"[4][5] The plan for the school received the approbation of the New Hampshire Anti-Slavery Society at its first meeting.Resolved, We regard with approbation the plan of establishing schools that will not, either by form of law or of prejudice oftentimes stronger than law, exclude colored youth from a participation in their benefits; and the proposed Academy in Canaan in this state, with reference to the principle, meets our views, and is recommended to the countenance and support of the friends of the people of color.
"Youths will be fitted for admission into any of the Colleges and Universities of the United States; but it is intended that this Seminary shall itself afford means of such correct and extensive classical attainments, as shall qualify young men to commence the study of the learned professions."
This announcement also said that a teacher, William Scales, a senior at the Andover Theological Seminary, was hired, and gave a long list of subjects to be taught.
[5] Williams, who would later marry Garnet, had been a student at Prudence Crandall's Canterbury Female Boarding School for "young Ladies and little Misses of color", which was also destroyed by a mob in 1834 after being open only a short time.
"[8] According to them, "[t]he village was to be overrun with negroes from the South — the slaves were to be brought on to line the streets with huts and to inundate the industrious town with paupers and vagabonds — and other tales too indecent and too ridiculous to be repeated".
The work was commenced and carried on with very little noise, considering the number engaged, until the building was safely landed on the common near the Baptist meeting-house, where it stands, ...the monument of the folly of those living spirits, who are struggling to destroy what our fathers have gained.
Four students — Alexander Crummell, Henry Highland Garnet, Thomas Sydney, and Julia Williams — enrolled in the Oneida Institute, in Whitesboro, New York, a hotbed of abolitionism, the most abolitionist college in the country and the first to admit blacks and whites on equal terms.
The Noyes Academy affair "created much excitement against the abolitionists, and if the account in the Statesman is to be relied upon, was the means of securing the election to the Legislature of a man as hostile to the anti-slavery cause as McDuffie [Governor of South Carolina] himself could desire.
The school opened in 1835, but months later, outraged opponents used a team of oxen to drag the Academy building down Canaan Street and forced the Black pupils out of town.
This brief experiment in educational equality helped launch the public careers of Black leaders Henry Highland Garnet, Alexander Crummell, and Thomas Sipkins Sydney.