Trustees and donors to the school agreed to have an interracial student body, announcing it in the February 28, 1835 issue of "The Liberator". "Youths will be fitted for admission into any of the Colleges and Universities of the United States; but it is intended that this Seminary shall itself afford means of such correct and extensive classical attainments, as shall qualify young men to commence the study of the learned professions." This announcement also said that a teacher, William Scales, a senior at the Andover Theological Seminary, was hired, and gave a long list of subjects to be taught. Another teacher, Mary Harris, was hired for the "female department", but the school was destroyed before she could begin. The school, in a "neat and handsome edifice", opened in March 1835, with 28 white and 17 African-American students. The white students were generally from local families, but many of the black students had traveled from as far as Philadelphia to attend the academy, because of limited educational opportunities elsewhere. They were described as having a "modest and becoming deportment" and "inoffensive, polite and unassuming manners". They often had to travel in poor conditions on segregated steamboats and stagecoaches, and while on the boats being barred from the cabin and forced to remain on deck whatever the weather. On a journey of , "rarely could they get food and nowhere could they find lodging." Several future prominent African-American abolitionists, such as Henry Highland Garnet, Thomas Paul, Jr., Thomas S. Sydney, Julia Williams, and Alexander Crummell attended the school during the several months that it was open. Williams, who would later marry Garnet, had been a student at Prudence Crandall's Canterbury Female Boarding School for "young Ladies and little Misses of color", which was also destroyed by a mob in 1834 after being open only a short time. Garnet and some other students boarded with Kimball. Many local residents objected to allowing blacks into the town to attend the academy, which they called a "nuisance" in a town meeting. There was an "oportune visit of some slavers from the South". Segregationists launched a campaign to discredit school officials and cultivate hysteria over the possibility of interracial marriage and racial mixing." According to them, "[t]he village was to be overrun with negroes from the South — the slaves were to be brought on to line the streets with huts and to inundate the industrious town with paupers and vagabonds — and other tales too indecent and too ridiculous to be repeated".