It was an illuminating experience and an honor to be asked to author three important chapters in a history of my alma mater, the Northfield Mount Hermon School, originally founded by Dwight L. Moody in the late 19th century. I covered everything from World War I to the present. That included the school’s transition through the “roaring twenties” from being separate girls’ and boys’ secondary schools for only poor kids to college preparatory schools, its transition to a single co-educational school uniting its two campus communities across the Connecticut River from each other, and through the challenges to boarding school life of the tumult of the 1960s and 1970s leading to the difficult and controversial decision to consolidate the school on one campus, the Mt. Hermon one. Here are glimpses of the three chapters I authored through the opening paragraphs of each.
Lift Thine Eyes
The Landscape, the Buildings, the Heritage of Northfield Mount Hermon School
Edited by Sally Atwood Hamilton
Chapter 8 Agent of Change
On April 5, 1917, the day the United States declared war on Germany, a slight boy with long slender fingers boarded a train with his father in Norwalk, Connecticut to make the trip north to the Mount Hermon School for Boys. When they arrived at the Mount Hermon Station, a truck took the boy’s trunk to the school while he and his father walked.
“The approach to the campus through the pines was at its glorious best,” Carlton L’Hommedieu ’18 remembered years later, “and made the long walk easy.” The dirt road they walked led between the school’s new brick gates dedicated just the spring before, gift from the Class of 1916. Once on campus, however, he felt “strange . . . because I didn’t know a soul or one building from another.” He had just turned sixteen and had never been away from home. He was terribly homesick.[i]
The next spring a Northfield Seminary student wrote home to her mother to report good news. Principal Charles Dickerson—a kindly science teacher the girls called “Daddy Dick”—had offered her a much-needed scholarship. Without it, she had resigned herself to returning home to work and save enough money to continue her education. Eva Freeman ’19 also wrote to thank Mr. Dickerson, expressing her “sincerest wish . . . to be able someday to repay some of the many good gifts that I’ve received from Northfield.”[ii]
Both Freeman and L’Hommedieu would do that, returning as faculty members in the mid-1920s at a pivotal point in the schools’ history. Freeman—or “Miss Eva,” as she came to be called— returned in 1925 to teach English, serving Northfield into the 1960s and recruiting her brother, Wilfred, and two younger sisters, Veronica and Beatrice ’27 to teach there, as well. L’Hommedieu, or “L’Hommy” as he became called as a student, returned in 1926 to teach Latin and music at Mount Hermon, fulfilling his dream, as he put it in his application letter written at age fifteen, of becoming “an accomplished pipe organist.” For forty-five years, his skill and presence helped set the tone for sacred music at the schools. Years later, when the position directing that program opened up, he encouraged a musician friend he met entertaining summer guests together at the Northfield Inn to apply for the job, and so it was that Al and Ginny Raymond came to put their distinct stamp on the schools’ choral music program over the next generation.
The schools L’Hommy and Miss Eva returned to in the mid-1920s teetered on the cusp of transformation driven by powerful social change—change, however, which had little impact on the physical campuses. Other than three new buildings at Northfield, new steam laundries at both schools, and remodeling the interior of Memorial Chapel, the campuses remained largely those Miss Eva and L’Hommy had strolled as students, (though Miss Eva took delight in noticing how even the construction of Palmer Hall at Northfield’s center saw “new paths spring into being overnight” forged by “the quick feet of . . . girls hurrying here and there.”[iii]) Nevertheless, it was changes in thought and direction that dominated these decades and lay the foundation for the school we know today.
By the1920s the Northfield Schools and the country at large were in the throes of momentous change. The continued growth of large-scale industry after the Civil War combined with agricultural stagnation in the 1920s increased the flood of rural people into the cities, where they struggled to piece together new ways to live in anonymous, less caring environments. Such were the people Moody and the YMCA movement, which he helped develop, originally sought to serve. The 1920s also marked a period of effervescent creativity in art, thought, design, and building that some have called “the second Renaissance.” American cities breathed the spirit of the “Roaring Twenties.” The “flapper”—that independent, often working woman of the city—was blazing new and, to many, frightening trails in fashion and personal life. Such changes stirred up sharp and wide-ranging conflicts in American life over marriage and divorce (which increased five-fold between 1870 and 1920), over the teaching of evolution, culminating in the Scopes trial in 1925, and over ideas about God and the universe that pitted “fundamentalists” against “modernists”—conflicts that shook Moody’s schools to the core.[iv]
Continued in Lift Thine Eyes
Chapter 9 From Idyll to Tempest
In May 1953, as America unveiled the hydrogen bomb and General Dwight Eisenhower’s election as president tightened the Cold War’s grip on the nation, Northfield’s alumnae gathered in Sage Chapel before their annual luncheon to hear from their school’s new principal, Barbara Clough ’29, the first graduate to head their school.
