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The Governor's Academy (formerly Governor Dummer Academy) is an independent school located on 450 acres (1.8 km²) in Byfield, Massachusetts, United States; 33 miles (53 km) north of Boston. It has 376 students in grades nine through twelve, approximately 75% of whom are boarders. The school was established in 1763, and is the United States' oldest continuously-operating independent boarding school.^[1]

Students study in small classes. Most faculty live on campus and serve as dorm parents and coaches as well as classroom teachers. Accelerated and AP classes are offered in subjects from mathematics and science to art, foreign languages, English and history. Chinese will be offered in fall 2007 along with the Western languages (French, Spanish, German) and Latin currently offered.

The school was founded two years after the death of William Dummer, who funded it in his will. Dummer had been lieutenant governor and acting governor of Massachusetts for many years and led the colony through a difficult period in the earlier 18th Century fighting off forays by "French & Indians" during what became known as "Dummer's War" in the 1720s. He also served as an early Overseer of Harvard College.

Over the years, the school's name has been entwined with those of many famous people. Paul Revere created the first seal for the school; John Quincy Adams served as secretary to the Board of Trustees; Theophilus Parsons, a Chief Justice of Massachusetts and author of the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, attended the Academy ; Samuel Phillips, Jr., founder of Phillips Academy, Andover graduated in 1771; Captain Edward Preble, commander of the USS Constitution and a hero of the Barbary Wars, studied there; Booker T. Washington Jr. (son of Booker T. Washington) starred on the football team in the early 1900s; Yu Gil-jun, a famous social reformer and the first Korean to study in the West, attended the school. Henry Durant, a founder of the University of California and its first president, and later an early mayor of Oakland, served as headmaster of the Dummer Academy from 1849-1852.