her mid-eighties, she underwent an epiphany. She determined to make her life count for something good, so she returned to Marion to begin a decade-long transformation of the place of her birth. She committed her great material gain to good use. She built parks, a library, a Music Hall, and, Tabor Academy to perhaps expand its meaning beyond herself.

She housed her academy in two Victorian structures on the corner of Spring and Main Streets in Marion. She also built a large home for herself and the family of her first Headmaster. Through her will, she charged the school always to improve itself:

… the character of the school should be gradually elevated and its scope enlarged [to serve] youth of all portions of the country …”

Tabor Academy served students from the Town of Marion and the surrounding communities of Wareham, Rochester, and Mattapoisett. From time to time, a few young men boarded at the school. The majority of students were young women, however, and the school prospered and grew for about twenty years.

A Visionary, Headmaster Walter Lillard

Then, a series of financial catastrophes swept the country, and Tabor Academy, along with many of the New England town academies, began to wobble. In 1916 there were fewer than a dozen students, and the trustees contemplated a sale of the property to the town as a site for the local high school. However, three trustees prevailed over this plan and that year hired a new Headmaster, Mr. Walter Lillard. Mr. Lillard brought a fresh vision to the school, seeing at once that moving Tabor from its “in town” location to the seaside would make it unique among New England schools. He quickly convinced the trustees of the vitality of his vision and worked over the next twenty years to move Tabor Academy toward the sea. By the mid-1930s, Mr. Lillard had effected a dramatic trade with the town of Marion, exchanging the then Town Hall (now the current site of the Academic Center) and a small plot of land on Front Street for the school’s larger land and buildings. He managed to acquire nearly a half-mile of salt marsh and fields and a few old summer cottages and thus, Tabor Academy, our school by the sea, had its second founding.

Quickly, under Mr. Lillard’s leadership, the school grew ten-fold, and by the time all of the operation of the school moved to its current location, Tabor’s reputation as a unique and extraordinary place had been secured. Mr. Lillard was a pioneer in the movement to create global school exchanges, founding the International Schoolboy Association in 1927 with the heads of 15 New England prep schools and school leaders from England, France, and Germany. This world-minded outlook spawned the international study, travel, exchange and service programs that have grown since then to give Tabor its global community today. Over the last decades Tabor has developed its philosophy, program, and facility founded on its deep connection with the natural world, the spiritual legacy of the sea around us, and the common humility and dedication that life by the sea inspires.

International Students and Programs at Tabor

Tabor Academy’s international exchange programs originate from the school’s early history. Fourteen years after the school’s founding in 1876, a group of students sailed from Tokyo, Japan, to enroll as full-time boarding students at Tabor. In 1927, Headmaster Walter Lillard joined fifteen other American prep school heads to create an International School Association linking secondary schools in Britain, France, and Germany, the first such association of its kind. His vision through the 1930s showed that schools could succeed in building friendships and working together across cultures at a time when that concept was in question. In the aftermath of World War II, Tabor welcomed its first postwar student from Japan in 1950, and from the 1960s on, each graduating class has included students from around the world.