Appointed a year before, Clough succeeded Mira Wilson, who, facing death from cancer, retired after heading the School for twenty-three years. Like Wilson, Clough was from a family steeped in higher learning. Her mother graduated from Smith and her father from Yale. She studied French at the University of Lausanne and the University of New Hampshire before going to teach and serve as dean at the George School, a Quaker school outside Philadelphia.[i]
Clough assured fellow alumnae that despite inflationary pressures pushing up tuition and the annual deficit, the Northfield Schools were sound. Nearly forty percent of Northfield’s 520 students, she pointed out, were either related to alumnae, faculty, or had siblings at the schools (similar to Mount Hermon’s percentage). She declared this “the best indication of sound growth.” Furthermore, she told them, Northfield’s traditions, including its “strong spiritual center from which radiates a light to be accepted by each girl when she is ready,” were “bound to last.” “Youth like tradition,” Clough observed, and “although it doesn’t know it, is conservative.”[ii] No one present could have imagined that within fifteen years, students would be clamoring to overthrow any tradition not justified by reason, and that soon thereafter pressures for change would lead the Northfield Schools’ trustees to abolish compulsory chapel, and to merge the two schools into one coeducational institution.
However in 1953, in the wake of the Great Depression and World War II, the nation longed for security, order, and a return to tradition. Yet, even though “change” was not a watchword of the day, changes were proceeding apace. The postwar baby boom itself would swell the number of secondary school students in the 1960s only to see it shrink in the mid-1970s, putting enrollment pressures on all prep schools. Educated professionals moving to take advantage of expanding job opportunities found themselves raising children away from family in new parts of the country and in new impersonal suburbs. By 1963 Betty Friedan’s harrowing account of being a middle-class suburban housewife would appear, the divorce rate would begin to take off, and sixties feminism would further stir the pot of change in gender, family and sexuality. [iii]
Meanwhile, African-Americans from the rural South continued their Great Migration to cities in the North and West, looking for greater economic opportunity and freedom than the resurgent segregationist South allowed. In Chicago’s South Side, Henry and Emma Marie Hills, from Mississippi and Arkansas respectively, had just had the last of their three children. In 1968, their son Cornell Hills ’70 would be a first-year student at Mount Hermon when “black power” was the slogan of the day and people around the world watched on television as Harlem, Watts, Detroit, and Hills’ own South Side Chicago burned.[iv]
Continued in Lift Thine Eyes
Ch. 10 The Challenges of Coeducation
In the summer of 1973, Bill Batty ’59 and his wife Linda packed up their belongings at the University of Oregon and loaded their three small children into their Volkswagen camper to drive cross-country to live and work at “Bill’s school.” As they crossed the Great Plains in their camper sporting bumper stickers like “Another Mother for Peace,” the Watergate hearings flooded radio and television, pointing toward the humiliating resignation of President Richard Nixon the next year. After thirteen years of war, the United States had made peace with Vietnam, and although agitation for civil rights and Black power had ebbed, the tsunami of the late 1960s and early 1970s left powerful forces of social and cultural change in its wake. That January the Supreme Court’s ruling on Roe vs. Wade made abortion legal, and in July, as they drove, the federal government unveiled its new Drug Enforcement Administration. Among the top ten hits on the radio that summer were “Why can’t we live together?” and “Me and Mrs. Jones.”[i]
The school the Battys drove toward was, like thousands of others at the time, coping with seismic change. Coeducation was the order of the day. With very few exceptions, single sex schools opened their doors to students of the opposite sex, seemingly in many cases without deep thought about the wider ramifications of the change. In part, the decision was stimulated by new visions—and realities—in relationships between men and women, reflected at the time in the burgeoning “women’s movement” embraced especially by the white, educated, middle class. For Batty, the changes he found at his school seemed “a sign of a healthy and contemporary academic environment, . . . a younger version of what I’d just been experiencing” at the college level.[ii]
During Northfield Mount Hermon’s thirty-two years as a two-campus school, numerous renovations and some additions to buildings on both campuses were necessary, but few new buildings were required. Although several new structures were added on the farm, only two campus buildings went up during these years: Blake Student Center at Mount Hermon and Dolben Library at Northfield. Both hearken back architecturally to buildings surrounding them from the schools’ early days. During these decades, the focus remained essentially on forging a coeducational school grounded in its distinctive heritage and providing a curriculum broader than almost any other independent boarding school in existence.
From certain standpoints, the decision to merge Northfield and Mount Hermon seemed logical and relatively easy to implement. After all, the schools had similar founding missions and values and had long-established relationships, first through administration and the board of trustees, and then through social programs, music, and theater. But, in fact, merging the two schools with their different cultures—and communities—presented challenges not easily discerned at the outset.
Yet, young faculty arriving at the school at the same time as the Battys—Pam Shoemaker, the Byroms, Pellers, and Schwingels, for instance—all felt the difficulties of the merger still palpable in the air on campus. At her first English Department meeting, Pam Shoemaker was taken aback by the “prickliness” between Northfield women and Mount Hermon men. Some wouldn’t speak to each other. Even the question of which dictionary to use provoked heated arguments ending in insults that took weeks to get over. Northfield women, as Shoemaker saw it, were generally single, lived in dorms, and shared daily domestic routines with students and each other. The men had families and coached. “So there were sort of two worlds colliding,” she felt, “with a fair amount of misunderstanding and lack of sympathy.”[i]