North Scituate Community House (North Scituate Academy)

The former North Scituate Academy, adjacent to and north of the church, is a hip-roofed, white-clapboarded structure with chunky belfry. Built for an organization known as the Central Society for the Establishment of a School as a tuition academy, it served as a school until the twentieth century. As built it was a two-room structure with entrance porches, each supported on two square piers, simply paneled and capped, notched into either end. The cupola was then centered between the porches. Its utilitarian style seems somewhere between Federal and Greek Revival, although repairs may have increased the Grecian aspect. The twentieth-century addition to the rear added a third inline room (with folding partition to combine the two rear spaces as needed). This renovation also placed the rear porch toward the center of the now extended elevation. The ceiling of the square room in front contains a circular field marked off with an illustration of the solar system, dating from the period of the building's design, in which the planets and their moons appear as colorful half-spheres against blue infinity, their orbits in red.