Cambridge Nursery School was founded in 1923 by a group of five Cambridge mothers, which included Dr. Abigail Eliot and Mrs. Erwin H. Schnell. Dr. Eliot, a Radcliffe College graduate and pioneer in the field of nursery school teacher training, was interested in offering children programs based on the then new English nursery school model. The Cambridge School met on a trial basis for three months in the spring of 1923 in the home of Mrs. Esther S. Schell at 4 Shady Hill Square. The experiment having been a success, the school moved in the fall of 1923 to a small building on a Farrar Street lot "about as big as a clothes yard" lent by Mr. Hicks. In 1924 the group "with gifts and loans from interested friends" bought the lot next door and moved the small building there, building on two more rooms to form a three-room bungalow believed to be the first building erected as a nursery school in the United States. In 1925 the group incorporated as the Cambridge Nursery School.
From the very beginning the school was a parent cooperative (or mother cooperative) with mothers helping in the classroom and serving on the executive committee. In the 1920's, mothers not only helped in the school once a week, but also met with the director once a month to discuss problems of child care and wrote papers and reviewed books on child care. In the early years of the school some of the mothers attended lectures on preschool education by Professor L.J. Johnson of the Harvard School of Education.
In 1926 a second group of children was formed to take care of increasing enrollment and to expand to another neighborhood. From 1926 to 1928 the group met in the home of Hallowell and Pauline Davis at 82 Avon Hill Street. In June of 1928 Cambridge Nursery School bought land at 6 Hillside Place from Mr. and Mrs. Davis. It borrowed $4000 from Institute for Saving in Roxbury, giving it a three-year mortgage on the property and entering a construction loan agreement with it. Gifts and loans of from $5 to $200 from parents and "such interested persons as appreciate the merits of the School," made the new property possible. The present Cambridge Nursery School building was constructed in the summer of 1928, and the Avon Hill branch of the school opened there in September of that year.
In the early thirties the Farrar Street branch was used for two- and three-year-olds, and the Hillside Place branch for four-year-olds, but by the early forties this division had been discontinued and each branch of the school took all ages of preschool children. In the thirties the school sponsored a second-hand store for children's clothes, toys, and furniture, partly to benefit the school and partly to help along its "research in scientifically correct toys." The school received royalties on such designs as a doll carriage which would support the weight of a child and a combined table and chair that could be used as a playpen. By 1936 an annual May picnic had been established to benefit the school, on the grounds of Professor Paul J. Sache' Shady Hill estate on Irving Street. This picnic, with a maypole, balloons, dances, games, puppet shows, and pony rides, was open to all children from two to eight years old and by 1950's had become a Cambridge institution.
In 1967 the Farrar Street building was renovated, but in 1977 the two branches were consolidated in the Hillside Place building, and since then Hillside Place has been the sole site of the Cambridge Nursery School, with two classes each containing 12-13 children. The school remains a cooperative today, with parents assisting teachers in the classrooms, serving as administrators, doing much of the building maintenance, and fundraising.
