Massachusetts legislature incorporated Bradford Academy in Bradford, MA, as the state's first coeducational academy, admitting both male and female students.
On February 27, 1804, the Massachusetts General Court approved an act of incorporation formally establishing Bradford Academy in the town of Bradford (later part of Haverhill), Massachusetts. This legislative action followed years of local advocacy, beginning with petitioners in 1803 who sought to create an institution of advanced secondary education for their community.
What made this incorporation historically significant was the academy's founding mission as a coeducational institution — one of the very first of its kind in Massachusetts. At a time when formal advanced education for girls and young women was exceedingly rare in the United States, Bradford Academy's charter allowed both boys and girls to receive instruction side by side, a progressive stance for the early nineteenth century.
The academy would go on to open its doors to students in 1807, offering curricula that, for its female students, went well beyond the domestic instruction typically available to women of the era, including subjects drawn from classical and academic traditions usually reserved for young men.
This incorporation laid the institutional groundwork for what would become, decades later, an exclusively female seminary and eventually a pioneering women's college. The 1804 charter is thus a foundational document in the history of American women's access to formal education, predating many of the better-known female seminaries and academies that followed in subsequent decades.