while walking down their bedroom corridors singing hymns. For a few years there was also a May Day dance with a queen and maidens, along with singing, dancing, and the winding of a Maypole.
As always, there was the emphasis on building strength of character. Echoing Mary Wollstonecraft, an early Westover catalog stated that the goal of academic work was to train the mind to reason and to control the emotions. The importance of thought was underscored by the motto on everyone’s brass belt buckle, “To Think, To Do, To Be.” Learning, Miss Hillard believed, should also stimulate originality and inventiveness: “A person of liberal education should radiate life and joy and color by passing everything through the prism of the imagination,” she liked to say. Freshman year studies were intended to develop concentration, while subsequent years were planned to inform and train pupils’ tastes in art and literature. All this education reached an epitome in the senior year. “The studies of the Senior Year, which the thirty odd other lovely girls who will make up our Senior Class next year are to have, are of an especially cultivating character,” Miss Hillard wrote persuasively to the mother of a prospective student who had spent the previous year in Europe.
Besides offering classes in art and literature, the school had many others in European and American history as well as a few in psychology, mathematics, astronomy, geology, physiology, and botany. The learning of languages, including Latin and Greek, was stressed, and plays were performed in German and French. Although the headmistress did not emphasize academics to the exclusion of everything else, she did, unlike Sarah Porter, put pressure on pupils by ranking them academically and reading aloud the list from highest to lowest on a day that was dubbed “Black Monday,” a practice modeled on boys’ schools. She also scolded poor performers. When freshman Marianna Talbott got the lowest grades in the school, Miss Hillard “gave me plain hell in front of the whole school,” the girl wrote in her diary. To encourage good grades, the principal established a policy that allowed a new girl who got over ninety in every lesson in a week to read in the library instead of going to study hall in the evenings.
Mary Hillard (left), Helen LaMonte, and Lucy Pratt. WESTOVER SCHOOL ARCHIVE.
Many graduates spoke glowingly all their lives about the brilliant teaching of Helen LaMonte, who was born the youngest of five children in 1872 on a farm in Owego, New York. It was the quality of her intellect that impressed them as much as her extensive knowledge. In her History of Painting class, which she taught in a large wood-paneled room, she asked pupils to research paintings and then paste reproductions of them in notebooks. “She was a magnificent teacher,” recalled a former student, who credited her with all she knew about art. Many others never forgot what she had said about particular paintings, and when they got to the Louvre and the other museums in Europe (sometimes with their notebooks in tow), they headed for those works of art. Miss LaMonte also taught Literature of the Nineteenth Century, the study of English prose and poetry. One alumna remembered thinking as she entered the class that “‘this is going to be good’—and it always was.” Not only was the teacher’s imagination a delight, but she also explained poems clearly. Another graduate, who wanted to stay at Westover until she had taken every course that Miss LaMonte taught, recalled gratefully that “it was she who opened my eyes to art and my ears and mind to poetry and literature.”
Part of a well-rounded life, in Mary Hillard’s opinion, was to experience the beauty of nature. Early on she had bought seventy acres and a small nineteenth-century farmhouse in the nearby village of Woodbury. While there is evidence that she acquired the property by borrowing money from friends, she had long believed that principals of profitable schools have the right “to share liberally in the earnings of the school,” and she apparently earned an excellent salary. The farm was her personal retreat as well as what she called “a holiday house” for student picnics, parties, and overnight stays with teachers and without any help from maids. She had adored picnics ever since her father had taken his children picnicking, and as headmistress she organized outings often at the farm, where everyone, herself included, cooked outdoors, cleaned up, and sometimes played baseball, and then took the trolley or walked through the woods at night back to Middlebury.
One of the most enthusiastic people about the outdoors was Lucy Pratt, a redhead with a plain face and a prominent nose, who loved the long walk from Middlebury, past Lake Quassapaug, to Woodbury and back. She also liked to lead girls on back roads all the way to St. John’s Church in Waterbury for services on Sunday mornings. Along with art teacher Helen Andrews, a quiet painter and etcher who had studied art in New York and Paris, she loved searching for and spreading the seeds of wildflowers they discovered in the woods. Trained as an elementary school teacher, she also loved to give parties for village children in the little white clapboard house near the Methodist meeting house, which the youngsters liked so much that they called it “paradise.” Miss Pratt, who worked at a standup desk in a little downstairs office with a fireplace, was responsible for business matters, housekeeping, and upkeep of the grounds. She was so soft-spoken and kindly toward the maids and maintenance men that they nicknamed her St. Lucy. Among the threesome who ran the school, it was she who was eminently practical and meticulous about details, and over the years she was school secretary, treasurer, and an assistant headmistress.
A self-effacing person from a large New England family, Lucy Pratt was also down-to-earth and possessed of a lively sense of humor, a firm ethical nature, and a strong dislike of pomposity. Like Helen LaMonte, she was devoted to Mary Hillard, but she could also deflate the headmistress when necessary, like the time she jokingly referring to her as “the Wise Woman” in a letter to Theodate Pope. When a girl was in danger of being expelled, Miss Pratt believed that if she would admit her mistake in breaking a rule she could stay, but if she would not or was untrustworthy, then she had no place at Westover. She was also dauntless: once when some seniors spotted a Peeping Tom outside the schoolroom, it was she who got into an automobile (along with, according to a rumor among the students, three men with pistols) to chase him away.
Exercise was an important part of a wholesome life, in Mary Hillard’s view, and an important reason for a school to be in the countryside. After a childhood of outdoor activities, she was convinced that young ladies suffered from too little exertion. The need for physical education for women was a relatively new idea at the time, and she was one of its ardent defenders. During Westover’s first year, girls were divided into athletic teams—Wests, Overs, and Seniors—for tennis, field hockey, and basketball games, and the three apple trees within the quadrangle were named for each team. The headmistress herself selected who would be Wests or Overs and read off the names in the dining room at the beginning of each year. Also, girls were encouraged to take cross-country walks or jogs for three or four miles in groups of at least four. In the winter there was tobogganing, snowshoeing, and ice skating on the school’s pond. For an extra fee girls could go horseback riding.
Miss Hillard had a way of getting girls to both go outside and learn poems by heart. If a girl failed to exercise and cross her name off what was called “the walking list,” she might be called on to recite at dinnertime the poem that everyone had to memorize each week. The poems were by Emily Dickinson and Emily Brontë as well as by Milton, Yeats, Tennyson, Blake, Stevenson, Keats, and by living poets who gave readings at the school like John Masefield and Walter de la Mare. On beautiful spring days, Miss Hillard, who adored poetry, might take English classes outside and read poetry to them as they sat on the grass. On other days she might suddenly appear in the schoolroom, put on her pince-nez spectacles, read a poem by Shelley or Wordsworth, and then quietly leave. The threat of being asked to recite a poem aloud, however, was a penalty that made some girls resent poetry and even dislike public speaking for the rest of their lives.
The first issue of The Lantern noted that a balanced way of life was not one of “solemn priggishness” but one that also “smacks of fun” for students and adults alike. For a Halloween german, Mary Hillard dressed up in a school uniform and a mask and passed around a box of chocolates until the girls realized who the tall, mysterious figure really was. At least once Lucy
