Russell Military Academy

The New Haven Collegiate and Commercial Institute (later to be popularly known as the Russell Military Academy) was founded by Stiles French in 1834[1] and is a defunct military academy and college preparatory school that "fitted" students to apply for entrance to nearby Yale or West Point, as well as offering classes in business skills like book-keeping.

Charles Ray Palmer, writing in 1908 when the school was long closed and the derelict and decrepit main building, constructed in 1829 for the use of The Young Ladies Institute, was still standing, gives the following description.

During the American Civil War, the school of 130 to 160 pupils furnished more than one hundred officers for the Union Army, as well as many drill masters and volunteers.

A small number of the school's graduates chose to fight for the South, including William Eugene Webster, the grandson of Noah Webster, who joined Lee's army in Virginia as a lieutenant, while his brother, his classmate at the Collegiate and Commercial Institute, served on the opposite side of the battlefield as a lieutenant in McClellan's Union army.

Their parents quarreled and separated over the war, the older boy siding with his mother and the younger sticking with his father.

[6] A detailed account of the gymnasium, with a floor plan and drawings of the equipment, appeared in The American Journal of Education in 1860.