Prospect Hill itself will always be a symbol of what is possible by way of transformation on a campus: present into future, seedling into verdure, sapling into tree.
In colonial days Prospect was known as 'Bare Hill,' with the terse aptitude for just description that characterized the early settlers of New England. It was literally a bare hill, set down on geological maps as a glacial 'drumlin.'
When, in 1885, Mr. E. A. Goodnow bought the hill from Byron Smith and gave it to the College, the task of transforming the hill into Goodnow Park began. Hundreds of hardwood saplings were set out along the spiral pathways. These little hardwood trees were protected by quick-growing balsams and by more than a thousand English larches brought in to act as what the experts call 'nurse trees' until the infant beeches and oaks and maples should get a foothold on the windward exposures of the hill. Some of the larches had to be cut out as the stand of hardwood established itself. Enough are left, however, so that after more than fifty years of service these graceful 'nurse trees' are among the prettiest aspects of the hill. Their feathery light-green tamarisk fronds in early spring look as fragile as lacework against the heavy darkness of the balsams. The balsams look both ancient and eternal, while the larches are like a transitory vision that might blow away in the first high wind. But in the New England climate the larch is more durable and far less easily tattered than the balsam. Prospect Hill nowadays, with its fine groves of beech and oak and evergreen, is a natural bird sanctuary; and the slender boughs of the larches are set swaying by flocks of rose-breasted grosbeaks and goldfinches and warblers every spring.
Down on the main campus, meanwhile, experiments of a hundred years have been going on. From the first, Mount Holyoke took pride in making a pleasant prospect of its grounds. Landscaped in the early days by an expert named Olmsted, the lawns and drives have spread from the first few acres into a varied up-hill and down-dale region, with lakes and flowering trees. The founding of Mount Holyoke did not take a great deal of valuable land out of taxable circulation; the orginal property was an uninhabited tract with a path across it, an alder swamp near it, and what the early students used to call 'a ravine.' Little by little the College has improved its holdings, sometimes when those most familiar with the locality had pronounced improvement hopeless.
For instance, Mr. Asa Kinney remembers a controversy on the subject of a small spring-fed pond that used to collect in a hollow between College Street and the place where the buildings of South Campus now stand. When the College decided to drain that pond and make a good lawn beside the highway, Mr. Bates (locally known as Mr. 'Posy' Bates because of his gift with gardens) objected. He said there would always be a pond there no matter what the College might do. He said the Lord wanted a pond there, and that sooner or later the pond would certainly come back.
Sure enough, the pond did come back; 'Although,' remarked Mr. Kinney when he told me the story, 'I unintentionally helped the Lord a little to bring it back. I planted a row of willow trees on South Campus to screen out Byron Smith's barn which used to stand near the orchard, and the willow roots got into the place where we were draining the pond and choked it up. So the pond came back for a while. And Mr. Bates was quite delighted.'
Those willows and hundreds of other trees that shade the campus look thoroughly indigenous now. As you look up through the branches of the tall elms around the pageant field, you find it hard to believe that each of those trees is a 'plant.' Yet the avenues were set out by Mr. Levi Allen and Mr. Lucius Hyde - the same Lucius Hyde who was invited by Agassiz to go as a taxidermist on a scientific expedition to study South American birds, especially the condor of the Andes. Lucius Hyde, who was always called 'Toot Hyde' by his old friends in South Hadley, declined the chance to go. 'How'd I look,' said he, 'going around with all them scientists?' But when we glance at the exquisite perfection of his mounted 'Birds of South Hadley' in the Mary Lyon Room today, we can easily believe that Lucius Hyde would have looked thoroughly satisfactory to Louis Agassiz in the Andes.
He was the same 'Mr. Hyde' who whittled broomsticks into walking staves for Miss Lyon's students on the original Mountain Days. Up the mountains he would go with his cart and dig up little trees. Down to the campus he would fetch them and set them out. Mr. Kinney has kept up the planting of trees and shrubbery to the present day, until for the dendrology classes the campus is almost as good as an arboretum. All the trees on South Campus are of Mr. Kinney's planting except the old orchard and the tall dark evergreens near Student Alumnae Hall.
