Carson Long Military Institute: Pennsylvania's Oldest Military School
Near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
The institution standing here today traces its roots to the eighteen thirties, when Bloomfield Academy opened in this Cumberland Valley town. For most of the nineteenth century it operated as a traditional secondary school, educating the sons of central Pennsylvania. In nineteen fourteen, Theodore K.
Long acquired the school, and five years later converted it to a military curriculum. He renamed it Carson Long Institute as a memorial to his son, William Carson Long. The school's first permanent building, known as The Maples, was completed back in eighteen forty, and it still anchors the campus today.
Carson Long holds the distinction of being the oldest military school in Pennsylvania, offering a structured boarding environment that has attracted students from across the country and around the world. The school survived the collapse of many similar institutions in the twentieth century, continuing to occupy the same grounds where Bloomfield Academy once stood nearly two hundred years ago.
