The Morris Academy was one of the new nation's first coeducational secondary schools, "instructing youths…in the higher branches of literature and the sciences together with the Christian precepts of morality and virtue." During the years in which it existed, students came from 63 Connecticut towns, 15 states and 10 countries including Argentina, France, Germany, Spain and the West Indies. Among them were the abolitionist John Brown; William and Henry Ward Beecher, brothers of Harriet Beecher Stowe; the native Hawaiian Henry Obookiah, who was a symbol of the American Foreign Mission movement, and Samuel Mills, its "father;" a governor and a lieutenant governor of Connecticut and four congressmen. Morris died in 1820, but the academy continued for another 68 years, having educated more than 1,200 young men and women by the time it closed.