Towpath Lodge

So it turns out this vacation has not yielded as much project time as I had hoped/thought when it started.  This week's "free" time has to be devoted entirely to correcting and planning as next week's resumption of classes gets closer and closer.  I have, though, finished going through the written sources for the Founder's Era, with the huge exception of Pete Seeger's one-man student newspaper.  I am hoping to spend some time in the archives during January and February.  I also hope to get over to Hill-Stead fairly soon.
Kegley Notes did not yield as much information as I thought it might, but it does have some interesting information about the changes the army made to the physical plant while they were here.  Some - such as the addition of the sprinkler system - were essential to the future of the school.
One thing I did not know is that TPR bought a facility known as Towpath Lodge, which was on Old Farms Road at the edge of the property.  Towpath Lodge was a privately-owned "country house," but it was set up for sizable gatherings; there were tables and benches for picnickers, and there was a dance floor with a loft for the orchestra.  The owner rented Towpath Lodge to church and company groups for gatherings and also hosted sightseers who came from all around to see his colorful gardens and manicured lawns.  Mr. Kegley recalled that on summer evenings the music and laughter from Towpath Lodge could be heard clearly in the school's quadrangle.  He also recalls that TPR abhorred the idea of a "dance hall" so close to her campus.  Accordingly, she instructed an agent to purchase the property from its owner, and in 1928 Towpath Lodge was converted into stables for the school's horses.  One can only wonder how the good people of Avon felt about seeing their "dance hall" housing horses for a woman who did not even pronounce "Avon" the way they did.

Eccentricities

One thing about which everyone seems able to agree is that TRP was a bit of an eccentric, and the sources contain any number of anecdotes to confirm it.  In the post labeled "Back At It," I mentioned the story of TPR's concealing a rattlesnake under her hooped skirt lest her mother see it and decide not to move to the wilds of Farmington. 
Another oft-repeated, probably apocryphal, story concerns her hiring of a gardener: it seems she told the prospective gardener to plant a series of rosebushes upside down exactly 18 inches deep; when he did precisely that, she hired him and then told him to re-plant the bushes correctly!
Another apocryphal story concerns the hiring of Percy Kammerer as Provost; she is accused of having gone to a city (New York?  Philadelphia?) telephone directly and scanned the names of Episcopal priests until she found one she liked, whereupon she proclaimed "There is my man!"  [There is actually a modicum of truth to that one.  She had decided on hiring a clergyman and did consult a directory - Gordon Clark Ramsey thinks it may have been Stowe's Clerical Directory - without making a hire.  Kammerer was recommended to TPR by the Dean at General Theological Seminary.]
She did call the school's telephone operator and spend twenty minutes instructing her on the finer points of pronouncing "Avon,"  and she did direct that Chef Candels serve coffee and brandy to the boys after a polo match. 
Her belief that the boys should have the social graces led to her decree that once a year the Refectory would serve artichokes.

As Expected...

Gordon Clark Ramsey lays more of the blame for the Founder's Era difficulties at the feet of TPR than does Sandra Katz.  He does point out that TPR was never known to interfere with the academic life of the school and indeed that she was traveling abroad during long stretches of the Founder's Era, but he clearly feels she did not offer her Provosts a genuine opportunity to run the school.  If he knows anything about Froelicher's drinking or Kammerer's philandering, he is not saying.  The result is the sense that TPR basically forced them out, either directly or through her meddling.  In Kammerers' case, he cites "the pressures of conflicts with the Founder," as the backdrop to his sudden resignation, and he seems to take offense at her frustrations with his prolonged absences from campus - often for admissions trips, he notes.  Ramsey clearly does not know – or does not believe, as Katz does – that Kammerer resigned in part because some of those “admissions trips” had involved liaisons with his former secretary! 
Indeed, there are some interesting factual discrepancies between the two sources.  That they should disagree over whether TPR was at the opening of school in 1927 (Ramsey suggests not, Katz says she was there but exhausted) or on where she was for the apocryphal choosing-a-Provost-with-a-phone-directory (Ramsey: Philadelphia, Katz: New York) does not have much impact on the narrative.  [See future post on TPR's eccentricities]  On the other hand, where Katz says the faculty resigned en masse twice (1930, 1944), Ramsey says they resigned in dribs and drabs in 1930, and he thinks their resignation in '44 was just a negotiating tactic of Provost Stabler's.  Ramsey mentions Stabler's March threat that the faculty would resign but not their collective May trip to Hill-Stead to do so.  He says that when TPR wrote the faculty that she was going to close the school "this left the faculty with no alternative."   The effect is to make it seem almost as though TPR locked them out, even though her letter stated that she would have kept the school open if any of the faculty had stayed.
The picture emerging most clearly is that the structure of the school - TPR's own authority as the sole executive of the Pope-Brooks Foundation and the confused administrative structure with several administrators, in particular the Master of Detail a.k.a. Aide to the Provost - lay at the heart of the various Provosts' concerns, and the faculty/ies were much more sympathetic to the Provosts than to the Founder.

