CANAAN — A divided country where the majority population does not believe their fellow inhabitants, despite living their entire lives in the same land, has any inherent, basic rights. Hatred manifests to the point that the majority of people under the cover of law terrorizes the minority population. Violence, imprisonment, even death threaten at every turn.
South Africa during Apartheid? Slobodan Milošević’s Serbia in the 1990s? Israel and the Palestinians in 2025? Or even — some might argue — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, sweeping up and deporting immigrants in America today?
Not in this case.
It describes America in the decades leading up to the Civil War in the 1860s, when many white Americans argued that Black people were inherently inferior and their enslavement as human chattel was condoned by God.
Unknown to many, a shameful episode of that period occurred in the Upper Valley in 1835. In Canaan that year an angry mob of townspeople lashed together nearly a hundred oxen to physically drag a schoolhouse founded to educate students of all races and sexes off its foundations and down the road.
Call it white rage, 19th century style. Echoes of it persist today.
“The history of Noyes Academy is often erased from American history,” said JerriAnne Boggis, executive director of Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire. “Noyes was one of the first of its kind and catered to many students that the American education system continues to exclude.”
On Sunday, at the traditional closing event of Canaan’s Old Home Days at the Old North Church in Canaan, there will be a service to remember that ignominious day in the town’s history.
The service will include an unveiling of a new historic marker to recognize Noyes Academy — the school that was built as one of the first racially inclusive, co-educational schools in the country before the crazed mob destroyed it — and celebrate the courage Black students who attended Noyes and went on to live remarkable lives.
The new marker, whose approximately $2,000 cost has been shouldered equally by the Canaan Historical Society and Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire, will be located at the former site of the George Kimball House.
The house, which was located on a site that is now occupied by Cardigan Mountain School athletic fields, served as a boarding residence for the 14 Black students who attended Noyes Academy during its brief existence. It was the scene of a dramatic confrontation between the Black students living there and a mob of angry white people threatening violence.
On the night of Aug. 10, 1835 a mob of white people showed up at George Kimball House. One of them fired a gun at students inside. But the Black students were prepared.
Led by Henry Highland Garnet, they had molded bullets, and Garnet returned fire with a double-shotgun blast through the window, “dispersing the attackers and protecting those inside,” states the commemorative marker.
(There is already a state historical marker recognizing Noyes Academy located in front of the Canaan Museum on Canaan Street, which is the location to where the Noyes Academy building was dragged from its original location adjacent to the Old North Church).
Sunday’s unveiling is the culmination of efforts largely championed by Sara Dunkerton, a math teacher at Indian River School in Canaan and a descendant of Nathaniel Currier, a merchant, state representative and founder of Noyes Academy.
Dunkerton, whose mother, Donna Zani Dunkerton, is the Canaan town historian, said she grew up hearing about how her family “came from a long line abolitionists and how my grandfather started the first interracial co-ed school of its kind in the nation,” she told the Valley News in an interview.
That knowledge fueled a lifetime passion to learn more about her four-times great grandfather Currier and the story behind Noyes Academy, which despite its brief history — it opened in March, 1835, was first attacked by a racist angry mob a few months later on July 4th before they returned to jack it off its foundation and drag it on skids up the street on Aug. 10 — was attended by Black Americans who later gained eminence in public life.
One, Garnet — the student who led the defense of George Kimball House — was invited by President Abraham Lincoln to become the first Black man to speak before Congress after the Emancipation Proclamation was passed. A second, Alexander Crummell, became the first recorded Black person to graduate from the University of Cambridge in England and was a major influence on W.E.B. Dubois. A third Noyes student, Thomas Paul, became the second Black person to graduate from Dartmouth College.
To people who assume that New Hampshire was always a beacon of enlightened equality and liberty, the story of Noyes Academy might come as a surprise, if not a source of shame.
“I grew up here in New Hampshire and I had never heard about it,” said Dan Billin, who lives in Lebanon and who has researched the history of Noyes Academy for more than 15 years and recalls the “shocking story” he learned when searching the internet one day to find out more about a reference made to it in an old travel log book he was reading.
Noyes Academy was a flashpoint from the beginning, according to Billin. Originally proposed as a school to educate white children in Canaan, abolitionists subsequently gained the upper hand and made it an “integrated school that would accept students from outside of Canaan” as well, said Billin.
The founders advertised the revolutionary school and it drew students from all over New England and New York City.
During its brief life, the school was comprised of 14 Black male students, two Black female students, and about 24 white students. Three of the white students had quit Andover when that school ordered its student-run anti-slave society shut down.
But despite the abolitionists taking control of Noyes Academy, resentment by others was intense.
“There were people in the community who were unwilling to abide Black people being treated like white people,” and considered the school “a threat to society and organized to shut it down,” Billin said.
The mob that attacked the school on July 4 was confronted and rebuffed by Nathaniel Peabody Rogers, an attorney and abolitionist. But after the agitators successfully called a special town meeting to vote the school a “public nuisance,” the mob returned the following month to jack up the foundation and move the school building to a new location.
Billin said the intent was to reopen Noyes Academy for whites-only, but the building was so badly damaged in the dragging operation that it remained unoccupied for several years before it mysteriously burned down one night.
At Sunday’s service Billin, Boggis and Dunkerton will all speak about the history of Noyes Academy.
Dunkerton plans to read Crummell’s eulogy to his fellow Noyes classmate Garnet.
“It doesn’t get any more real and authentic than that,” she said.
