Anchored in Tradition

On a sunny June afternoon in 1918, a large crowd convened on the Marion waterfront for what was billed as a marquee event in Tabor history. Students in the boat building class, which was first offered in 1916 with the arrival of Headmaster Walter Lillard, were finally ready to sail the “batter boat” skiffs they had toiled all year to complete.

1932 Model Boat Race at Hoyt Field Duck Pond

Lillard viewed this inaugural voyage as an important marker of Tabor’s new direction and identity. His plan for saving and transforming the academy, which had come within a last gasp of failing due to its dwindling enrollment, was to embrace its unique location as the key to its future.

“Lillard was the man who launched Tabor Academy onto the sea,” school historian Joseph Smart wrote in his 1964 book, The School and the Sea. “He realized at once that if the school was to be advertised nationally as a boys’ boarding school, about the only quality to distinguish it from other older, more successful preparatory schools was the advantage offered by the salt harbor lying unused before it.”

Starting in 1916, Tabor began creating programs that made the most of this advantage. The rowing and sailing teams took shape, and courses such as boat building, model boat building, mechanical drawing, and woodworking equipped students with a valuable combination of practical and theoretical knowledge.

The fact that they could then sail and race their own boats presented yet another unrivaled experience.

For this reason, Lillard and the school publicly celebrated the first student-made boat launch in 1918. It was scheduled after the morning’s Commencement exercises. Parents and local residents had all been invited. Captain John Carlson, physical director of the Tabor Summer Camp and a veteran sailor of the Swedish merchant marines, was tasked with leading the ceremony.

“Well,” Carlson recalled years later in Smart’s book, “It was awful, let me tell you.”

The four boats had been tied to the dock with their sails set. The students waited at the edge of the shore as anticipation mounted. Finally Carlson yelled, “Jump in!” The boys raced down the ramp, sprinted across the float, and leapt into their boats. “By God,” Carlson said, “All the boats turned right over at the dock, right in front of all those people.”

In the rush to finish building the boats by the end of the school year, the students had not received proper training on how to sail—let alone enter—their vessels. As Smart wryly observed, “No one had remembered to tell the early sailors (and swimmers) of Tabor Academy not to grab onto the mast on entering a small boat.”

Thankfully this episode was a comic footnote rather than an inauspicious sign of what lay ahead. The school’s nautical programming grew rapidly over the next decade. When the United States entered World War I in the spring of 1917, Lillard felt a call to action. He had previously served in the National Guard and re-enlisted as a Captain. While waiting for his orders to come through, he sought to make himself as useful as possible to the war effort. That summer, he started a naval training program on Tabor’s campus to prepare young men who planned to enter the armed forces.

Camp Cleveland, named for one of Marion’s most famous visitors, President Grover Cleveland, was a six-week session where cadets learned to sail and perform a range of military duties. To augment the training, Lillard borrowed two 31-foot cutters from the Navy. According to Smart, the camp brought Tabor “to the attention of hundreds of people who had never heard of the small, struggling school.”

One such individual was Alexander Forbes. Forbes had visited Camp Cleveland when he sailed Black Duck, his 68-foot schooner, into Sippican Harbor. The visit left such a strong impression that Forbes lent Black Duck to the camp the following summer. It would stay with the school, sailing mostly under Captain Carlson’s command, for several years.

Although Camp Cleveland only ran for three summers, it left a permanent imprint on Tabor’s approach to education. Elements of the camp’s curriculum were adapted into a full-year nautical training program that included courses such as seamanship, navigation, and naval communications. Today’s nautical science department descends directly from this chapter in school history. Much like current students, Tabor’s earliest nautical science pupils learned from hands-on experience. The seamanship class drilled in the Navy cutters, navigation students honed their skills on Black Duck, and the communications class made frequent trips to a trans-Atlantic radio station where they cabled messages to Norway and France.

Underpinning Tabor’s early commitment to nautical science was Lillard’s belief that time spent in boats was time spent building character. “A good sailor must be orderly, alert, quick to respond to an order… and intelligent in making accurate observations and in reaching independent decisions when unexpected situations arise,” the 1920-21 course catalog stated.

Extracurricular nautical opportunities expanded in the years after Camp Cleveland. Forbes allowed Tabor to continue using Black Duck as the school schooner. This enabled the start of a deep-water cruising program, which Smart called Tabor’s “most distinctive feature.” In 1925, the school returned Black Duck and purchased the first Tabor Boy, an 88-foot auxiliary schooner originally named Robin.

“It was this ship,” Smart wrote, “which was to carry the school’s name up and down the East coast on the many cruises to Maine or to Washington, D.C., as well as into the very heart of the nation by the long trip up the Hudson River and through the Great Lakes to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933.”

Tabor Boy 1 Sails to the 1933 Chicago World's Fair

Other cruising opportunities arose beyond participation in the budding Tabor Boy program. Through a partnership with the Merchant Marines, Tabor students could sail as cadets on international voyages during their spring and summer vacations. Lillard accompanied students on the first trip to France in 1919.

The following year, Lillard contacted the director of the Sea Scouts, an organization affiliated with the Boy Scouts, to learn more about their program.

Check out the 1922 Sea Scout Summer Program Flyer

In his letters that have been preserved in the Dartmouth College archives, Lillard described in colorful language his reaction to receiving a copy of the first Sea Scout Manual. “I was astonished to discover the absence of any real seagoing facts of life,” he wrote. “The manual had been written by some landlubber Scout official. Obviously they needed some real saltwater experience. I suggested by letter a national training camp at Tabor.”

After meeting with the Sea Scout leaders in New York, Lillard announced that they agreed to hold such a camp at Tabor during the summer of 1921. It was also agreed, he noted cheekily, “to bury the alleged manual and plan for a real salty one to be edited by a group of carefully chosen sea dogs, with me sitting in to contribute a little boy psychology.” There’s no doubt that Lillard’s confident tone stems from the early success Tabor achieved through Camp Cleveland and the school’s subsequent programs. Sea Scout training became a component of Tabor’s nautical curriculum into the 1940s.

The ultimate validation for Lillard came in 1941 when he received a letter from Frank Knox, the Secretary of the U.S. Navy. Knox informed Lillard that Tabor had been designated as a Naval Honor School, a status it maintains to this day.

There are many threads tying the school’s early nautical endeavors to today’s robust program where hands-on learning remains the backbone of a Tabor education. TaborX this year offers canoe construction, while boat restoration has been a perennial student choice for individual senior projects. Arguably no course is more hands-on than model boat building. Like their predecessors, today’s boat builders race their boats at the end of the term. It’s a fun and highly anticipated climax. And unlike the first launch in 1918, today’s students tend to stay dry.