Westover: Giving Girls a Place of Their Own

By Laurie Lisle

Westover, a girls' school in Middlebury, Connecticut, was founded in 1909 by emancipated "New Women," educator Mary Hillard and architect Theodate Pope Riddle. Landscape designer Beatrix Farrand did the plantings. It has evolved from a finishing school for the Protestant elite, including F. Scott Fitzgerald's first love, to a meritocracy for pupils of many religions and races from all over the world. The fascinating account of the ups and downs of this female community is the subject of Laurie Lisle's lively and well-researched book. The author describes the innovations of the idealistic minister's daughter who founded the school in 1909, her intellectual successor who turned it into a college preparatory school in the 1930s, the quiet headmaster who managed to keep it open during the turbulent 1970s, and the prize-winning mathematics teacher, wife, and mother who leads the high school today. This beautifully illustrated book tells an important story about female education during decades of dramatic change in America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Release date: Jan 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780819569660

Laurie Lisle

In addition to Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O’Keeffe, Laurie Lisle is the author of two books: Without Child: Challenging the Stigma of Childlessness and Louise Nevelson: A Passionate Life. She lectures widely on O’Keeffe and writes essays, articles, and book reviews for various publications. Lisle lives with her husband in northwestern Connecticut and Westchester County, New York.

Book preview

WESTOVER

Garnet Books

Early Connecticut Silver, 1700–1840

by Peter Bohan and Philip Hammerslough

Introduction and Notes by Erin Eisenbarth

The Old Leather Man

by Daniel DeLuca

Westover: Giving Girls a Place of Their Own

by Laurie Lisle

Making Freedom: The Extraordinary Life of Venture Smith

by Chandler B. Saint and George Krimsky

Welcome to Wesleyan: Campus Buildings

by Leslie Starr

OTHER BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR

Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O’Keeffe

Louise Nevelson: A Passionate Life

Without Child: Challenging the Stigma of Childlessness

Four Tenths of an Acre: Reflections on a Gardening Life

WESTOVER

Giving Girls a Place of Their Own

LAURIE LISLE

WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS MIDDLETOWN, CONNECTICUT

Published by Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT 06459

www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

© 2009 by Laurie Lisle

For the author’s Web site, see www.laurielisle.com

All rights reserved

Printed in U.S.A.      5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lisle, Laurie.

Westover : giving girls a place of their own / by Laurie Lisle.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978–0–8195–6886–1 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Westover School. 2. Girls’ schools—Connecticut—Middlebury—History. I. Title.

LD7251.M635L57 2008

373.18235′2097468—dc22    2008029051

Materials in the Westover archive are published with the permission of Westover School, Middlebury, Connecticut.

Materials pertaining to Theodate Pope Riddle are published with permission of the Archives, Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, Connecticut.

Excerpts from a letter of John Masefield to Mary R. Hillard, dated April 28, 1917, are quoted with the permission of The Society of Authors, London, the literary representative of the Estate of John Masefield.

Quotations from the essay Taking Women Students Seriously are from On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 1979 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Used by permission of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Every effort has been made to secure permissions from copyright owners to publish photographs in the archive of Westover School. Sometimes the photographer is unidentified and unknown. In other cases, neither the photographer nor his or her estate could be located. Any copyright owners who were not contacted by the author are invited to come forward and be gratefully acknowledged.

Designed by Charlotte Strick

Cover illustration: Westover students crossing the Quad during the early years of the school. Adapted from a photograph in the Westover archive. The photographer is unknown.

To my Westover

aunts, cousins, mother,

and sister —

once girls known as

Eleanor Cole,

Esther Merriman,

Barbara Simonds,

Lally Simonds,

Nan Morse,

Linda Simonds,

Phillis Simonds,

Abigail Congdon,

and

Adeline Gwynne —

who attended from

1909 to 1968

CONTENTS

PREFACE

My Westover

THIS BOOK HAD ITS BEGINNING IN THE AUTUMN OF 1971, WHEN I was working for Newsweek in New York. In the wake of the women’s liberation movement, I was seeing everything with new eyes, and I wanted to re-evaluate my life as a girl, especially my three years at Westover. The impact of leaving home at the age of fifteen for a hermetic female community had been huge. As far as I could tell, the school had changed very little from the time my mother had attended in the late 1920s and early 1930s. I wondered why I had never heard the words women’s rights spoken by my intelligent and independent women teachers, even by the indomitable Louise Dillingham, who had ruled the place for many years with a peculiar combination of absolute authority and enigmatic detachment. I was wondering about other matters, as well.

