JA had come to Worcester “about three weeks after his commencement” at Harvard to keep a school. (Commencement in 1755 fell on 16 July.) The circumstances of his appointment are related in his Autobiography. The 2school he kept was the “Center School,” built in 1738 close to the site of the present Worcester County Court House in Lincoln Square, where a plaque now memorializes his brief career as a pedagogue (Daughters of the Amer. Rev., Report of the Committee on Historical Research and Marking Local Sites of the Colonel Timothy Bigelow Chapter, Worcester, 1903, passim). The town appropriated £75 for the support of its center and several outlying schools in 1755, but part of JA’s compensation was his keep (“Worcester Town Records,” Worcester Soc. of Antiquity, Colls., 4 [1882]:20).

During a later visit to Worcester JA recorded the names of some of the pupils he had taught at the Center School (entry of 2 June 1771, below).