The story of the Eliot School begins with donated corn and land. In 1676, a group of local residents donated corn and land to support a school in Jamaica Plain — a practical, unglamorous act of community investment that has somehow outlasted nearly everything else from that era. Three hundred and fifty years later, the school is still there, still teaching, and on Saturday, October 3, it will throw itself a birthday party in its own schoolyard.
The Nifty 350 Festival runs from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Eliot Schoolhouse, 24 Eliot Street, and it is designed less as a formal ceremony than as a big, open house. There will be art-making activities for all ages, a collaborative graffiti wall with the muralist GoFive, music from the Boston mobile-DJ crew A Trike Called Funk, food from El Sonorense, and beer from Drawdown Brewing. There will be limited-edition merchandise, special discounts on classes, and a speaking program at 1 p.m. about the school's history. Everyone who buys a ticket is entered into a giveaway for a free class, a free week of the children's summer program, or a personalized pastel-and-charcoal portrait drawn by the school's life-drawing instructor, Paul Tomkavage.
Tickets are $25 in advance and $30 on the day, but the school has been explicit that cost should not be a barrier: pay-what-you-can tickets are available for adults, and anyone 18 or younger gets in free. The event is T-accessible via the Green Street stop on the Orange Line, and street parking is available. It happens rain or shine.
What the party is really marking is a genuinely strange survival story. The Eliot School is one of a small group of early colonial-era schools that still exist today, and its founding year, 1676, was also the year King Philip's War ended — a conflict that devastated Indigenous communities across the region. The school sits on the traditional lands of the Wôpanâak, the Pawtucket, the Ponkapoag, and the people known today as the Massachusett. In 1689, Rev. John Eliot endowed the school with an additional 75 acres, which is where the name comes from. Eliot attached a proviso that the school educate Native Americans and Africans as well as colonial children — but, as the school itself now states plainly on its history page, no historical evidence suggests its trustees ever followed that plan. The school acknowledges that the name John Eliot "speaks to a complex and violent past." That willingness to tell the harder version of its own story is part of what makes the 350th anniversary more interesting than a simple birthday.
For its first two centuries, the Eliot School was a grammar school, adapting as the town around it changed. Then, in the late 19th century, it turned toward the arts. In 1874 it left the public school system, and by the late 1880s it had added sewing and carpentry classes. Wood carving flourished. Plumbing, basketry, and millinery each had their day — the plumbing is long gone, but it makes for good trivia. The school offered manual training for schoolteachers, instruction for adults, and classes for children both after school and during the school day.
A pair of MIT professors who lived nearby, Robert and Ellen Swallow Richards, played an outsized role in that transition. Both were proponents of vocational education and home economics, and their advocacy helped make "shop and home ec" standard features of 20th-century American public schooling. Robert Richards sat on the Eliot School's board for more than sixty years, finally resigning in 1944 at the age of 100.
Through the 20th century, students came to the Eliot School, in the school's own phrasing, "to satisfy that instinctive desire of human beings to create" and as "relaxation from their sedentary vocations." That mission has carried into the present: the school now teaches woodworking, sewing and yarn, fiber arts, book arts, drawing, painting, photography, and other crafts and fine arts to thousands of people a year from Boston and beyond. Its stated mission is to inspire lifelong learning in craft and creativity for all.
The festival's collaborators reflect that same neighborhood-rooted, hands-on ethos. GoFive, who will lead the collaborative graffiti wall, was named one of the school's 2022 Artists in Residence alongside his frequent mural partner TakeOne. A Trike Called Funk, meanwhile, is a Boston creative venture co-founded in July 2021 by MC and dance lead Aaron Myers and DJ Edward Galan, whose mobile DJ unit — a party on three wheels — brings music and dance spanning the African Diaspora in the Americas, from funk to hip hop and salsa to samba, to community events around the city.
The day's schedule is built for wandering in and out. Screen printing with the school's Teen Bridge program runs from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., and attendees are encouraged to bring their own shirt or bag to print. The interactive graffiti art with GoFive runs the full four hours, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. A Trike Called Funk starts at noon, pauses for the 1 p.m. speaking program, and continues at 1:15. Food and beer service runs from noon to 2 p.m., with gluten-free and vegetarian options available. Face painting with Zahirah Nur Truth is scheduled from 12:30 to 2 p.m. The whole thing wraps at 3.
It is, in other words, a party with a lot of moving parts — and a rare one. A 350th anniversary comes around once, and for an institution that began with donated corn in a year of war, still teaching woodworking and book arts in a Jamaica Plain schoolhouse, it is worth marking. The school's sponsorship materials describe the day as a "community carnival" with hands-on arts and crafts, live demonstrations, yard games, music, cake and ice cream, and surprises for all ages. The invitation is essentially the same one the school has been extending since 1676: come make something.