After graduating in 1961, my memories of my years in Middlebury, Connecticut, remained unresolved. They were as charged as if radioactive, and as ongoing as a persistent itch. I remembered my restlessness because I didn’t believe I was being readied for Real Life. Although I realized I was getting an excellent education, I also wanted something else. After graduation, my adolescent ambivalence turned to antagonism, when alumnae news was more about weddings than professional work or other kinds of adventures. As boys’ prep schools went coeducational, I applauded, regarding female institutions as anachronisms, something I had endured simply because I was born too soon.

Intending to write a freelance article about girls’ schools from my new point of view, I wrote to Westover’s acting headmaster for an interview. I was more comfortable returning as a reporter than an alumna and had skipped my tenth reunion the previous spring. When I drove up to the school’s imposing façade along the side of a village green, all the nervousness and anticipation I had felt when returning from vacations came rushing back. I pushed open the heavy front door, walked in, and there was Red Hall flooded with sunlight, with the green grass and little apple trees within the Quad visible through its large windows. Standing in that familiar, feminine place, I felt enveloped by emotion. To my astonishment, I felt a sense of solace. I tried to resist this feeling because it undermined my new ideas. An enthusiastic supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment, I espoused equality and togetherness with males, and I rejected the ideas of womanly retreat and feminist separation.

Why did it feel so, well, pleasant to be back?

Perhaps it had to do with tricks of memory or the beauty of the place. Still, my reaction didn’t make sense to me. After all, I had suffered adolescent angst while there. Maybe I was tired of gender battles in Manhattan, where my boyfriend seemed to live in the Dark Ages, and where female editorial employees of Newsweek had filed a complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission protesting the magazine’s discriminatory policies against them.

In the interview, soft-spoken Joseph Molder gave me the impression that he was more on the girls’ side than I had expected, my notes of the meeting say. My notes also reveal my point-of-view at the time: It would be a mistake for alumnae to make the school a bulwark against change in their daughters and granddaughters, rather than a good opportunity to mold the new woman creatively. Afterward, he introduced me to a long-haired, bearded English teacher about my age, who startled me by saying he was getting girls to read women writers like Sylvia Plath. I was also surprised to see students in their own clothes, to hear about their baking cookies at the headmaster’s house, and to see them riding off on bikes to volunteer jobs outside the high walls of the school. In a note to Mr. Molder after I returned to New York, I thanked him for answering my questions so patiently and graciously and praised his sensitive touch as headmaster. Then I asked him if the school was ever going to teach sex education or women’s studies. (I never got an answer to that question.)

Then I got in touch with the president of the board of trustees, who politely invited me to lunch at his Wall Street club, a hushed place with red walls and large models of sailing ships. As we talked, he indicated that Westover’s future was up in the air, and that it might become a school for remedial students. Noticing that I was almost the only female in the room, I asked if we were in a men’s club. When he nodded yes, I felt a stab of resentment. Maybe my conflict had less to do with my dislike of the female sphere than my perception of its inferiority to the male one, where the prizes, I thought, were the ones worth winning. Since I had intended my article to be critical of girls’ schools, I was confused. I had no idea how to begin it and, in fact, I never did.

Years later, after returning from my thirty-fifth Westover reunion in 1996, I read in The New York Times about the opening of the Young Women’s Leadership School, the first public school for girls to open in the city in a century. I instantly understood what the young girls in East Harlem would get from a school of their own, and I felt happy for them. I also realized that I was glad that Westover was still a school for girls, and that it had been mine for a while. Even at the time of the interview I had noted that I guess the place either gave me or nourished my desire to dream and grow. Entering at the end of the 1950s, I must have absorbed the message that girls like me were important because such a magnificent piece of architecture had been designed for us and dedicated to educating us. Also, I remembered being interested in the school motto, To Think, To Do, To Be (inscribed in Latin on our brass belt buckles and the awesome emblem over the front door). It boldly challenged the expectation for a girl’s life in an era when women were only assumed to exist, instead of also thinking and doing. The words must have interested me because they assumed no inherent conflict between intellectuality and femininity: they indicated that clear thoughts and bold actions were part of a womanly life.