Back At It

Christmas vacation has arrived, and with it a few moments to devote to this project.  The first few chapters of the existing school history, Gordon Clark Ramsey's Aspiration and Perseverence, contain some interesting insights.  He found in a history of Westover School an anecdote about the time when TPR was hoping to convince her parents to move to Farmington.  It seems she was walking outside with her mother when she looked down to find a rattlesnake on the ground in front of her.  Not wanting to give the snake any influence over her mother's decision, TPR stepped over it, concealing it with her hooped skirt as her mother walked by!
I didn't know also that TPR's grandparents - the Popes - were from Maine - Vassalboro - and that it was the failure of their woolen mill that inspired Alfred (TPR's father) to resolve to be a success in business.  Ramsey points out it was that business success - in the steel business - that created the fortune TPR spent building and founding AOF.
Looking again at Dearest of Geniuses,  I realized that Katz quotes a "cousin's son" who visited while a student at Yale.  Unless I misread the genealogy, that "cousin's son" has to be Brooks Shepard, who was my godfather!  Uncle Bubs, as we called him, was related to TPR and once told me he specifically remembered a fly in amber that enthralled him while he was visiting at Hill-Stead (I assume that visit was before his Yale days).

Hooray Archives

This week, Carol Ketcham, the school archivist, dropped by with some goodies for the project.  She gave me copies of Theodate Pope Riddle and the Founding of Avon Old Farms by Brooks Emeny, Recollections of Avon Old Farms School 1935-1941, by Clarence Derrick, and Kegley Notes, which is a series of Avonian articles written by Seth Mendell '52 to record the recollections of Bill Kegley.  (Bill Kegley was employed by Avon Old Farms from the summer of 1924 until well into the 70's; he was on site for the construction of the buildings and worked with Mrs. Riddle and every head of school through George Trautman.)  I had been looking for the Brooks Emeny piece, but I had no idea the others existed, and, since they represent eyewitness accounts of the Founder's Era, I cannot wait to have at them.  Emeny's book has the Deed of Trust among its appendices; in leafing through, I have noted with interest that the Aide to the Provost [1st called Master of Detail, this is the position whose mere existence caused so much discord between TPR and the Founder's Era Provosts (and caused some candidates for Provost to think twice)] had to be a graduate of a service academy and a former officer of the army or navy of this or any other English-speaking country and could not be dismissed by the Provost.  On a separate note, the name of the student newspaper, the Avon Record, is also set forth in the Deed of Trust.  Of course, the Deed is not entirely sacrosanct; the section entitled "Sports" specifically excludes extra-mural or interscholastic competition in anything other than riding, and through the years we have dropped the positions of Chief Engineer, Farm Manager, Forester, Steward, and, of course, Aide to the Provost.
Carol also told me that she has in the archives bound copies of all of Pete Seeger's '36 underground school newspapers.  Pete was an aspiring journalist when he was here, and he wrote and published his own school paper.  He once told me that TPR renewed his scholarship every year primarily because his newspaper was how she found out about what was going on at school! 
Thus, it seems there will be ample written sources for the chapter on the Founder's Era.  Of course, I hope to glean a great deal of information from interviews, but it is nice to know there is a wealth of information - most of it primary sources - available.
(By the way, you might well ask why none of the pieces mentioned in this post appear on the still anemic list of sources below.  The answer is that, for no reason of consequence, I have decided to add sources to that list only when I have actually consulted them in what I think is a fruitful way.  Hence, the list will hold at one source until at least mid December, after which time Gordon Clark Ramsey's book and the sources listed here will begin to appear.)

Dearest of Geniuses - Part III

An interesting question that comes up is how to present TPR's eccentricities.  Twice during the Founder's Era, the Provost and entire faculty resigned - the second resulted in the school's closing in 1944.  A third time (in between) a Provost threatened to resign and take the whole faculty with him.  Sandra Katz clearly suggests that "the school's historian" (Gordon Clark Ramsey - his book is next on my list) is firmly in the camp that says TPR was too meddlesome and unpredictable and that she hired people to run the school and then would not let them do it, ultimately driving them away.  Katz, though she makes it clear that TPR was not about to yield one iota of the authority that comes with founding, designing, and fully funding a school, submits that these famous departures say more about the Provosts than about the founder.  One of them was a secret drunk whose wife was burying his empty liquor bottles off campus lest they be seen in his trash, and another was altogether too friendly with women other than his wife (who, in turn, got to know the music teacher better than she should have).  In both cases, TPR allowed the Provost to escape with his reputation at least partially intact - at a cost of considerable damage to her own.  Katz does not deny that TPR was eccentric, but she presents her as more victim than villain in the various power struggles of the Founder's Era.
Ramsey's Aspiration and Perseverance may present these things in a different light, and TPR's cousin Brooks Emeny wrote a piece called Theodate Pope Riddle and the Founding of Avon Old Farms School in the mid-70s.  I am hoping I'll have access to that through the library, the archives, or perhaps Hill-Stead.  I am also hoping, of course, to interview as many alumni of the Founder's Era as I can.  Would that I could interview Dad and Grampa.  If I am not mistaken, Grampa arrived as part of the gang hired to replace the first faculty that departed en masse, and he was a member of the second!  I would love to know how he felt about all this, but if he ever committed those thoughts to paper, I have yet to run across it.
School is back in session - it is a busy season filled with the Toys for Tots drive and Boar's Head preparation.  I won't get to devote much time or energy to this project for a few weeks, and therefore I may not post anything.  On the other hand, this is fun stuff...

