The original building opened in 1767 as a prep school for classical learning — one of the leading preparatory institutions in colonial New Jersey. In 1771, Colonel Francis Barber was named headmaster. Barber was a figure of both intellectual rigor and military courage; he would serve as an officer in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War and die in 1783 when a felled tree struck him during peacetime camp exercises. His pupils included Hamilton and Burr, who attended sequentially rather than simultaneously. As historians have noted, there is no documented record of the two meeting during their school years — but the overlap in their circles was real and deep. Hamilton would go on to become the first Secretary of the Treasury. Burr would go on to shoot him.

The academy's physical history is one of repeated destruction and reconstruction. On February 25, 1779, British troops raided Elizabeth and burned the building. It was rebuilt in 1787. It closed again in 1834, briefly becoming the first Session House of the First Church, then was rebuilt in 1863 and again in 1917. Each reconstruction kept the institution alive under a different name and in a different configuration, but the institutional thread persisted — from colonial prep school to parish house to community center to what it is today. The building's durability across more than two and a half centuries is its own form of argument about what the people of Elizabeth considered worth preserving.

The academy was renamed the Snyder Academy of Elizabethtown in honor of the Harold B. and Dorothy A. Snyder Foundation, whose funding supported reconstruction and renovation. Today the building includes a museum, a 250-seat theater, an art studio, and space for educational services and community events. Signs outside mark the historical association with Hamilton, Burr, and Barber — a reminder that the ground you are standing on was once a classroom for two men whose conflict would define early American political history. The building sits in the Midtown historic district of Elizabeth, a neighborhood still shaped by its colonial-era street plan.