Update

In case you were wondering, The History Press did send a contract a while back, but the editor and I agreed to put off signing it for a while.  I was concerned that it has specific due dates and word count windows, and I suggested we wait until I had a draft of the Founder's Era chapter done - the theory being that writing that draft will give me a much better idea of how long the book might be and of how long it will take to write it. 
In the meantime, speculation has it that the four May, 1934 forest fires on the estate were caused by careless horseback riders throwing cigarettes into the dry grass by the sides of the trails.  Fortunately, there were boys on the tower (Dio tower? the water tower?) doing fire-guard duty; when they sounded the alarm, other boys raced to the scenes of the fires and put them out before they spread too far.

Censored!

The archives have two versions of the first page of April 29th, 1934's issue of The Avon Weekly News-letter.  On the first of them, Pete has written "Censored" across an article that does not appear on the second of them.  It seems Kenneth MacLeish's six foot Texas Bull Snake had suffered a fractured rib and so had been illegally smuggled into the dorm to recuperate.  The snake then got out, went behind the radiators, and disappeared into a gap in the wall.  As of the first writing, he had not yet been found.  It is easy to imagine how the notion that a six-foot snake was loose in the dorm might unnerve some students - indeed, the April 15th issue of the News-letter (which reported the snake's initial arrival at school) contains a cartoon depicting a terrified student who has awakened to find a snake on his lap.  The caption reads: We might wake up some time in the night and see.. A snake devour a branch of the family tree..  If censoring the newsletter was an attempt to keep the students in the dark, it failed; the boys who went to Hartford that week found a full report in the Hartford Times, and there was a subsequent notice in the New York Herald Tribune. 
Perhaps the whole thing was a spoof and that is why Pete was not allowed to run it; perhaps Avon, like Hogwarts, has a giant snake living within the walls...