Soon afterward I returned to Middlebury to examine the school archive on the balcony of the former library, the airy, white clapboard colonial that had once been a church. I loved being back in the beautiful old building, and I remembered being happy reading on its sofa in the warmth of the fireplace on winter afternoons. The large portrait of founder Mary Robbins Hillard still hung there, the doe-eyed likeness that makes her look smaller and sadder than the way my mother remembered her. Maybe I would find material for the article left unwritten so long ago or for a book about girls’ schools. The archive was indeed full of treasures—letters, diaries, manuscripts, photographs, memorandums, minutes of meetings, and many other materials carefully collected over the years by alumna archivist Maria Randall Allen. Eventually, when she suggested that I write a history of Westover, I realized it was what I really wanted to do—to examine the place that still evoked such strong emotion.

One day while perusing the large, gold-embossed, old leather-bound school guest book, I saw what looked like the signature of my grandfather. He and my grandmother may have visited in May of 1923, when my mother and her older sister were still in grade school. It was my grandmother who must have heard about Westover from an older cousin in Massachusetts, whose daughter, Eleanor, had entered when it first opened in 1909. I will never know how the Coles heard about Miss Hillard’s new school in Connecticut, but it doesn’t matter. In Eleanor’s old age—eighty years after her graduation in 1912—she remembered that she had worshipped her headmistress and adored her years in Middlebury. She had not been especially studious, she said, but she had loved all the singing and the feeling of freshness and, in a way, hope in the lovely little chapel, whose beloved chaplain had officiated at her wedding.

My mother was in her eighties when I began working on this book, and I enjoyed entertaining her with what I was discovering in the archive. I liked taking her to visit her sister-in-law, a member of Westover’s class of 1930, and one afternoon my stories inspired the two old ladies to break into a spirited Raise Now to Westover. After my mother’s death, when I was going through her attic, I found her khaki day and white evening school uniforms, carefully tucked into a trunk along with a wedding dress. I held up the uniforms and marveled at their exquisite tailoring: all little tucks, intricate seams, deep hems, and lovely embroidery. Then, most miraculously of all, I discovered in the attic many girlish letters, written in achingly familiar handwriting, that she had mailed to her parents from Middlebury.

My mother had wanted me to go to Westover, too. In fact, she never even suggested the possibility of my going away to any other school. It was go to Westover or stay home—despite the fact that her memories were a mixture of pleasure and shame. While at boarding school, she had learned a love of reading, made good friends, and been elected head of the Over field hockey team, but she had left without a diploma. She did not attend her class’s graduation or ever return for a reunion, as far as I know. Still, she felt that Westover was an experience her daughters should not miss.

During my childhood, she had often talked about a larger-than-life personage, a Miss Hillard, a kind of Protestant princess or priestess in my imagination, who could read girls’ minds. Mother never spoke about her own mother with the same kind of awe. She also made affectionate references to a young headmistress, whom she called Dilly, who sounded like the nicest person in the world. My mother often recited poems to me that she had memorized during her four years away at school, like Emily Dickinson’s paean to reading, a little, rhyming poem called A Book. She also used to recite a Biblical passage that she knew by heart, and that I would also learn at Westover—Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not Love, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal, it begins. I still have my tiny blue booklet about it given to me and everyone in my class by Miss Dillingham in 1959, full of my scribbled, idealistic reflections.

On an autumn day when I was fourteen, my mother drove me to Middlebury to meet Dilly and see the school I had heard so much about. I remember a long talk with a formal and formidable Miss Dillingham in her dimly lit sitting room, when my mother nervously did most of the talking. At home in Providence, I had taken to bickering with her, and I didn’t get along with my stern stepfather, either. Growing up was growing out, I had nothing to lose, so I was ready to go, I had remembered a decade after graduating. When the acceptance letter arrived a few months later, I was glad to be going.

