"Foxcroft has set a standard distinctive in girls' education. No other school is quite like it in all the world. It has given hundreds of girls not only intellectual training, but aims and ideals that only a school of simplicity and sound training can give. Foxcroft standards—discipline, a will to work, intellectual and moral honesty—have given the girls a sense of honor and of the joy of life that have been clearly reflected through their lives."
—Charlotte Haxall Noland
Charlotte Haxall Noland founded Foxcroft School in 1914, at the age of 32. She dreamed that her own school would be one that "girls would want to come to and hate to leave because they loved it." From the beginning, Miss Charlotte's highest aim and Foxcroft's greatest responsibility has been to educate the whole student. Her efforts to instill high purpose, integrity, leadership, understanding, and a sense of joy in students guides Foxcroft even today. Foxcroft is a transforming experience and shapes the loyalty of today's students and of nine decades of Foxcroft alumnae.


Charlotte Haxall Noland was born February 1, 1883 to Cuthbert Powell and Rosalie Haxall Noland at Burrland, in Loudoun County, Virginia. Cuthbert Noland taught his seven children a love for animals and the out-of-doors. Rosalie Noland was a firm, but loving mother who pulled her family through the lean years that followed the failure of the Haxall Flour Mills. The Nolands instilled in their children a deep abiding faith. Self-reliance and ingenuity were necessary traits for success in the spirited Noland household; the children performed chores to earn extra money and devised their own imaginative entertainment. Charlotte often led her younger siblings into creative adventures with her insatiable curiosity and unbounded energy.

Charlotte went on to pursue her studies both at the Sargent School of Physical Education at Harvard and during summer study at Oxford University. It was there in1904 on an afternoon ride that she passed the estate of a Major Foxcroft. “That’s the name that hit me right! I took it back and kept it,” she later said of the school’s namesake. Charlotte’s earliest work was done at a gymnasium in Baltimore and at a summer camp at her native Burrland. Finally, in October of 1914 Charlotte realized her dream of opening a school for girls. She remembers, “No one will ever know the excitement I felt that October day in 1914 when twenty-four girls – three of them babies only ten years old – and three day scholars, came to me. That is what started Foxcroft that day. My joy knew no bounds.”
 of