07/10/2026
Susan Mabel Hood Emerson, a Mary A. Burnham alumna from 1897, purchased and then reopened the Mary A. Burnham School on September 28, 1939 following it’s one-year closing. Enrollment increased, the facilities grew, and a summer boarding school in Newport, Rhode Island — ”Burnham-by-the-Sea” was opened. During the regular school year it operated as the Newport School for Girls. Burnham-by-the-Sea was sold in 1974.
Fun fact for those old enough to remember, or others to Google — in the late ’60s, the Gothic horror soap opera Dark Shadows used Burnham-by-the-Sea as the exterior set, and it was the inspiration for an episode of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! When the movie The Great Gatsby was filmed next door at Rosecliff in the summer of 1973, Burnham students spent the evenings listening to and spying on the filming.
Mrs. George Waldo Emerson was appointed director of Stoneleigh-Prospect Hill School in 1944. She served both schools with assistance from Mrs. Peters and Mr. John Emerson at Mary A. Burnham, and Mrs. Lane at Stoneleigh-Prospect Hill. In 1950, Mrs. Emerson’s son, Edward (Mr. “E”), and his wife, Margaret (Mrs. “E”), assumed the roles of co-principals of Stoneleigh-Prospect Hill School, furthering the connection between the schools, which had become affiliated as “sister schools”.
In the late 1960s, when Smith College’s campus prohibited further expansion of The Mary A. Burnham School’s facilities, and while the Stoneleigh-Prospect Hill School had a smaller enrollment and 150 acres of land, the two schools began plans for a merger.