Walking through Westover’s front door in September of 1958, I was a quiet girl, distressed, maybe even depressed, by feeling voiceless at home. In the presence of my volatile stepfather, it was impossible to say much of anything. Before long, after discovering the daily pile of The New York Times on a high-backed bench, I became electrified by news about the nascent civil rights movement. I tentatively started to talk about it, and soon I was offering my opinions in Current Events and Miss Norman’s history class, on the volleyball court and everywhere else. Rooting for the Overs seemed less important than defending the pacifism of Martin Luther King. My classmates gently teased me for my passionate and probably dogmatic views, but they, as well as my teachers, put up with my argumentativeness.

My newfound voice was not just verbal, either. I began keeping a diary, writing about my thoughts as well as my emotional ups and downs. After returning from a perfect Christmas vacation during junior year, it suggests that I had a mid-winter meltdown. I was seventeen, in my seventh year in a girls’ school (including a day school in Providence), and eager to experience life. I was also starved for difference, but most of my classmates were, like me, daughters of alumnae from established Protestant families. Everything suddenly seemed too female, too boring, and too tense. I telephoned my mother in tears, telling her that I wanted to go to another school senior year, definitely one with boys. She sighed and suggested that I go talk to Miss Dillingham. At the age of sixty-two—incredibly, younger than my age now—the headmistress appeared to me as a powerful but benevolent grandmother figure, not unlike my own widowed grandmother. The next day I fearlessly went to see the person we called Miss D in her sitting room. Our talk elated me, evidently because of her empathy. It came down to the point that maybe I was ready to go on and that enough of boarding school is enough, I told my diary. I’ve just outgrown this place. Wisely, she asked me to wait until after spring vacation to make a final decision, and I willingly agreed.

It wasn’t long before I went to see her again, this time to ask if I could take a rare weekend pass to go to Harlem for a seminar for teenagers at a Quaker settlement house. She said she would think about it and, after undoubtedly calling my mother, gave permission. Despite being petrified, my diary says, I was soon on a train to New York, where I was met by two boys wearing American Friends Service Committee tags and taken by subway to a narrow brownstone on East 105th Street and another kind of life.

That evening or the next, a square dance was organized for those of us from elsewhere and the Puerto Rican teenagers in the neighborhood. Smoking incessantly, the young men, who wore black felt hats pulled down over their foreheads and long hair, seemed older and more guarded than others my age. As an accordion player warmed up, a dance set was formed, and our two groups eyed each other nervously. I smiled uncertainly at the girl with jangling earrings and elaborately curled hair opposite me, and she quickly beamed back. The dancing started awkwardly—they had never square danced before—and it ended in twirling circles that made all of us dizzily collide and collapse on the floor. After a moment of silence, a titter broke out, and soon everyone was laughing together.

Back in Middlebury, I landed in the infirmary with a sore throat after four days of sleeping little and eating erratically. In the silent, snowy, wintry beauty around me, I reflected on the overcrowded tenements, overflowing garbage cans, and noisy streets of East Harlem. I had been shocked by its ugliness, but not as much as by a despairing parody of the Twenty-Third Psalm, which a young addict had slipped into my hand. Heroin is my Shepherd: I shall always want. It maketh me to lie down in gutters, it began, and it ended: Surely hate and evil shall follow me all the days of my life, And I will dwell in the house of misery and disgrace forever. When I recovered, returned to the dormitory, and dressed in my white eyelet evening uniform for dinner, an elderly housemother reprimanded me for wearing seamless stockings, presumably because they made me look bare-legged. After my days in Harlem, I was infuriated by her pettiness. It was 1960, however, and it did not enter my mind to rebel against the rules. My plan was to go to another school.

That year I was taking a creative writing elective. It meant so much to me that I have saved my notebook from the class, as well as the classic grammar we were given, The Elements of Style, by E. B. White and William Strunk, Jr. The first page of the notebook has a quotation by Joseph Conrad about the purpose of writing, undoubtedly dictated by our teacher, white-haired and soft-spoken Miss Kellogg, English department chair and Bryn Mawr alumna, whom Miss Hillard had hired in 1925. On the second page, I dutifully wrote down more time-honored rules about writing, and then, as in any working writer’s notebook, I used the rest of the ruled pages for essay and story ideas as well as bits of dialogue and description. I have never forgotten the excitement of a homework assignment from that class: taking a topic from a basket in the schoolroom, and then writing about it for half an hour. I must have loved that exercise in extemporaneous writing because it was an invitation to voice.

