Booth School (Philadelphia)

The Booth School or "The Booth School: A Country School for Boys and Girls" was a private or independent school in the Philadelphia Main Line suburbs from 1938 to 1976. The 27-acre (110,000 m²) campus it occupied for most of its existence was located at the intersection of Ithan Avenue and Clyde Road in Rosemont, Pennsylvania, and is now the site of Hill Top Preparatory School.

History

Timeline

The school was founded as The Devon School in 1938 by Phoebe Booth (Mrs. John Wesley Booth, née Barsby). A graduate of West Chester University of Pennsylvania (then West Chester Normal School), the former one-room schoolteacher gathered several neighbors to serve as teachers. They started the facility in the Booth residence in Devon, Pennsylvania, with about 20 students. In 1944, the Booths moved the school to a larger location in at the old Snowden estate Rosemont (its final location) and changed its name to The Booth School.

Mrs. Booth served as the school's only headmistress. Innovative in educational issues (such as coeducation and teaching of reading through phonics) and conservative in outlook, Mrs. Booth was both admired and criticized by her students. Associate headmistress Phoebe Booth Dechert (Mrs. Peter Dechert), Mrs. Booth's Harvard-educated daughter, assisted in administration. Mrs. Dechert also taught English and other subjects, directed student plays, and later spearheaded the school's development from a respected elementary school to a full 12-year curriculum in 1961, making it K-12 and over 300 strong at its peak.

Booth also had a summer school and a summer camp called "Hurricane Hill" on its campus.

The Booth School closed in 1976. Some of the faculty participated in the founding of the Woodlynde School of Strafford, at about the same time Booth closed.

Facilities

The main building on the campus was a Georgian mansion originally built for the Snowdon family in 1917. An additional single-story building was built in 1961 for the Upper (high) school classes. In the early 1970s a small gymnasium was constructed to permit physical education during the winter months.

Afterword

Mrs. Booth died in April 1985 at the age of 89. Mrs. Dechert and her family moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1968, where she worked in theater and conservation and died on October 9, 2005.

It is not known whether any school records are still in existence. There are no Booth records at Hill Top or at Woodlynde. A group of alumni has formed to facilitate contact and networking with former school members (currently using a Yahoogroup).

A number of Booth School yearbooks, from 1962–1967, are held at the Sanderson Museum of Chadds Ford, PA. (Christian C. Sanderson, a local historian and fiddler, taught square-dancing at the school for a number of years.)

A local Booth reunion was held at the old campus in June 2009. A national reunion was held during the weekend of June 18–20, 2010, at the same location.

Notable attendees

• John de Lancie, '67, actor--Star Trek's "Q"

Coordinates: 40°01′01″N 75°21′14″W / 40.01702°N 75.35376°W / 40.01702; -75.35376