The Girls’ School of Tabor Academy

The Girls’ School of Tabor Academy was established during Walter Lillard’s reorganization of the school in 1916. As Tabor refashioned itself as a national boys boarding school, boarding for girls was discontinued, but day girls continued to be educated through a new separate, but closely integrated, division called the Tabor Academy Girls’ School.

The Girls’ School functioned as a preparatory program with a female principal reporting to Headmaster Lillard, and a curriculum that shared faculty, and at times classes, with the boys. The girls were graduates of Tabor Academy, though not always granted full participation in commencement ceremonies.

Their experience blended academics with a full co-curricular life. Field hockey, basketball, and tennis teams competed in local leagues—including a notable basketball championship in 1937—while drama productions and the orchestra remained coeducational, as did dances and teas.

A 1926 Girls’ School yearbook—handmade by the students themselves, as they were excluded from the main Tabor yearbook— describes an education designed to prepare students “for secretarial work, for Normal School, for College,” and emphasizes the cohesion of the small student body. “We work together as a unit for the purpose of preparing ourselves to be future leaders.” Indeed, graduates Jane Lillard Bartter ’37 and Jeannette Zora Turnbull ’38 were recruited as Naval intelligence cryptographers during WWII.

With a new Headmaster and the pressures of World War II, the last principal retired in 1943 and the formal girls’ division dissolved. Small numbers of girls continued to enroll and graduate through the mid-1950s, though records of their academic and co-curricular lives are sparse. The last female graduates received diplomas in 1956.

For more than two decades afterward, Tabor enrolled only boys. When coeducation was reintroduced in 1979, it did not mark a new experiment— it was an acknowledgment of a long- interrupted presence and a return to the original coeducational vision of Elizabeth Taber in 1876.