As I wrote, the act of writing enabled me to sublimate my desires and summon the patience to postpone what I imagined was really living. A few weeks after returning from New York, but well before spring vacation, I announced to my diary, I’m staying. What’s one year out of a lifetime? I found a roommate and applied for a summer program with the Quakers. And I wrote. The extreme contrast between Harlem and Middlebury called for comprehension, and it fueled my words. It was then when I intuited that I had the mind set of a writer, and the inclination to be more of an observer than a participant. The pleasure of expressing myself on paper was enhanced the following June, when one of my essays about Harlem was published under my byline in the school literary magazine, The Lantern.

Senior year was surprisingly happy. In October, I loved thinking hard in the mornings and playing tennis vigorously in the afternoons. As always, I found my classes intellectually exciting, or mentally invigorating, as I put it in my diary, and I was doing well in all of them except for French. I also noted that being away from the world gives you a chance to think about things. Since everyone’s femaleness was taken for granted, it was downplayed, and we were free to dream outside the narrow gender expectations of the era. In November, I was thrilled when President Kennedy was elected, and I planned to join his Peace Corps. And, despite my Unitarian reservations about the Anglican liturgy, I liked what I called the peace and beauty of the lovely little chapel with its large arched window, especially at Christmastime, when it was full of sweet-smelling greenery. That winter I contentedly worked on a paper for Miss Dillingham’s senior ethics seminar about nonviolence in the civil rights movement. When the pond froze, the ice hockey was exhilarating. In Introduction to Philosophy, Mr. Schumacher asked us to write about what we wanted in life, and, at a time when few women I knew had careers, I wrote in turquoise ink that I wanted two of them: to be a writer and a social worker. That school year had its disappointments, too. After getting permission from Miss Dillingham to drop mathematics after sophomore year, I was disappointed when I did poorly on my math SAT. She told me it didn’t matter, since I was going to major in history or political science. But I was right to be worried, and I did not get into the college of my choice.

At Ohio Wesleyan, I stayed away from sororities after so many years at girls’ schools. But after being mocked in a mostly male history class when speaking up, I gravitated to literature classes with more female students and became an English major. If women did not make history, I told myself, they had at least written novels for centuries. Literature was as close to a female sensibility as I could find in academia at that time before women’s studies courses. After graduating, I went to work for a daily newspaper in Providence before moving to New York. It was a struggle to write on my own, until I left Newsweek after six years to write a book. After it was published, I moved from Manhattan, eventually settling into a small historic house (called the Academy, since part of it had once been a schoolhouse) on a village green in northwestern Connecticut. Without really realizing it, I had found a place like Middlebury, where I developed a pattern of writing in the mornings and walking or gardening or researching or running errands in the afternoons, not unlike the rich rhythm of life I had learned so long ago at Westover.

Working in the archive on this book, I was alternately surprised, amused, saddened, and almost always interested in what I was finding. I interviewed alumnae, administrators, trustees, and teachers, including my former English teacher, Miss Newton, who amazed me by saying she not only remembered me but also recalled my total absorption and involvement in classroom discussions. This demanding teacher had wanted me to think harder in her Nineteenth Century Literature class, so I was glad to give her a copy of my first book and get a nice note from her about it. I decided that she and my other teachers had not used feminist language in the 1950s because it was risky and, besides, many of them were living the lives of liberated women anyway. Being in Middlebury and returning to my own and others’ reunions, I got to know the school again. It was gratifying to see the way it had transformed itself through the decades into a place that is better than before—more informal, more open, and much more diverse—while still offering excellence in the classroom. While Miss Dillingham had endorsed a kind of tough love, I learned that Ann Pollina has brought great warmth to Westover, and it is what she calls a place with heart. As always, students get used to expressing themselves and being smart and strong. It is without question a good place for girls.

Reading letters and diaries of other alumnae and listening to their stories, I understand that we shared much, but that we experienced it differently. Sometimes it seems as if we went to different schools. My Westover is unlike anyone else’s, yet, like everyone else, I feel a sense of possessiveness about it. Inevitably, this history of our school is about what I read and remembered as well as what others revealed to me and reminded me about. And, as I learned about our school’s past, I learned more about myself. At times I was sorry for that struggling teenager, but I was glad to discover in my student file that Miss Dillingham had had a better opinion of me than I had of myself. Looking back, I’m grateful that my Real Life was delayed for a few years so that I could imagine the life I really wanted to live.

