Students at MMI Preparatory School honored their School’s founders, Eckley Brinton Coxe, and his wife, Sophia Georgianna Coxe, during a program at graveside service and at the School on Tuesday, giving thanks for the Coxes’ contributions to the School and the area.

Senior class officers laid a wreath on the Coxes’ grave at St. James Church on Tuesday morning and Donna Titus, Associate Dean and English Department Chair and longest tenured faculty member at MMI, provided a few words at the site. The class then toured the historic Coxe home and enjoyed refreshments. Upon return to the School, they worked with the underclassmen to provide the history of the School’s founders with a play and other activities.

Head of School Theresa Long reflected, “Our history is both deep and extraordinary. Honoring Eckley and Sophia Coxe gives students a meaningful chance to express gratitude for the vision and determination of the Coxe family, which shaped the School as we know it today.”

The School also celebrated with an all-school holiday lunch on Tuesday, the last day of classes before the Thanksgiving break.

The lives of Eckley and Sophia Coxe provide an interesting history of the early coal-mining days and history of the Hazleton area. After graduating from Penn in 1858, Eckley was sent abroad to continue his studies at the Ecole des Mines in Paris, France. He attended the Mining Academy in Freiberg in Saxony, where he studied mechanics, which piqued his interest in mechanical inventions that aided the mining industry. After returning to the US in 1864, he established Coxe Brothers & Co. to combine control of the coal lands. Soon, his firm controlled more than 35,000 acres of coalfields and increased coal production. This consolidation brought almost every mining operation in NEPA under his control and is considered to be one of Eckley’s greatest accomplishments.

He then produced the Mining and Mechanical Institute – today’s MMI Preparatory School. This institution, founded in 1879, was chartered in 1894 as an all-boys’ school to teach the sons of miners. Today, it is a co-educational college preparatory school serving students in grades six through 12.

His wife, Sophia Georgianna (Fisher) Coxe, was equally well known throughout the region. Because of all the charitable works she performed throughout her lifetime, she was known as the “Angel of the Anthracite.”

Her love of people and concern for their welfare prompted her to establish a hospital in Drifton, the first one in the area. Sophia also helped found St. James Episcopal Church in 1884 and taught Sunday school at the church for 40 years.

On November 26, 1925, Sophia celebrated her 85th birthday and Thanksgiving as she made her last public appearance. Even though she was in ill health and her physicians advised against attending, she was determined to dedicate her newest accomplishment, the MMI gymnasium.

Sophia Coxe died four months later on March 3, 1926. She is buried beside her husband in the churchyard of St. James Episcopal Church.