Abbot Hall
Exeter's first on-campus dorm
For nearly 75 years, the Academy operated without dormitories. Instead, “the boys boarded about town,” as one Exeter historian writes. But as enrollment grew, along with the cost of living, the Trustees recognized the need to offer on-campus housing to help ensure equal opportunity for all students. Charles H. Bell explains this thinking in his 1883 book Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire: A Historical Sketch, writing that the Trustees “determined to establish at the charge of the Academy, a dormitory and commons hall for the members of the school of limited means, by which the expense of living should be reduced to the minimum.”
The school experimented first with housing students in an Academy-owned building on Spring Street, which had been the J. & B. Williams printing shop. The arrangement worked so well that in September 1852 the Trustees voted “to erect a more suitable and capacious building for the same purpose, in the Academy grounds,” Bell writes. “It opened for use in 1855. It was constructed of brick, and contained rooms for fifty young men, with a dining hall and other needful accommodations; and cost about twenty thousand dollars.”