L. L.

Sharon, Connecticut

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

MANY MORE PEOPLE THAN I CAN EVER THANK PERSONALLY HAVE helped me bring this book into being. Archivist Maria Allen’s assistance has been invaluable. Over the years, she has collected not only memorabilia and other materials but also many stories from alumnae, and it was wonderfully helpful when she sent out a mailing to all the alumnae from the Dillingham decades asking for more of them. She has aided me in innumerable other ways, from showing me around the archive to arranging initial meetings with her classmate, Adele Ervin, and her friend, the late John Ferguson. Adele, the school’s first alumnae secretary, has enriched this history through our talks and by giving me a box of vivid and important letters. During his boyhood in Middlebury, John knew his mother’s close friends—Mary Hillard, Helen LaMonte, and Lucy Pratt—so his reflections, and the letters and papers he gave me, were very revealing.

Maria did not ask me to write this book before proposing the idea to Ann Pollina, who immediately endorsed it. It has been a pleasure to get to know Ann and hear about her exciting ways of educating girls. She has enthusiastically assisted me in every way, giving steadfast support, a number of interviews, any documents I asked for, and allowing me to go where the truth has taken me. My first interview with Joseph Molder, long before I began this book, was followed by another four of them, the last at his lakefront home in Middlebury. True to character, he was always thoughtful, insightful, and honest with me about the goings-on at Westover during three decades.

I am grateful to the nearly one hundred people who have graciously shared their memories and insights with me in person, by telephone, letter, and e-mail. The oldest was Mary Willcox Wiley ’18, and the youngest were girls who were not yet alumnae. Mary, who had just had her hundredth birthday when I visited, had a merry smile and an amazing memory, and when it faltered, she would say, I can’t quite get hold of that tail feather; we had a good laugh after I mentioned uniforms, and she replied that she had never seen any unicorns at Westover. Since Louise Dillingham’s personal papers have disappeared, I am very glad to have talked at length with her niece, Dorothy Goodwin ’49. Also, my sister and her roommate in the class of 1968 explained to me why they had felt so rebellious. I had fascinating talks with Anita Packard Montgomery ’47, Eunice Strong Groark ’56, Betsy Shirley Michel ’59, Victoria DiSesa ’70, and Mary Gelezunas ’84. Other contributors are too numerous to name, but I have cited them in the endnotes, and my heartfelt thanks go to every one.

I also wish to thank those who let me publish photographs and quote from letters and other writings of their relatives, especially the nephews of Mary Hillard and Helen LaMonte, William H. MacLeish and Edward S. LaMonte. During her very long life, Miss LaMonte was like a one-woman Greek chorus commenting kindly and wisely from afar about the happenings in Middlebury. My thanks go as well to David Norman, a nephew of Patience Norman, and to Mark Schumacher, the son of Joachim Schumacher. Many alumnae kindly shared their youthful writings and the written words of their mothers and fathers, including my classmates, Catherine Drew and Skipper Skelly. I am very pleased that Adrienne Rich and her publisher and John Masefield’s literary executor also granted me permissions. Mary Robbins Hillard, a 1944 memoir published by Bishop John T. Dallas about his longtime friend, and Westover, Elizabeth Choate Spykman’s delightful little 1959 history written for the fiftieth anniversary, were very useful. When working at the archive of Theodate Pope Riddle’s Hill-Stead Museum, the staff generously gave me valuable information, such as the existence of Miss Hillard’s letters to a close friend, August Jaccaci. Thanks also go to all those with offices on the ground floor of Hillard House, who, between my rushed trips up and down the stairs from archive to photocopy machine and back, answered my many questions. It was Kitty Benedict ’52 who suggested that I send the manuscript to Wesleyan University Press, and Charlotte Strick ’91 who designed the book.

