St. Andrew's School

Working for DuPont during World War I, A. Felix du Pont was directly responsible for providing France with gunpowder. Pacifists branded him a “Merchant of Death.” A devout high churchman, his zeal for the creation of this Episcopal school possibly owed something to postwar guilt. He searched widely for the perfect rural site until the Episcopal Bishop Philip Cook of Delaware suggested scenic Noxontown Pond, in a historic and unspoiled district only a mile from Du Pont Highway. The 360-acre Comegys Farm was purchased in 1928, and Brockie, a Philadelphia architect who had worked for Cope and Stewardson, was hired, with the contractor, Turner Construction Company, to provide stone construction in Collegiate Gothic Revival style: irregular massings, mullioned windows with leaded lights, a crenellated tower, and cloisters. Main Building and the master's house nearest it were finished when the school opened with thirty-two boys in fall 1930; “the house on the point” (a dwelling overlooking the pond) came in 1932; the original boat house and headmaster's house in 1934; gym, 1935–1937. In November 1988, the affluent and idyllic campus provided the setting for a Hollywood movie, Dead Poets Society (1989). An elementary school, St. Anne's, was created on land nearby (2002, Doug Proctor for Anderson Brown Higley Associates), its buildings imitating agricultural structures.