The first Gunnery as it faced on route 47, a dirt road, in the 1880s (note pump at the roadside)

Hand-colored postcard of the first Gunnery as it appeared in 1910

The first Gunnery showing the walkway to the schoolhouse and the corner of route 199 and route 47

The first “Gunnery” stood on the site presently occupied by Gunn dormitory. The birthplace of Ebenezer Porter Mason, an astronomer, and owned by the Canfields, Frederick Gunn’s sister and her husband, the first “Gunnery” building was purchased by Frederick Gunn with the help of his father-in-law, General Daniel Brinsmade, in 1850. It served as a home for the Gunns, their faculty and staff, a dormitory, a schoolhouse, and a gymnasium (the front hall). The original structure was two stories and was quickly outgrown. In 1869, following Victorian trends, the Gunns added a third floor and a hexagonal tower on the north side. Another hexagonal tower was added in the 1870s to provide boarding for girls.

As The Gunnery developed and grew, the campus expanded to include a schoolhouse and a gymnasium. The original building continued to function as a dormitory and home for the headmaster and his family. In 1908 a separate building, designed by E.K. Rossiter, was erected as an infirmary in the rear of the Gunnery building. C.G. Fenn, Class of 1866, was the contractor.

In the 1920s, when The Gunnery became a corporation governed by a board of trustees (as opposed to a privately owned school), the school began an ambitious building program under then headmaster, Hamilton Gibson. This program was designed to turn the school away from the road and provide a “quadrangle” for emphasis on communal living. Because the Victorian design of the first “Gunnery” had fallen out of fashion and outgrown its usefulness; because the building was “much in need of repairs which were structurally impossible” (Stray Shot, February, 1928); and because the designers wanted homogeneity for the quadrangle buildings, the first Gunnery building was torn down in 1928.