LYCOS RETRIEVER 
George Bancroft: Hill School
built 276 days ago
Appointed James K. Polk's first secretary of the U.S. Navy in March 1845, Bancroft initiated a number of important reforms of the naval service during his seventeen months in office. The most important of these was the establishment of a permanent naval academy for the education and training of young officers. In a feat of administrative legerdemain, Bancroft found funds, teachers, and a site for a school without resort to Congress. It opened 10 October 1845 with lawmakers agreeing to fund the new academy the following year. Bancroft took other steps to rehabilitate an officer corps grown moribund in the decades following the War of 1812. He argued for promotions based on merit rather than seniority; he sought legislation for removing old and unfit officers from the ranks; and he ordered candidates for certain officers' grades to demonstrate their fitness for appointment by passing examinations.
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Bancroft School is the oldest independent day school in Central Massachusetts. In 1900, a group of Worcester parents invited Frank Robson of Princeton, New Jersey, to head the new school. The School was named in honor of George Bancroft, a diplomat, Secretary of the Navy, and historian who was born in Worcester in 1800. Mr. Bancroft personified those qualities of scholarship and service upon which Bancroft School was founded. Outgrowing modest school buildings on Elm Street, the School moved to more spacious quarters on Sever Street in 1922, to a building which would accommodate the two hundred and fifty students who then attended the school.
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Mr. Bancroft had a remarkable career. He founded and ran a progressive prep school in Northampton. Then he became a committed, partisan Democrat at a time when Massachusetts Democrats were as much a minority as Massachusetts Republicans are now. The Massachusetts Whig Party won every election for governor from 1825 to 1855, except for two one-year terms of Democrat Marcus Morton, who won in 1840 by a single vote out of the more than 100,000 cast. George Bancroft and Isaac Davis, future mayor of Worcester, presided at the victory celebration at Brinley Hall. But when Mr. Bancroft ran for governor in 1844, he lost.
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Bancroft graduated from McGill with degrees in French and English, and moved to Toronto where he received his Master's degree and his PhD in educational theory. He taught at Forest Hill Junior High and Forest Hill Collegiate Institute for a decade — although he had an unhappy work relationship with a principal there who never acknowledged his doctorate.
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Bancroft was known for strong self-discipline throughout his life. At a young age, he walked to and from school, two miles each way. He loved to read and was inspired by the philosophy of John Locke, Johann von Goethe, and the Greek classics.
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October 3 has come and gone without causing a ripple here in Worcester, even at the Bancroft School. On Oct. 3, 1800, George Bancroft was born in a modest frame house on what is now Salisbury Street. You can see the marker, just west of Montvale Road.
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