It’s the season for graduations. This week we go way back—110 years, in fact—to when Tenafly’s graduating eighth-graders looked like this.
Imagine that when these kids were in eighth grade, America had 46 states, World War I was a decade away, women could not yet vote, people drove around Tenafly’s dirt lanes in horse-drawn wagons, and the borough had only 2,700 people living there (compared with about 14,500 today).
These students attended the Browning School. The school is no longer in operation, but the building is still standing and is easily recognizable as part of the Browning House Condominiums at Tenafly Road and West Clinton Avenue.
At the time, Tenafly didn’t have a high school. In September, these eighth-graders would be off to attend classes in Englewood.
The adult sitting in the middle of the back row is Ralph S. Maugham, who was the superintendent of Tenafly schools for 45 years. The borough’s Maugham School was named for him in 1929 and continues to operate today as an elementary school.
Designed by Tenafly architect William Stoddart, the first class graduated from Browning School in 1908. The school was named for John Hull Browning, who donated it to Tenafly. Browning was president of the Northern Railroad and served as Tenafly’s board of education president in 1906. He had a 26-acre estate with a magnificent stone mansion on Engle Street, a block south of East Clinton Avenue.
Over the years, the Browning campus was an elementary and middle school, and later a high school. After a new high school opened in the 1970s, the old Browning School sat vacant. In the early 1980s an over $7 million renovation turned the building into condominiums while maintaining much of its exterior facade.
