Tabor Academy was founded by Mrs. Elizabeth Taber in 1876. It was a time, as Mrs. Taber was clearly aware, of great national events: the Centennial Celebration of the Declaration of Independence and the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, as well as the end of the presidency of Ulysses Grant. A decade out from the end of the Civil War, much of the country was in an optimistic mood. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876; Thomas Edison was close to discovering the electric light. Custer would make his "last stand" in the summer. Harvard and Yale would play their first Thanksgiving football game in the fall.

Mrs. Taber had grown up in Marion, Massachusetts, and spent her childhood along the shores of Sippican Harbor. She married Stephen Taber, moved to New Bedford, and became the mother of three children. While her husband achieved considerable wealth as both a clock maker and whale ship investor, Mrs. Taber’s life was shadowed by sadness. She saw all three of her children die in infancy, and after the Civil War her husband died as well. For a period of time, Mrs. Taber apparently lived in solitude in a New Bedford mansion, but then, in her mid-eighties, she underwent a kind of epiphany. She determined to make her life count for something good, so she returned to the town of Marion to begin a decade-long transformation of the place of her birth. She committed her great material gain to good use. She caused to be built parks, a library, the town’s Music Hall, and, finally, Tabor Academy, which she named, as a kind of theological pun and to expand its meaning beyond herself, for Mt. Tabor in the Holy Land.... Read more