The Greek philosopher Plato founded his Academy in Athens back in 387 BC, considered the first university in the western world. Now fast forward some 2,200 years to the California frontier of 1872, when a group of Fresno County leaders took a nod from Plato and founded their own community dedicated to education, nestled in the foothills northeast of Clovis. The story of Academy, today on KVPR’s Central Valley Roots.
John Simpson came to California during the Gold Rush, and in 1852 settled on the banks of Big Dry Creek in what is today Fresno County. He found a profitable business in raising livestock over 7,000 acres. Simpson married his wife Sarah in Visalia in 1859.
A few years later they founded a church, and in 1866 the community had grown enough to support an elementary school, with the founding of Dry Creek School, which offered a primary school curriculum and was run by the county. The following year, Sarah Simpson donated land for the construction of a Methodist Church. It’s considered the oldest church in Fresno County.
But the leaders of the church saw a problem. There was no secondary school in all of Fresno County. So they pooled their resources, and with $50,000 founded the Dry Creek Academy in 1872. It was considered one of the finest secondary schools in the region. But when the Central Pacific Railroad founded the townsite Fresno, the fate of the Academy was sealed, and the community and school faded in importance.
While the secondary school faded away, its name lives on in the community of Academy today, located where Highway 168 enters the foothills. Dry Creek Elementary school also lives on in a new location as part of Clovis Unified, as does the old Methodist Church on Madsen Avenue. And here’s one final twist that brings things full circle. When the University of California was looking at sites to build a new campus in the 1990s, one of the three finalists was Academy.
