The vibrant and diverse Groton School of the 21st century took root in the inspired mind of the young Endicott Peabody.

Before founding Groton in 1884, at the age of 27, Peabody's life had taken many turns. Educated in England at Cheltenham and Cambridge, he pursued a banking career but abruptly turned away from finance and toward the Episcopal Church. Only months after the famed gunfight at the OK Corral, Peabody arrived in Tombstone, Arizona. In “the town too tough to die,” the Anglophilic Yankee won over the miners, cowboys, and townspeople and built the first Episcopal church in the state.

But Peabody did not feel drawn to pastoral work and headed back East to complete his seminary studies. A brief stint as a schoolteacher provided the young man with his calling. He would start his own institution—a church school which explicitly sought to instill high-minded principles in the offspring of the most successful American entrepreneurs of the Gilded Age. The campus would sit on rich farmland along the Nashua River, with marvelous vistas of the distant mountains of Wachusett and Monadnock.