Berwick Academy is a college preparatory school located in South Berwick, Maine. Founded in 1791, it is the oldest educational institution in Maine and one of the oldest private schools in North America. The school sits on an 80-acre, 11-building campus on a hill overlooking the town, near the border between Maine and New Hampshire. Approximately 565 students in grades Pre-K through 12 (and post-grad) attend this coeducational day and boarding school. The majority of students commute to Berwick from approximately 60 communities in the surrounding regions of southern Maine, southeastern New Hampshire and northeastern Massachusetts. There are also several international residential students. History Berwick Academy was founded in 1791 when citizens of Berwick, York, and Wells (then villages in the District of Maine within the recently founded state of Massachusetts) raised $500 to teach languages, liberal arts and sciences to "the youth in this part of the country." Chartered by Massachusetts Governor John Hancock later that year and armed with a classical educational mission, the school opened in a small hip-roofed Georgian building on land donated by Judge Benjamin Chadbournes. Today known as The 1791 House, the building was relocated to the current campus in 1971 and is the oldest school structure in the United States still utilized today. From its founding the school contracted with the town of South Berwick to educate local students, serving both as a private college preparatory school and the de facto local public. As the town grew and industrialized, the school's dual role necessitated campus expansion. A new Academy building was built in 1830, and destroyed by fire in 1851. Its successor, designed by architect Richard Upjohn, was superseded by the William Hayes Fogg Memorial Building in 1894. Designed by George Albert Clough in the Richardsonian Romanesque style, landscaped by Frederick Law Olmsted, and built complete with electricity and state-of-the-art science labs, it remains a focal point of the modern campus, housing the majority of Upper School history, English, and foreign language classrooms. In 1955, the contract with South Berwick terminated and the school reverted to a purely private "prep school," featuring boarding for boys, a day department for girls, and college preparation on a classical model for both. Considerable physical expansion during this period included the acquisitions of surrounding homes for dormitories and of adjacent lands for playing fields. In the 1970s, the burdensome cost of housing students and the increasing suburbanization