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Agnes O'Reilly Hocking, daughter of famous Irish poet, co-founded the Shady Hill Open Air School in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Agnes O’Reilly Hocking, the third of four daughters born to famous poet John Boyle O’Reilly of Ireland and writer Mary Murphy O'Reilly of Charlestown, died on May 15, 1955, in Madison, NH at age 78. Born on May 19, 1877, Agnes was just 13 when her father passed away suddenly in August, 1890.


All four daughters attended the ceremony when the O’Reilly monument was unveiled in the Fens on June 21, 1896, attended by thousands of people, including U.S. Vice-President Adlai Stevenson. They sat in a group in the front row on the stage.   A year later, her mother Mary died in November 1897 when Agnes was 20.

Agnes became an educator, and was mentioned in local papers as being a permanent substitute teacher in Charlestown. In June 1904, she and her sisters Elizabeth and Blanid sailed for Europe for six months, where they spent time in Rome and the Alps. 

On June 28, 1905, Agnes married famed philosopher William Earnest Hocking, professor at Harvard College, Yale University and Phillips Academy. The marriage got extensive newspaper coverage because Agnes’ request to be married by a Catholic priest was denied by the Archdiocese because of stringent laws about Catholics and non-Catholics marrying. She refused to sign a paper promising to raise her children as Catholic.

A Boston Globe story on June 30, 1905, reported that the couple was “quietly wed on Wednesday last at her home on Walnut Street Brookline…by Rev Dr Samuel M Crothers pastor of the First Parish Unitarian church of Cambridge. There were but few present for the nuptials and those were intimate friends of the bride and groom. None of the sisters of the young woman nor her grandmother nor her uncle nor aunt attended the ceremony… the relatives of Miss O’Reilly discountenanced the union because of the religious difference.”

In 1915, the couple started The Cooperative Open Air School for children on the back porch of their home on Quincy Street in Cambridge. The school grew quickly and was praised for being a progressive, non-traditional place of learning. In 1925 it was renamed the Shady Hill School, which flourishes today,

Author John Kaag, in his book American Philosopher: A Love Story, writes that “Agnes’ supranational exuberance had a pointed rational aim; to probe life with all possible richness and fullness; to secure freedom with self-control.” She made Shady Hill a “place where children feel happily in love with both this educational aim and their headmistress.”

One of the students who was most influenced by Agnes was Belguin-born writer May Sarton, who came to the school in 1917 at age five and was one of the youngest students. In her memoir, I Knew A Phoenix, Sarton writes, “There is no doubt that (my) creative mind stemmed in those early years from the genius of Agnes Hocking, the schools’ founder and moving spirit."

Agnes Hocking with students, courtesy of Shady Hill School
Sarton writes that “the core of the school and its unique strength lay in the one fact that poetry was made centrally active. Agnes Hocking taught this subject - if what she did can be called by any such formal name as teaching.”

Although Earnest Hocking had the more worldly reputation as a philosopher and teacher, Sarton writes, “The school was born of this marriage of poetry and philosophy, and though philosophy was worshipped, poetry ruled.”

Agnes died on May 15, 1955, in Madison, New Hampshire, at the age of 77, and her husband died on June 12, 1966 at age 92. They are buried at Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, where other notable Irish are buried including Colonel Thomas Cass and poet Fanny Parnell.

Learn more about John Boyle O’Reilly, whose monument is part of the Boston Irish Heritage Trail.

Research + Text, Michael Quinlin



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