On a bright April morning, the Chapel at Western Reserve Academy filled to capacity — just as it had a century earlier — its white wooden pews occupied by students in green blazers, faculty, special guests and a few alumni who had returned, as if by instinct, to the place where so many of their beginnings had been staged. The occasion was Founders Weekend, marking two hundred years since our founding on April 26, 1826.

The morning’s Cornerstone Ceremony was both commemorative and joyful, unfolding with a careful awareness of our history. Head of School Suzanne Walker Buck P ’24 offered remarks that balanced institutional pride with a sense of continuity, welcoming a gathering that included Trustees, civic leaders and alumni whose class years stretched back decades. Among them were Timothy R. Warner ’69 and Anne Cacioppo Manganaro ’75, who have stewarded the Bicentennial celebrations, as well as Martin D. Franks ’68 and Nathaniel E. Leonard ’82, co-Presidents of the Board of Trustees.

How does one meaningfully recount two centuries? The answer, in part, belonged to the students. A group of seniors — Jayden Kersh, Anika Soni, Thomas Casey, Roberts Sartor and Maya Kinney — took up the task with earnest authority, narrating the school’s evolution while an archival reel flickered overhead, compressing generations into a sequence of images: stoic portraits, changing fashions, the slow expansion of campus buildings, the steady accumulation of memory.

Music, as it often does on such occasions, carried what words could not. A piano performance by Jessica Sun ’26 moved with force and precision through a piece by Sergei Rachmaninoff. The Academy Choir, meanwhile, reached further back, performing a hymn composed for the laying of the original cornerstone in 1826. The effect was like a conversation across centuries; one voice answering another.

There were proclamations, too, offered by local and state leaders, each one affirming the school’s place within a broader civic fabric. We extend our deepest gratitude to Ohio State Senator Casey Weinstein, Hudson Mayor Jeffrey L. Anzevino, Summit County Council President Erin Dickinson ’99 and Hudson Heritage Association Co-President Susan Newman, for their attendance and ceremonial decrees. 

But anniversaries, even ones two hundred years in the making, have a way of bending toward celebration. The ceremony gave way to a series of buoyant proceedings: a game, cleverly titled “The Price is Light,” in a nod to our motto, Lux et Veritas, was a rowdy and joyful affair. Students were invited to guess the cost of everyday items across different eras (examples: a Sony Walkman from 1983, a steel milk can from 1919, a banana split at Saywell’s in 1952), collapsing time into a guessing game of inflation + imagination.

And of course, there were gifts! Bicentennial ball caps, bright and uniform, gifted by Ye Zhang P ’28 and donned happily and eagerly by students. And, in a gesture that elicited immediate and deafening delight, the announcement of a Head’s Holiday that following Monday, extending the festivities a little further past the weekend.

By the afternoon, the mood had fully shifted from reverent to festive. In the dining hall, lunch was served not as a single meal but as a series of stations, each offering small tastes of cities that hosted the Olympic Games. From there, the celebration moved into the Murdough Athletic Center, where the long-running Class Olympics reached its crescendo. For weeks, classes had accumulated points in events like history trivia and the annual Connections Challenge, but now the contests were immediate and physical. Clad in color-coded shirts — seniors in blue, juniors in pink, sophomores in green, freshmen in purple — they competed in games of speed, strategy and chance, culminating in a tug-of-war that was both friendly and ferocious.

But only one class could prevail. That it was the Class of 2026 — our Bicentennial graduates — seemed, to many, a kind of narrative finale. 

The following day carried the celebration beyond campus. The Hudson Relays is an event where – this year – WRA students and faculty ran alongside participants from Case Western Reserve University. Hudson was a perfect starting line for the Bicentennial year for both institutions; everything, after all, began here when the race was created in 1911. Our Head of School Buck and Bicentennial Chair Warner ran the first leg, passing the baton to seniors Caz Badynee and Lauren Smeltzer. The stakes, at least officially, included glory; unofficially, they included donuts in the Green Key for the returning runners. It was a rare and happy moment of joint celebration, linking two institutions with shared histories in Northeast Ohio, and underscoring the sense that even a two-hundred-year milestone is not merely retrospective, but communal.

By weekend’s end, what remained was less a single moment than an accumulation of them: music and memory, competition and ceremony, the past carefully honored, the present fully inhabited, the future laid out in front like a brand new brick path. Two hundred years on, dear old Reserve is a story still being written — and what an exciting moment to turn the page.

Click here to access photos from the Cornerstone Ceremony.

Click here to access photos from Class Olympics.

Click here to access photos from the Hudson Relays.