Dr. and Mrs. Howe were married in the fall of 1904. Mrs. Howe’s father had died the previous year, and the youngest of her six siblings, William Torrey Barker, Jr., was not yet ten.

The Melvoin Building that now houses the Middle School replaced the Howe Building, which opened in the fall of 1957 but after a half century of service proved of a design and construction type that no longer permitted rehabilitation in a manner consistent with the...

The School’s 50th anniversary witnessed publication of Roger Duncan’s The Story of Belmont Hill School, 1923-1973, cited in a prior post. On the 75th anniversary Harold Prenatt’s Belmont Hill School 1923-1998 appeared, contributing a significant photographic component to the story.

In the spring following Dr. Howe’s death, The Sextant published a memorial edition. A leather bound edition  signed by the boys in every class, the faculty and the trustees, plus some graduates, was then presented to Mrs. Howe.

Ninety years ago today, January 28, 1932, Dr. Howe passed away in his residence, now Howe House, at Belmont Hill, two days after suffering a severe heart attack. Henry Sawyer, later a faculty member for over 50 years, was then in the senior class. As he recounted at...

The work of founding Belmont Hill effectively brought to an end Dr. Howe’s work as a scientist and leading authority on dragonflies. Nonetheless, nearly a hundred years later, a controversy involving him as a principal over the naming of a dragonfly resurfaced: H....

Dr. Howe graduated from Noble & Greenough School in 1893 but did not enter Harvard until the fall of 1897 with the Class of 1901. During most of the intervening years he worked at the Plymouth Cordage Company in Plymouth, MA, to raise the money for college. Dr....

After a long period of inactivity, The Golden Sextant returns with a new look and a new section. We have moved from our original PageMill platform to WordPress, thanks to some help from Boston Web Company, a Belmont neighbor.