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
