and financial details, she was so able that one of the shareholders, banker James S. Elton, said he regretted that because she was a woman she could not be president of the Waterbury National Bank. Mary wrote Harris Whittemore that she was “on fire” about her school, and when someone declined to buy stock, she would simply ask again. In 1907 Theo’s architectural plans were finished and Richard F. Jones of Hartford, a contractor who had built Hill-Stead and also worked for the Whittemores, was chosen. John Whittemore signed the construction contract in September, but before building could begin it was necessary to move the Methodist meetinghouse and its parsonage, the Middlebury general store and post office, a blacksmith shop, a clapboard farmhouse, and several towering elms. All but three apple trees in an old orchard were cut down, and the soggy pastures of a farm were filled to become playing fields.
Westover School under construction about 1908. WESTOVER SCHOOL ARCHIVE.
When word finally got out about the plans, there was an uproar. It was feared that the trustees as well as the principal were abandoning St. Margaret’s. At a meeting in November, alumnae and others presented two petitions protesting the loss of the boarders to trustee Chauncey B. Brewster, the bishop of Connecticut, but by then most trustees were already backers if not stockholders of “Mary’s school.” Finally Miss Hillard was forced to publicly explain. In a lengthy letter to The Waterbury American, she complained about being misquoted and misunderstood and heatedly defended herself and her plan for a new school. She wrote that she felt “naturally” entitled to take boarders and teachers with her to Middlebury because it was she who had attracted them to St. Margaret’s in the first place. She explained that prospective parents of out-of-town pupils worried about their daughters’ lack of athletics and “freedom of life” in Waterbury. The handwriting on the wall became clear, she went on, when her “own old girls” began urging her to do something so that they could send “their daughters to me” to be educated. She also pointed out that without boarders at St. Margaret’s, there would be more room for the Waterbury girls. Finally, she added that the pupils at the new school would continue to patronize Waterbury churches, concerts, hotels, and businesses. The storm blew over, but a newspaperman wrote sarcastically that the young ladies will go to Middlebury, “where the bloom of the cowslips is unpolluted and the rarified atmosphere untainted with the soot of industrial progress.”
This ivory tower had been estimated to cost a quarter of a million dollars, but by the time it was finished it would be more than twice that amount. Although Theo designed the building without a fee, she never felt constrained by a budget. As expenses mounted, more stock was issued; then in late 1908 when a large amount of money had to be borrowed, Mary refused to agree to the loan until the stockholders had taken out an insurance policy on her life and until dividend payments had begun. (Afterward Mr. Whittemore admitted to her that he had never believed dividends would ever be earned, and he was surprised and pleased to be wrong.)
As construction got underway, the Pope’s chauffeur drove Mary and Theo to Middlebury almost every day. One moonlit evening when the two women went to Middlebury to inspect the new foundation, Mary felt overwhelmed by its size—it was a hundred and twenty-five feet square—so Theo calmed her by telling her to let her “spirit” fill the space. After the walls went up, stucco was applied, made of white sea sand, goats’ hair, and lime, supposedly a formula that Michelangelo had used for frescoes. They envisioned the large interior of the four-sided structure with its covered walkway as a place for walking in bad weather. “This quadrangle is filled with sunshine falling over the low roofs,” Mary wrote in the first school catalog. “The spring sunshine in these sheltered conditions will bring bulbs and shrubs into early bloom.” She was more than pleased. And after telling Mr. Whittemore that the building of the school was going “very well,” she added: “I took advantage of the fine sleighing and a beautiful day to take the schoolgirls out to see it. They could talk of nothing else for some time they were so charmed with it all, the location, the building, the New England green and all. It had just the effect I knew it would have upon them, and they are already planning coasting and skating and all the sports. There was but one dissenting voice among them. ‘But where is a corner grocery for getting olives and crackers?’ said one mournful fifteen year old, little knowing that one of my joys is the absence of corner groceries and soda fountains!”
Nicknamed “the Nomadic Queen” by the Rev. John N. Lewis, Jr., of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Waterbury, Mary Hillard ended up taking almost all the St. Margaret’s boarders with her to the new school like a pied piper, leaving only six girls behind with the day pupils. The teachers, maid, and handyman who followed her to Middlebury were those who were devoted to her. Many times throughout her life she would say that after loyalty to “Truth, Justice, Patience, Courage” and other ideals, she believed in loyalty to people. Most of them stayed for the rest of their working lives at the school called Westover, which was given its name because it was west and over the hill from Waterbury.
2
Creating a School:“A Real Girls’ Republic”
IN THE WESTERN WORLD THERE IS AN AGE-OLD DREAM OF womanly togetherness. Alongside the history of female exclusion from male institutions, there are stories of females voluntarily withdrawing together to embrace values that are absent in society. This tradition includes Amazon myths, Christian convents, and the Beguine communities of lay women during the Middle Ages. In 1405 Christine de Pisan wrote about an imagined City of Ladies devoted to the principles of Reason, Rectitude, and Justice. In nineteenth-century America, the antislavery, temperance, and other reform crusades gave birth to a feminist movement, and its aspirations were reflected in the nation’s poetry, plays, and political organizations. The early years of the twentieth century were the era of the educated “New Woman,” who was agitating for the right to vote, to contraception, and other forms of equality and emancipation. When the American Charlotte Perkins Gilman published a humorous fantasy about a peaceful female civilization in her periodical The Forerunner, many of its characteristics were already in place at Westover. Although no one knows whether Mary Hillard read those passages—which eventually turned into the utopian novel titled Herland—many of her ideals were taken from its pages.
In the fictionalized country that the author called Herland, women are not isolated, uneducated, ignored, inhibited, or dominated. When three young men discover this land, its women innocently challenge their assumptions about the nature of women. Gilman pictured a community of rose stone buildings set in a great garden and encircled by carefully tended forests of trees dedicated to the free and full development of everyone. This utopia pictures chaste courtship with men without the restrictions of marriage and the pleasures of motherhood through the parthenogenic births of daughters. Education, as well as enlightenment and empowerment, was a centerpiece of this ideal community. In her novel, Mrs. Gilman, the mother of a daughter herself, described spirited and fearless girls who were also eager learners. They were instructed in morality and other matters by the kind of reasonable, gentle, serene, and wise women that Miss Hillard wanted to bring to her school. The adults of Herland, in fact, looked like contemporary American women, the author observed, but without their “strained nervous look.”
In 1909, as the first full year of her school got underway, Mary Hillard herself, at the age of forty-seven, appeared dignified and self-confident. Likewise, Middlebury resembled the imagined Herland to a striking degree. The school’s first catalog, no doubt written by the principal, pictured it as “an old, quiet, orderly little village lying peacefully among the hills of western Connecticut … set in an intimate and beautiful park-like landscape broken by frequent streams and ponds, and dotted with the buildings, pastures, and woodlands of old farms, still largely owned and worked by the descendants of the early settlers. Removed from the activities and turmoil of our modern urban life, Middlebury furnishes an ideal environment characterized by the intimacy
