Lesley University

In 1909, Edith Lesley opened a kindergarten teacher training school in her family’s boarding house at 29 Everett Street with just nine students. The first class graduated two years later at First Parish Church in Harvard Square, eleven women armed with Friedrich Froebel’s progressive philosophy and a belief that play, singing, and block-building were serious educational tools. That modest home, doubling as boarding house and schoolhouse, became the cornerstone of what is now a university educating roughly 2,500 students.

The school changed names as it grew, becoming Lesley College in 1944 and eventually Lesley University in the early 2000s, each shift marking how far nine students in a boarding house parlor had traveled from anyone’s original budget. In 2018, the university acquired five more historic buildings a few blocks away on Brattle Street, a former Episcopal seminary’s chapel and dormitories among them, extending its reach without leaving the neighborhood. Froebel believed children learn best through play. Lesley, it turns out, grew the same way: one room, then one house, then an entire corner of Cambridge.