St. Albans opened its doors to 34 students in the fall of 1909. A bequest of Harriet Lane Johnston (1830-1903), the niece and first lady of President James Buchanan, had provided for the establishment of an all-boys school and for a scholarship fund for choristers at the future Washington National Cathedral.
The campus of the National Cathedral School for boys, as the school was first known, consisted of the Lane-Johnston Building, which housed everything: the dorm, classrooms, the refectory, and the headmaster’s study and apartment. In December of that year, the bishop deemed the Little Sanctuary, then a repository for furnishings for the future Cathedral, the school’s chapel.