Our History

In 1946, nine Brothers of the Congregation of Holy Cross from Notre Dame, Indiana, founded Gilmour Academy in Gates Mills, Ohio.  The Brothers exhibited the courage they hoped to instill in their future students by purchasing and rehabilitating the 133-acre Cedar Hill Farm, which had been largely vacant for nearly 20 years.

They named their new school for the second Bishop of the Diocese of Cleveland, the Right Reverend Richard Gilmour, a champion of Catholic Education.

Initially an all-boys school, Gilmour welcomed its first students in the fall of 1946 and held its first graduation in 1950.

Classes were conducted mostly in Tudor House, but the remaining farm outbuildings were also pressed into service.

In 1982 the two schools merged, creating the only Catholic, independent, coeducational college-preparatory school in the region. The Glen Oak School building became the Gilmour Academy Lower School in 1986.

Gilmour Academy has changed over the years, from the creation of its Middle School in 1974 to the continual addition of new facilities.  But it has never strayed from the teaching of Holy Cross founder Blessed Fr. Basil Moreau, C.S.C., “We shall always place education side by side with instruction; the mind will not be cultivated at the expense of the heart.”