Girard College

Stephen Girard's legacy

Born in the seaport city of Bordeaux, France, in 1750, Stephen Girard arrived in the city of Philadelphia, in May 1776, during the momentous summer of the American Revolutionary War and remained there for the rest of his life. During his 55 years in the city, he became the wealthiest American of his time and the fourth-wealthiest American of all time, adjusted for today's dollars.

With the assistance of noted attorney William J. Duane (1780–1865), in the 1820s, he wrote a long will and testament, outlining every detail of how his fortune would be used. Immediately after he died in 1831, the provisions of his will were made public. In addition to extensive personal and institutional bequests, he left the bulk of his fortune to the city of Philadelphia to build and operate a residential school. The bequest was the largest single act of philanthropy up to that time in American history.

The Girard Estate remains open in perpetuity. Its endowment and financial resources are held in trust by the courts of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, which provides much of the school's operating budget.

History

Girard College was founded in 1833, three years before the establishment of the Central High School of Philadelphia. Both schools, along with Girls' High, acted as a type of "magnet school" type, with college prep/academic curricula, strict admission standards, and noted faculty and famous alumni with respected roles.

The buildings and classrooms for Girard took some time to design and construct with their expensive "Greek Revival" stone architecture, with monolithic columns, but were ready and opened on January 1, 1848, under provisions of Girard's will supervised by the appointed trustees, including banker and financier Nicholas Biddle, (1786–1844).

Girard's vision for the school can best be understood in the context of early 19th-century Philadelphia. The city was then at the forefront of creating innovative American institutions designed to solve a specific social challenge, such as the newly founded and constructed Eastern State Penitentiary (humane incarceration), the Pennsylvania Hospital (mental illness), the Pennsylvania Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb (disabilities), and the Franklin Institute (scientific knowledge). Girard chose to dedicate his immense fortune to helping educate young men of Philadelphia as Americans for the future.

Girard's will stipulated that students at Girard College must be "poor, white, male, orphans". For over a century, the school remained exclusive to orphaned white boys. However, in 1831, a mother who became a widow had no rights and resources, and "guardians" were often appointed by the "probate courts" or "orphan courts" of the city and state. Girard operated as a school for fatherless boys rather than children with no living parents or guardians. (In the 19th century, the college determined the legal definition of the term orphan to be "a fatherless child".)

From May 1954, with the U. S. Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, there was increasing pressure on Girard College to accept racial integration, as the city's public schools had long been. After an extended, bitter, 14-year civil-rights struggle led by Cecil B. Moore – including Martin Luther King Jr.'s August 1965 address to a crowd outside Girard's front gates ("[Philadelphia,] the cradle of liberty, that has ... a kind of Berlin Wall to keep the colored children of God out") – the first four black boys entered the school in September 1968.

Program

All students live in single-sex dormitories arranged by grade level. Residential advisors occupy apartments in the dorm buildings. Girard requires that all students participate in the five-day program. All students go home on weekends. Girard is open to students of all religious backgrounds. Once a month at the beginning of the school day, however, all students attend a non-denominational assembly in the school's chapel. The chapel has a large pipe organ, designed and built by Ernest M. Skinner in 1933. The instrument is used for occasional concerts and has been recorded by such organists as Virgil Fox and Carlo Curley, who was director of music at Girard College in 1970 when he was 18 years old.

Entering 2016, enrollment at Girard was projected to be 311; of these, 122 were Elementary School students (grades 1 to 5), 89 were Middle School students, and 100 were High School students (grades 9 to 12). Girard employs 127 faculty members, of whom 71 are academic teachers, and 56 are residential advisers. Class sizes range from 12 to 20 students in the elementary school and from 16 to 22 students in the middle school. In the high school, honors classes have 15 students, and other classes have 20 to 25 students.

Founder's Hall

Founder's Hall at Girard College (1833–1847) is considered one of the finest examples of American Greek Revival architecture, for which it is designated a National Historic Landmark. School founder Girard specified in his will the dimensions and plan of the building. Nicholas Biddle (1786–1844) was chairman of the school's building committee, banker and financier, and president of the later revived and reorganized Second Bank of the United States in Philadelphia.

Girard's will demanded an architectural competition for the school's design. With his $2-million contribution, the 1832 competition was the first American architectural competition to be held nationally. The winning architect was Thomas Ustick Walter (1804–1887). After the Girard commission, Walter designed the dome of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. He returned to Philadelphia and became an assistant architect on the City Hall and, in 1857, a founding member of the American Institute of Architects (AIA).

Founder's Hall was the school's original classroom building. It has three main floors, each measuring 14,000 square feet (1,300 m2). The plan for each floor, according to Stephen Girard's specifications, consists of a 100-by-20-foot (30.5 m × 6.1 m) front hall, four 50 ft. square rooms with 25 ft. ceilings arranged two by two, and a back hall the same size as the front hall. The scale of the spaces was impressively large when the building first opened.

Resulting from his association with architect Walter, Nicholas Biddle hired him in 1834 to convert the Biddle country seat, Andalusia, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, from a large Pennsylvania farmhouse into an exemplary domestic Greek-Revival structure.

Notable faculty

Bruce Carey, conductor

Ida Craddock, writer and advocate of free speech and women's rights