LITMIR.BIZ

      Mary Robbins Hillard as a young woman. L. ALTMAN & CO.

      By that time Miss Porter had already chosen her successor, assistant principal Mary Dunning Dow, a former pupil and a widow who was much older than Mary. At the same time, the scholarly and elderly headmaster of St. Margaret’s School in Waterbury was looking for an assistant. His wife had recently died, and one day during a visit with a parishioner he confessed his difficulty in trying to run the girls’ school alone. The woman, whose daughter had roomed with Mary Hillard at St. Margaret’s, mentioned the young teacher as someone with energy and ideas; one thing led to another, and Dr. Russell offered Mary Hillard—whom he had asked to leave the school some fifteen years earlier—the position of assistant principal. When she told Miss Porter about the offer, the older woman urged her to take it, telling her that she had a talent for leadership. Mary’s reservations were about leaving the peaceful village of Farmington for the busy city of Waterbury. Also, she had enlarged her circle of friends in Farmington to include more sophisticated people than those in the parsonages of her youth. Miss Porter assured her that she would find similar people in Waterbury, like the fine old New England family of Edith and Frederick Kingsbury, who had two daughters her age living at home. As Mary Hillard turned twenty-nine, she decided to go.

      As Miss Mary Hillard walked rapidly through the streets of Waterbury in the autumn of 1891, she carried herself with more dignity and solemnity than usual, aware that she was being observed. A tall, slender, single woman with searching eyes, she was remembered for parting her long, dark brown hair in the middle and pulling it back into a knot at the back of her head. Instead of elaborate Victorian fashions, she wore the more practical clothing of the professional women of her day. “There was an air of austerity mingled with something athletic,” an observer recalled. “The shirtwaist with a collar and bow tie, the longish skirt, the absence of anything colorful, the modest hat, gloves, all bespoke restraint.” She brought a pearl-handled knife to St. John’s Episcopal Church in the city, where St. Margaret’s trustees and most of its pupils worshipped, to cut tight corset strings of girls who fainted during services. Although young men were awed by her, she got to know several Yale graduates who worked for The Waterbury American as well as families who knew her father. Direct and businesslike, she gave people the impression that she knew what she wanted and had no time to waste. “There were inner fires always burning in her,” observed a younger friend, the Rev. John T. Dallas, assistant pastor at St. John’s, who would get to know her very well.

      Her sense of urgency was undoubtedly exacerbated by the realization that St. Margaret’s was in debt and in decline. She had quickly discovered problems with the school’s faltering furnaces and its drafty, dilapidated Victorian wooden structure. About a year after her arrival, Dr. Russell became ill, entered a New York City hospital, and sent in his resignation. The board of trustees asked Mary to take his job. In an act of astonishing audacity by a woman barely over the age of thirty, she said no. Instead, she responded with a counteroffer in which she proposed to rent the rambling building from the trustees and run St. Margaret’s as her own school. As gestures to reassure the trustees, she offered to hire Dr. Russell, who had remained in New York to teach theology, as rector and to meet with them once a year.

      Mary Hillard obviously did not want to be under the thumb of older, more cautious male trustees who, she feared, might not be willing to borrow enough money to turn the school around. She felt supremely confident that any debts she took on would be eventually repaid as she increased enrollment. The trustees, including Frederick Kingsbury, must have been taken aback by the demands of the young woman, but by 1894 they agreed to them. Kingsbury, whose mother had gone to Miss Pierce’s School in Litchfield, was a firm believer in women’s education and most likely in women educators as well. The young headmistress was equally persuasive with Waterbury bankers. At the end of every school year, when tuition income ended and teachers had to be paid and repairs undertaken, she would take out a personal bank loan endorsed by Dr. Russell simply on the strength of a handshake.

      It was during this time in the late 1890s when she began to hire the teachers a few years younger than herself who would follow her to Westover and be lifelong friends. She asked Helen Dean LaMonte, a member of the Smith College class of 1885, to teach art history and literature. Lucy Bailey Pratt, a teachers’ college graduate, took charge of the kindergarten. She also hired Henriette Coffin, a young Frenchwoman, to teach the French language and literature, and Helen Andrews, an artist, to teach drawing and painting. In 1900 her younger sister, Fanny, was teaching psychology and history at the school, but she, like their oldest sister Martha, gave up teaching when she married. During the first decade of her sixteen years at St. Margaret’s, Mary borrowed and repaid huge amounts of money for repairs and, with the help of a gift in 1902, finally got the school

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