WESTOVER

1

Mary Hillard and Her Era:

Protestant and Progressive

ON A DAY IN LATE APRIL OF 1909, A WOMAN NAMED THEODATE Pope and a group of teachers from St. Margaret’s School in the city of Waterbury, Connecticut, excitedly got into the Pope family’s chauffeured motor car, carrying a samovar, a ham, hatboxes, and precious colored photographs. The overloaded car made what one of the women later described as a perilous trip over the hilly six miles to the village of Middlebury. The village green, shaded by elms and encircled by white colonial homes and shops, was now bordered on one side by an enormous, pale stucco school with a steep slate roof and a bell tower. Over the large dark green door, an emblem on a projecting gable held three Tudor roses, a lamp of learning, and the commanding words "Cogitare, Agere, Esse (or, To Think, To Do, To Be"). A few days later, when a Waterbury newspaperman described the impressive neocolonial façade of the school called Westover, he noted that it would look better with shrubbery grown up around it.

After the teachers arrived, walked through the wide doorway, and looked around, they started to oversee the unpacking and arranging. At the end of the day, Lucy Pratt, Helen LaMonte and others happily settled down in a small front office and lit candles on its mantel and a fire in its grate. They waited for the new headmistress to arrive and be delighted by the sight, but when Mary Hillard finally rushed down the hall carrying her typewriter and papers, she was so busy that she didn’t even notice them. Since there was not yet any telephone or telegraph service to the village, it seemed as if they were far out in the country. When Miss LaMonte opened her eyes on the first morning, however, she joked: ‘Taint lonesome! Miss Pratt.’ So we began with gaiety—and it never was lonesome, Lucy Pratt recalled forty years later.

The next day, the women continued to hurry around the huge, half empty edifice, unpacking blue Canton china for the dining room and endless boxes and crates. Theodate Pope locked the chapel door so no one would touch the drying varnish inside. Workmen were underfoot everywhere, uncrating chapel chairs or putting turf in the Quad or carpet on Red Hall, but we somehow managed to go on in spite of all the activity, recalled Helen LaMonte. Curious visitors were constantly arriving and asking to be shown around, she remembered, and her feet ached even though someone had thought to bring foot powder for everyone’s shoes.

Less than a week later, Miss Hillard and others stood inside the front door to greet the seventy or so pupils, who had formerly boarded at St. Margaret’s School, arriving after spring vacation on electric trolley cars from Waterbury. The young girls excitedly explored the many rooms as their trunks and more furniture slowly arrived up the hill by horse-drawn wagons, a procession that was halted for a few days by a spring snowstorm. As the unpacking paused, Lucy Pratt took the time to write to Theodate Pope, who had left for a vacation in Cuba to rest from her exhausting preparations as the school’s architect. We have been in our beautiful home one week … [and we think] with love of our blessed architect … for every peg in every closet, every latch of every door, every screw in its place sings Theodate. My sweet bedroom almost keeps me awake with the peace of its beauty.

In the middle of May, the three apple trees inside the inner courtyard put forth arrays of pale pink blossoms as one of the loveliest springs in memory got underway. Amid the excitement there were a few emergencies. A girl suddenly needed an appendectomy, and without a motor car available to get her to a hospital, the operation was performed on ironing boards in the unfinished infirmary. Someone threw a few muslin blouses, called waists at the time, down a chute labeled waste. Then the well water ran out. Nonetheless, Mary Hillard was elated. We are in! It is all so beautiful and good, she wrote to a friend in late May. It is all so good a start, she added a few weeks later. A beautiful spirit was here, that matched our beautiful setting, and I think our life had a benediction in the sweetness and consideration that my dear girls showed through the days of adjustment, and that every helper, from the servants up, seemed full of. So that I shall always look back to those days of real stress with such deep thankfulness as being full of something living and spiritual. When the school term ended in June, the twenty seniors returned to Waterbury for a graduation ceremony with their former classmates at St. Margaret’s School, mostly day students who lived in the bustling city.

BY THE TIME WESTOVER OPENED, the task of educating girls already had a long and contentious history. In 1792 during the Enlightenment, eighteenth-century English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft had called for their equal education with boys. In Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, she urged mothers to teach their daughters so they would learn to think, and she herself started several schools for girls. Early on in New England, there had been dame schools, where young children were taught to read, write, and do arithmetic in the homes of women. After the American Revolution, it was regarded as patriotic to educate the future mothers of the republic, those who would educate the male citizens of the young democracy. Connecticut had enlightened attitudes about educating females, and many of the best schools for girls were in the state. One was Sarah Pierce’s school in Litchfield, which opened in 1790 to educate the daughters of merchants, landowners, and ministers, including educator