In 1852, Bernard Fox, a highly respected botanist from Boston, left Massachusetts with a large number of trees bought a short time earlier by Commodore Robert Stockton. After spending a year and a half with Stockton, Fox sought to build a nursery of his own, and arrived in the Orchard area in 1853.

All pictures and much of the text for the Orchard School History pages were borrowed from the book, Orchard School: A Narrative History, written by Richard Keller.