In June 1895 the trustees elected Joseph Howland Coit the school’s second Rector. When elected Rector, Joseph Coit was sixty-four years old. For thirty years he had served as vice-rector, devoted to his brother Henry Coit and absolutely loyal to his policies. In a letter to trustee Samuel Eliot, he wrote: “I am trying to honor his memory by a faithful, untiring but humble effort to keep alive the methods, the traditions, the spirit with which he conducted the school.”