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 and the decorous simplicity of New England.” Originally inhabited by Algonquin Indians, the village was settled by English families in the early 1700s, and little had changed since then.
With its neocolonial façade of large shuttered windows, the school’s exterior echoed the village’s colonial past. Its square shape with everything—classrooms, bedrooms, offices, music practice rooms, a dining hall, schoolroom, gymnasium, library, infirmary, and chapel—under one roof was also reminiscent of the old scholarly and religious communities of Europe. Perfectly planned and proportioned as a place for girls and women, it was intended to create a sense of comfort and closeness. Certainly the sheltered cloister in the center of the school, where Mary Hillard hoped bulbs and bushes would blossom in early spring, suggested a sense of safety. One side of it called the Sally Port opened out to a view of the lovely Connecticut landscape. Many years later an architectural historian would note that the handsome and “prepossessing” quadrangle still fostered a feeling of community within.
Mary Hillard and pupils gathered in Red Hall, 1910. WESTOVER SCHOOL ARCHIVE.
In the early catalog, Miss Hillard went on to describe the inspiring aspects of the architecture. It blends “purpose with beauty, so that the sweet austerity, the charm and stately dignity of its academic and domestic atmosphere shall be an unconscious but constantly elevating influence endearing the place to all.” Older girls were supposed to initiate younger ones into this state of mind. And everyone else, pupils and teachers and administrators alike, was supposed to be affected as well. Like Sarah Porter, who had encouraged friendships between students and faculty, Mary Hillard wanted to break down barriers between the generations. “From today on you will realize more and more clearly there is no difference between us,” she would say to her girls. “We are all just pupils in the great school of life.”
Inside the large front door, the building was oriented both inward and outward—inward toward the grassy courtyard and out toward the rolling hills. The heart of the school was Red Hall, an airy two-story assembly room with a grand staircase encircled by a balcony, named for the blood-red color of its carpeting, curtains, upholstered couches, and extravagantly fringed and tufted velvet Victorian lampshades. Others believed the soul of the school was the small Gothic Revival chapel with its carved dark walnut woodwork and graceful arched window of clear glass. As so many backers of the school were Episcopalians on the board of St. Margaret’s School, the prayer books and hymnals were of that denomination, and the chapel was named after the same saint. It would be open to girls and speakers of all Christian faiths, so it was decided that the chapel would be dedicated instead of consecrated during a ceremony on a late October afternoon in 1909.
Expressing the understatement of the Arts and Crafts aesthetic of the time as well as the values of her childhood in a Protestant parsonage, Mary Hillard also explained in the catalog that “luxury” had been banished from the school for the “straightforward, perfect simplicity”