Cardigan Mountain School A boarding and day school for boys in grades 6 through 9
Looking Back and Preparing for What is to Come
 

Looking Back and Preparing for What is to Come

By Christopher D. Day P’12,’13, Head of School

Cardigan’s founders were members of the so-called “greatest generation.” Tempered by the Great Depression and World War II, they set out to create a place of learning and growth in the glorious Upper Valley for the men who would follow them. The seed that they planted in the shadow of Cardigan Mountain has, 75 years later, grown into a maturing community. Our residential middle school for boys is now as sturdy as our mountain namesake, yet still as fragile as the ecosystem we all inhabit—rich with tradition and potential, and requiring constant care and nurturing. 


You will find a great deal of history in this issue, and many glimpses of Cardigan at 75 that illustrate just how closely intertwined our School’s past, present, and future are. Ironically, to look back only underscores Cardigan’s consistent focus on preparing for what is to come: for the School, for our boys, and for the world. 

Because of this, families who chose Cardigan for their sons in the 1940s would recognize many of the simple lessons that await boys here today. Certainly they would spot the foundational academic building blocks that still form the core of each student’s experience—one can’t ascend to great heights without mastering a strong, well-earned base. Yet perhaps the strongest through lines between eras are those intangibles—active learning, risk-taking, entrepreneurial spirit, service and responsibility, belief in one’s own potential—that manifest differently over the years.

I invite you to join me in a salute to our School on its 75th birthday, and to share in my palpable excitement for the potential and growth of this worthy enterprise in the many, many years to come. 

Christopher D. Day P’12,’13

There’s no doubt that our modern programs simply and profoundly differentiate us from other junior boarding schools in the world. These programs have deep Cardigan roots. Hap Hinman and Cardigan’s other intrepid founders couldn’t have envisioned the GATES Invention and Innovation Competition, but they would have understood exactly how it harnesses middle school boys’ imagination and intellectual energy. They couldn’t have foreseen the PEAKS program, either, but like us they believed that all boys should be recognized as individual learners with unique learning styles and intellectual on-ramps.

Daily campus life would no doubt be familiar to our founders as well. Today’s boys still have a “dirt under the fingernails” bond with what’s real, utilizing the rich bounty of our 500-acre campus, Canaan Street Lake, the surrounding forest and wetlands, and of course, our Farm Program. They learn when to be boisterous and when to be quiet: how to avoid getting plunked by a snowball in one moment, and in the next, to don a green blazer, white shirt, tie, and gray flannels for Chapel. All Cardigan boys leave The Point with an authentic sense of their potential and limitations, having calibrated their own moral compass—perhaps without even realizing it. 

The bookend experiences of the Dawn Climb and Sunset Hike on Mount Cardigan have provided countless Cardigan boys with moments of reflection during critical turning points in their lives. At these milestone moments, we often note that the end of one chapter marks the beginning of new adventures. So it is for Cardigan. I invite you to join me in a salute to our School on its 75th birthday, and to share in my palpable excitement for the potential and growth of this worthy enterprise in the many, many years to come. 

Cardigan students watch the sunset from atop Mt. Cardigan

Fall 2022 Feature: Habits of Learning for all Cardigan Students

Early morning view of Cardigan's campus

FROM THE EDITOR: When I look back over the many months it takes to produce an issue of the Chronicle, and I think about the countless conversations I have with the people in this community, there are always details that overlap unexpectedly, adding surprising nuances and subtleties to the stories within each magazine; history repeats itself, characters long forgotten resurface, faces in archival photographs look eerily similar to faces in the present.

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