The Ethel Walker School
private college-prep school in Simsbury, Connecticut
The Ethel Walker School, also commonly referred to as "Walker's", is a private, college preparatory, boarding and day school for girls in grades 7 through 12 plus postgraduate located in Simsbury, Connecticut.
History
Ethel Walker, a graduate of Bryn Mawr College (Class of 1894), founded the school in 1911 in Lakewood, New Jersey, with a $10,000 loan and an initial class of ten students. Walker intended a rigorous college-preparatory curriculum at a time when, as she later recalled, "the general public thought girls would be physically ill if they studied." Students were required to pass half the College Board entrance examination to advance to their junior year.
In 1917, the school moved to the former estate of Walter Phelps Dodge in the Weatogue section of Simsbury. In 1919, the family of Emily Cluett, a student who had died in the influenza pandemic, donated funds to purchase additional Dodge properties for the school. Walker married Dr. E. Terry Smith in 1921 and stepped down as head of school, though she attended every commencement until her death in 1965.
In April 1933, two fires, suspected to be arson, destroyed the main classroom building and a dormitory, displacing 100 of the school's 174 students. Five earlier fires had been discovered and extinguished. The damage was estimated at $300,000.
“The Ethel Walker School” enters the record as private college-prep school in Simsbury, Connecticut. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Ethel, Walker and School can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5403226. Authority coordinates are 41.850, -72.836. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1894, 1911, 1917 and 1919.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Ethel Walker School” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.