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Henry Augustus Coit was an American clergyman and schoolmaster. He served as first rector of Saint Paul's school, Concord, New Hampshire from 1856 to 1895.
Background
Henry Augustus Coit was born on January 20, 1830 in Wilmington, Delaware, United States. He was the second of the nine children of Joseph Howland and Harriet Jane (Hard) Coit, and the seventh in descent from John Coite, a Welshman, who landed at Salem, Massachusetts, in 1636 and established a shipyard at New London, Connecticut, in 1650. His father, a graduate of Columbia College, was converted to Episcopalianism while a student in Princeton Theological Seminary and served as pastor of churches in Wilmington, Delaware, Plattsburg, New York, and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Education
Henry Coit was sent at fifteen to St. Paul’s College at College Point, Flushing, Long Island, where he felt to the full the moral and religious power of William Augustus Muhlenberg. No other man so influenced his life and thought. He matriculated at the University of Pennsylvania in 1847 but was soon compelled to leave because of illness.
Career
At the end of the 1840s Coit went to Georgia as tutor in the family of Bishop Stephen Elliott. Subsequently he taught under John Barrett Kerfoot in St. James College at Hagerstown, Maryland, and in a parish school at Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He was ordained deacon by Alonzo Potter at Lancaster January 22, 1854, and priest in Philadelphia December 3, 1854, and began home missionary work at Ellenburg, Clinton County, New York. Meanwhile George Cheyne Shattuck the younger and some associates projected a church school for boys to be opened in Concord, New Hampshire. Their first choice having declined, they offered the rectorship of the school to Coit, who accepted it.
In 1856 he entered on his duties as the first rector of St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire. He held the rectorship until his death thirty-nine years later.
His school, which on its opening day consisted of the rector and three pupils in a lonely farmhouse, became one of the most successful and most often imitated of American boys’ schools. Coit gave himself to the work with complete singleness of purpose and with the energy and resources of a man of genius. St. Paul’s School was his lengthened shadow; without striving to do so or even intending to do so, he dominated the pupils, the masters, and the board of trustees. To him the purpose of education was the formation of character, and character that Miltonic union of true virtue and the heavenly grace of faith which make up the highest perfection. What he actually accomplished was, he knew, inexpressibly below his aims and ideals, but it was sufficient to rank him with Arnold of Rugby, Fellcnberg of Hofwyl, and his own teacher, Muhlenberg. He had a profound understanding of boys, and a rich gift of humor; and his strong, exquisite, unselfish, deeply religious personality left an enduring impress on their minds. He made no innovations in the course of study or the methods of instruction; it was his moral and religious influence over those in immediate contact with him that made him a great educator.
Coit had few intimate friends, lived much within himself, and avoided the world. Calls to various influential parishes and to the presidency of Hobart and Trinity Colleges he declined. Once he wrote a letter to a newspaper, and once he was persuaded to contribute to The Forum an article on boys’ schools. His health visibly declined during 1894, and in February 1895, he died after a brief illness. He was buried in Concord. A volume of his School Sermons was published in 1909. Joseph Howland Coit, his brother, succeeded him as rector of the School; another brother, James Milnor Coit, was for years one of the masters of the School and later conducted the Coit School for American Boys in Munich.
Achievements
Henry Augustus Coit was remembered as a great educator. He made a great moral and religious influence over the lives of generations of St. Paul’s students.
