University Liggett School

01 / The story of this place

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University Liggett School traces its roots to spring 1878, when the Reverend James D. Liggett and his family founded a small independent girls' school in Detroit called the Detroit Home and Day School, which moved in 1883 to a building at Cass Avenue and Stimson Place. The school expanded to Grosse Pointe in 1914 with an Albert Kahn-designed campus on Burns Avenue, and in 1954 merged with another local school to form Grosse Pointe University School. That school in turn merged with the original Liggett School in 1969 to create University Liggett School, which consolidated onto a single campus on Cook Road in Grosse Pointe Woods in 2012. Novelist Jeffrey Eugenides, later the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Middlesex, attended the school in the 1970s before going on to Brown University, and has credited his time there with shaping his fiction. The coeducational, independent school today teaches students from preschool through twelfth grade on its Grosse Pointe Woods campus.

1. Traces to an 1878 Detroit girls' school founded by the Liggett family
2. Grosse Pointe campus built in 1914, designed by Albert Kahn
3. Took its current name after a 1969 merger
4. Novelist Jeffrey Eugenides attended in the 1970s
5. Consolidated onto one Cook Road campus in 2012