LITMIR.BIZ

      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.