[1] He graduated from Yale University in 1883, where he was a member of Skull and Bones and won the Townsend Prize.

[3] In 1890 he opened a college preparatory school for boys in Pelham Manor, New York.

By 1913, the school had outgrown the hotel, and Mr. Taft commissioned the first permanent campus building, a collegiate Gothic castle known as HDT, after Horace Dutton Taft and designed by architect Bertram Goodhue, with landscape architecture by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.

[4] Taft retired as headmaster in 1936,[5][6] but continued to teach a course in Civics until his death.

[7] On June 29, 1892, he married Winifred Shepard Thompson, an art teacher at a New Haven high school who was originally from Buffalo, New York.