Dearest of Geniuses - Part II

So the Lusitania story, as related by Sandra Katz, includes waking up in a ship or boat called the Julia and being taken to "a third rate hotel" in Ireland.  Nothing there to suggest inspiration for the school's architecture.  Oh well; it is a good story.
One question that presents itself is how to refer to Theodate in the book itself.  Dearest of Geniuses calls her "Theo" throughout, as did most of her family and friends.  As a little girl, she was called Effie; workers on the school site referred to her as "Miss Theodate," though not to her face.  Through all of my years at Avon, she has been referred to almost exclusively as "Mrs. Riddle," which is the name I used in the last post.  She was not "Mrs. Riddle," though, until she was almost fifty.  She had decided to design and build the school as a tribute to her late father long before she married John Wallace Riddle.  Nonetheless, "Mrs. Riddle" is the early favorite; "Theo" works for a biography, but this is the history of her school, not her life, and I suspect that precious few people associated with the school ever called her anything other than "Mrs. Riddle."  At this point, at least, calling her anything else sounds - feels - inappropriately informal.  (In this blog, though, I will frequently resort to using "TPR," which is what I am using in my notes.)
It is interesting also to read that TPR thought of the school as "The Avon School" (and/or "Avon College") for a time before adding "Old Farms" because this section of town had been known as Old Farms for more than a century.  Grampa's Cum Laude Society certificate is on the wall of the study on Islesboro, and it says "The Avon School."  I have forgotten the year, but it would have to have been after 1930.  So that name - the Avon School - stuck to some degree.  Of course, it was "Avon" with the short "a" - pronounced as the English would pronounce it.  That, too, survived for some time; I remember our Islesboro neighbor Mrs. Sperry, whose husband taught science during the Founder's Era, saying "I am so glad you're at Avon," and using the short "a."

Dearest of Geniuses - Part I

By way of beginning my research on the Founder's Era, I am reading Dearest of Geniuses, Sandra Katz' biography of Theodate Pope Riddle.  To this point (I am seven chapters in and have reached 1914), I have learned a few interesting tidbits.  I didn't know Mrs. Riddle had had several commissions prior to building the school, one of which, Dormer House, looks very much like the school.  This matters primarily in that it seems to belie the old yarn that AOF looks as it does in tribute to Mrs. Riddle's surviving the sinking of the Lusitania.  Indeed, Katz suggests it was during a 1910 visit to England that TPR was inspired by the architecture of the Cotswolds; if that is the case, it cannot be that she awoke from a post-Lusitania coma in a small red sandstone village in the Cotswolds and then built the school as an homage to that village and her survival.
I am looking forward to reading the section on the Lusitania episode, and I am wondering what other Avon myths this book debunks.  (It is not entirely fair to characterize the school-looks-like-where-she-woke-up story as an "Avon myth" in the sense that I do not believe anyone actually thinks it is true; it IS a great story...)

Welcome

Welcome to Semblance of Permanence.  I am setting up this blog primarily because I have recently agreed to write a history of Avon Old Farms School.  I was approached with the idea by The History Press, and Ken LaRocque, the headmaster, has expressed enthusiasm for the idea, so I have reason to hope/believe the project will go forward.
The title Semblance of Permanence refers to a quotation from Theodate Pope Riddle, the school's founder who saw her school as, among other things, an oasis where the love of tradition would be fostered.  A Semblance of Permanence is also the working title of the book, if a book of which not one word has yet been written can even have a title. 
The idea of this blog is to reflect on and write about the project and perhaps to tell some stories that will not make it into the book.  I do not, though, suffer from many delusions about the entertainment value of the rantings of a harried history teacher in the throes of a book project.  The purpose of the blog is also to learn about blogging itself and the technologies associated therewith - in the hope and expectation that I might be able to apply what I learn to my teaching.
So welcome to the blog.  There will probably be long stretches of postless time (during school), and there will probably also be posts that do not relate directly to the book project.  If you have found your way here, you are probably related to me, or you know me really well, or at least you have a strong interest in the school and its history.  Whatever the case is, I hope you enjoy.