In late April, I had a first appointment with a new doctor, and it turned out that he had lived for some time in a house that was once part of the Hill-Stead property and had met a number of people with first-hand experience of TPR. The one anecdote he told comes from TPR's attorney, whom the good doctor got to know well. It seems TPR and her attorney were returning to Hill-Stead in her car when they came upon a couple of town officials who were looking at the sharp turn on Mountain Road near the Hill-Stead entrance. When TPR stopped to find out what they were up to, they suggested there might be a way to make the turn safer but that it would require that TPR yield a small piece of property. TPR turned to her attorney and asked "Do I have to do this?" When he responded that she did not, she turned to the two officials and said simply "no."
So what does this anecdote tell us? I suppose it is encouraging to those inclined to think of TPR as overbearing and difficult to deal with. Certainly it reinforces the notion that she was strong-willed and decisive, but we knew that already. We also knew she was eccentric, which raises a number of questions for me. First is the classic question about TPR and her era: did she somehow drive away three Provosts and two entire faculties and in so doing force her school to close? Second is what does "eccentric" mean in the context of a strong-willed woman in the early twentieth century?
So what about this idea that TPR was overbearing, perhaps overly meddlesome, and the trials of the Founder's Era were entirely of her own creation? Certainly there were those in her day who took that view. Cal Magruder '46 reports that the perception among students in '44 was that the troubles came as result of disputes between TPR and Brooks Stabler, and the faculty and students collectively sided with Stabler. Of course, like most Founder's Era alumni, Cal also reports he did not see much of TPR and that she was not a presence on campus.
By the way, the good doctor has since moved out of the house that was once part of Hill-Stead, but he now lives in Devonwood, which was of course once part of the school property, so in some ways he simply traded one former TPR estate for another.
