History

Penikese Island History: The Anderson School

From the arrival of the first Europeans until the early 1870s, Penikese passed through many hands of private ownership, the last being a wealthy businessman named John Anderson, who maintained Penikese Island as a vacation getaway. Around this same time, a renowned naturalist and geologist named Louis Aggasiz had been publicly searching for a site to establish a school of natural history where his students could "study nature, not books".

Anderson became enamored with Agassiz and his vision, and donated Penikese Island and the princely sum of $50,000 to Agassiz to start his school. Agassiz opened the school in 1873, naming it for its benefactor. As a charismatic man operating during a time of widespread scientific and intellectual renaissance, Agassiz's school created quite a sensation, inspiring dramatic prose and even a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier.

Among Agassiz's innovations was to create a system of circulating seawater in his laboratories for the live study of collected marine specimens, the cisterns for which survive today on Penikese Island. The Anderson School did not last long; Agassiz died in late 1873 and the school closed after a fire in 1875, but his idea of circulating seawater was duplicated at Woods Hole's storied Marine Biological Laboratory, founded in 1888 by a couple of Agassiz's Anderson School students, and remains in use today.

As with other chapters in Penikese's history, there is abundant information available about Agassiz and the Anderson School, both in print and the internet. One book, written by a former Penikese Island School staff, covers the topic in some detail: Island of Hope by I. Thomas Buckley.