The Academies on the Hill

The Academies on the Hill. Perry County Bicentennial. , In early 1837, educator Robert Finley began a Latin Grammar School in a second floor room of Dr. Jonas Ickes' tavern on the Square in New Bloomfield. While Finley had filed papers creating the school in 1836, it was formally incorporated by the Commonwealth in 1838. After a few years in a home on East Main Street, the school moved in 1840 to a spacious campus at 200 N. Carlisle Street. For most of the 1800s, academics offered the only available college preparatory education in Perry County. However, as public high schools were established in the 1800s, private academies began to close., New Bloomfield Academy (NBA) continued until acquired by Perry County native Theodore K. Long in 1914. A graduate of NBA and Yale Law School, Long was a prominent Chicago attorney, businessman and elected official. Tragedy struck in 1913 when his only surviving child, William Carson Long, died in an accident., Grief stricken, Long purchased the school as a memorial to his son, renamed it Carson Long Institute (CLI) and, in 1919, converted it to a boys' military school., That same year, Long's nephew, Edward L. Holman (1896-1982), a World War I veteran, NBA and Gettysburg College graduate, joined the faculty. In 1921, Holman became school head, a position he held for the rest of his life. An outstanding speaker and community leader, he explained the school's mission as, "We are not preparing boys for war, we are preparing them for life.", In 1957, Col. Edward's son, Carson E.R. Holman, a graduate of CLI and West Point, joined the CLI faculty. The younger Col. Holman assumed the position of school president after his father's death in 1982, retiring himself in 207., For decades, the school prospered producing thousands of young men who served in peace and war, but by the late 1900s, military schools nation-wide were folding due to changing educational expectations. At its closure in 2018, the then-named Carson Long Military Academy was the nation's oldest boarding school with military training., In 2020, Talmudic University, a religious educational community, purchased the campus, making it the third "academy" on the hill and still a center of academic excellence that produces leaders for an ever-changing America.