The Tome School is a private school in North East in Cecil County in the U.S. state of Maryland. It is one of the oldest schools in Maryland. It enrolls grades K - 12.HistoryPort DepositThe Tome School for Boys, originally located on Main Street in Port Deposit, Maryland, in Cecil County, on the east bank of the Susquehanna River was founded by Jacob Tome (1810-1898), as a nonsectarian college preparatory school for boys. It opened for boarders and received its first students in 1894. It was part of a system of schools collectively known as the Jacob Tome Institute that began with kindergarten and extended through high school. Situated in the northeast corner of the state, the Tome School was immediately popular, attracting almost all the students from the town of Port Deposit and many from outside, throughout Maryland, Pennsylvania and neighboring states.Tome left the school an endowment at his death in 1898. Under the direction of his widow, Evalyn N. Tome, the Board of Trustees hired Scottish immigrant James Cameron Mackenzie (1852-1931), to direct the school. MacKenzie, one of the most important late 19th-century secondary school educators, proposed using the endowment to create a separate upper-level boarding school for boys. Two hundred acres on the bluff above the town of stone granite buildings and the broad picturesque Susquehanna River were purchased for this purpose. MacKenzie in turn consulted with Robert Swain Peabody (1845-1917), of the prominent Boston architectural firm of Peabody & Stearns, concerning the design of the new Jacob Tome Institute.
