First Newark Academy

Site of the First Academy of Newark - Burned by the British on January 25, 1780

The Academy was founded in 1774. In the winter of 1779–80, American troops used the academy’s rooms as barracks. On January 25, 1780, a British raiding force reached Newark across the frozen Hudson River waterways and burned the school, on the same night that raiders struck Caldwell’s Elizabethtown. Newark Academy belonged to the Presbyterian educational world of Alexander MacWhorter, a Princeton graduate and trustee. A marker in the former Washington Park, now Harriet Tubman Square, recalls the lost building.