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The Lapham Institute was a Freewill Baptist academy in North Scituate, Rhode Island in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The site has also been home to Smithville Seminary, Pentecostal Collegiate Institute, Eastern Nazarene College, and the Watchman Institute.

1905 Postcard of Pentecostal Collegiate Institute in North Scituate

The school was originally founded in Scituate as the "Smithville Seminary" in 1839 by the Rhode Island Free Will Baptists (later American Baptist Association). The Free Baptists were extremely active in northern Rhode Island during the nineteenth century and extensively involved with abolitionism and the Underground Railroad. Well-known educational reformer, Henry Barnard, established the first "Rhode Island Teacher Institute" at the Seminary in 1845. In 1863 the school's name was changed to the "Lapham Institute." The school had a strong connection with Bates College, another Free Baptist institution, and many of the institute's principals went on to become professors at Bates. In 1867 the Institute began giving normal instruction for teachers with public funding (as a predecessor to Rhode Island College).

The school closed in 1876 and reopened in 1902 as the Pentecostal Collegiate Institute (PCI) after a split from the original Pentecostal Collegiate Institute and Bible Training School. The Institute was renamed Eastern Nazarene College (ENC) in 1918. In 1919, ENC left the site and moved to Quincy, Massachusetts, on the South Shore of Boston, Massachusetts where it remains as the only evangelical Christian college in metropolitan Boston.

In 1920, Reverend William S. Holland bought the school, and it became a day camp and trade school for African American children known as the Watchman Institute (Watchman Industrial School). Several suspicious fires occurred in Institute in 1924, 1926, and 1934 forcing the school to close.^[1] The Ku Klux Klan was believed to be responsible, although no one was ever arrested. Similar events had occurred during the preceding 100 years throughout rural New England, such as the Noyes Academy in New Hampshire in 1835 and Parsonsfield Seminary in Maine in 1854.

The Institute was eventually renovated in the 1970s and converted into apartments known as Scituate Commons, which still sit on Institute Lane. The Greek Revival Seminary was built by Russell Warren in 1839 and became part of the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.

• James Burrill Angell, President of the University of Michigan, University of Vermont
• Thomas Angell, Professor at Bates College
• Mary Latham Clark, author
• George Day, editor of the Morning Star
• Henry Howard, Governor of Rhode Island 1873-1875

Hector Richard Carbone, History of the Rhode Island Institute of Instruction, (University of Connecticut, 1971).
William Howe Tolman, History of Higher Education in Rhode Island, (DC: Government Printing Office 1894).
Robert Smith, In the 1920s, the Klan Ruled the Countryside, Providence Journal, 4/29/1999

• Rhode Island College info
  
• Description of the Seminary by a Former student: James Angell
  
• William Tolman's Description-1894
  

• Bates College
• Cobb Divinity School
• Eastern Nazarene College
• Scituate, Rhode Island
• Rhode Island College