Kingsport 1844: Ebenezer Hall Academy

28) Ebenezer Hall Academy
107 Pickering Avenue, The Panhandle, South Shore. Est. 1824

A) History
Another recent feather in Kingsport’s cap, Ebenezer Hall Academy is a private school founded by the Hall family and dedicated to the education of Kingsport’s most promising young men. It accepts students at the age of 13 and graduates them after four years, providing their parents can afford the $40/year tuition. (For the sake of comparison, Harvard’s annual tuition is $75.) Hall Academy features the liberal arts curriculum typical of most New England preparatory schools, but focuses on maritime law, mathematics, and accounting. Some graduates move on to higher education; but many remain in Kingsport and join the family business. The Academy’s colors are blue and white, and the school mascot is an osprey. Every spring, the Academy hosts a popular rowing competition between White Pier and Pilot Island.

The headmaster is a retired Miskatonic University professor named Cornelius Alwyn. A published poet from Innsmouth, Professor Alwyn is recognized as New England’s foremost expert on John Keats, and claims to have befriended Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Roger Ainsley during his nebulously-defined “years in London.”

B) The Hall Library
The Academy’s library is quite extensive, and features more works of classical literature and philosophy than the Kingsport Public Library. Its librarian is also considerably more pleasant, a former mistress of Alwyn’s he brought from Arkham and installed at the school. Known to the students as Miss Angell, she is universally beloved, and betrays a playfully flirtatious manner with the students even though she’s well into her forties.

The Hall Collection

The Academy library is home to the Hall Collection, a series of texts relating to Mayor Eben Hall and Kingsport in the mid-1700s. The collection is locked inside the Solomon Palm Rare Books Room. Miss Angell requires a written letter from the headmaster or a successful Charm roll to grant visitors access to the room. The Hall Collection includes numerous antique books dating to the colonial period, including Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World, The Negro Christianized, The Christian Philosopher, and Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions. There’s a woefully incomplete version of Eben Hall’s De Vermis Mysteriis, its writing illegibly soiled, and the mayor’s annotated copy of John Hale’s A Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft. A goatskin folio holds documents about the 1722 raid on St. Michael’s Church, including confiscated church records and a list of the accused, which includes not a few Tuttles and Illsleys. These papers are accompanied by a letter signed by Ebenezer Hall ordering his executor, Jonathan Fisher, to see that the records are destroyed upon his death. The Hall Collection also includes documents about the 1730 smallpox riots and the establishment of the Gravesend prison ship, including notes on “the diabolickal Father Cheever’s culte of quietus.” Sorting through the collection takes 1D3+1 hours, and grants the researcher +1 percentile in History and +1D4 percentiles in Kingsport Cult.

White Leviathan > Chapter 1—Kingsport 1844
[Back to Encounter 27, Professor Riddle’s Cabinet of Curiosities | White Leviathan TOC | Forward to Encounter 29, Mercy Hospital]

Author: A. Buell Ruch (based on the work of Kevin A. Ross)
Last Modified: 26 November 2021
Email: quail (at) shipwrecklibrary (dot) com
White Leviathan PDF: [TBD]