At the foot of Prospect, down by the brook, there's the myriad life of the seedlings in the Plant House, and the Wild Garden with its choice botanical specimens and its sheets of Wake Robin and bloodroot and anemones in the spring. There's the pool with lotus, and the cat-tails and lily-pads of Lower Lake. Years ago, when graduation exercises were held in July, the lake was white with lilies for 'Anniversary.' An old description mentions the young men who came as visitors to the exercises, each young man with a pond-lily in his buttonhole. Commencement now has been set back some weeks before the water-lily season; but Lower Lake is still a center for visitors, when, on the last evening of Commencement, the seniors give their Senior Serenade from floating canoes, each canoe carrying a garland of Japanese lanterns that reflect like golden blossoms on the surface of the lake.
Serenade from the pond instead of on dry land is one of the innovations that has come about of late; and another recent custom is connected with winter in the Plant House. Now and then, at a moment when some hothouse flower is at its best, the Department of Botany declares a Plant House Tea. To this tea are invited students and members of the Faculty who are interested in horticulture, together with their most favored friends. Down to the Plant House you go, and in at the little side door. Central tea-tables are set up under the tropical trees in the Palm House of Talcott Arboretum, and in every corner throughout the greenhouses little tables are placed for guests. You may wander at will through the narrow aisles and look at all the flowers, deciding which favorite blossom you will choose to have beside you while you take your tea.
Perhaps it is chrysanthemum time, and you may admire the well-set curls of a yellow prize chrysanthemum. Or perhaps the fairyland of sweetpeas is in flower against the winter frostwork of the greenhouse roof. Possibly a rare orchid has just blossomed and is the Guest of Honor for the Tea. Or you may like to go into the cool English Violet room, and remember how one young woman who studied in this department made her living for a good many years by raising Princess of Wales violets, so named when the Princess of Wales was Alexandra. Those violets were so beautiful that a fashionable Philadelphia florist engaged every winter all that their owner could grow. Into her violet house every winter morning before dawn went this Mount Holyoke graduate, to pick and bunch her violets by dim lantern-light; because English violets keep their most delicate fragrance when they have been picked before sunrise in the cool dark.
Or it may be that the house for experimental seedlings is your favorite; and there Mr. Kinney may perhaps bring out his boxes of blue fringed gentians - hundreds of little plants - which he has studied in the process of raising them from seed. Once he brought out a single seed-pod and opened it for us - the rain of tiny black specks of seeds looking like a shower of fine black powder, enough to start a garden of fringed gentians if every one should grow. The only drawbrack about the fringed gentian is its inherent scarcity. As Mr. Kinney pointed out, Nature herself doesn't propogate fringed gentians very well. True biennials, and capricious about their germination, they stand many a chance of running out. We asked Mr. Kinney how surely he could count on his crop of them every year, and he said that if he could take care of them and control conditions he counted on them about as you would on calendulas. But they are notional, as likewise are the native orchids that the Plant House experiments are now starting to raise from seed.
Discoursing on these forward-looking topics, the Plant House Tea goes on, delightful, picturesque, fragrant, and full of ideas. It is one of the gentlest of the newly established customs, a surprise for the returning alumna. Professor Alma Stokey points out that in a world of tea-parties this one is notable for being 'a tea without a buzz.' Some tricks of acoustics in the massed vines and aisles of earth and foliage absorbs the sound. No matter how many the guests, the place is hushed and tranquil, a veritable Tea-Without-Buzz.
Anyone who has watched a college through years of growth learns to expect the unexpected. The unexpected event may sometimes be the return of something old to the campus. A curious example of this was the return, not long ago, of the silhouette of one of Mount Holyoke's earliest Trustees. Doctor John Todd was President of the Board of Trustees when the Charter had been 'passed to be enacted' and 'approved by Edward Everett, Governor,' in 1836. August Edouart, on his sojourn in America, cut the silhouette of Doctor John Todd, as well as the silhouettes of the President of the United States and several ex-Presidents. Edouart's method was to fold his paper once and cut each silhouette in duplicate, giving one to his sitter and keeping the duplicate for his own portfolio. On his voyage back across the Atlantic, Edouart was shipwrecked and his portfolio of duplicates with him; but both were rescued on the Guernsey coast. In gratitude Edouart gave his portfolio to the little daughter of the cottager who took care of him. Years later the grandson of that child sold the silhouettes in London. Still later Mr. Horace Brown secured the John Todd silhouette and gave it to Mrs. Andrew B. Wallace of Springfield, who generously gave it to the College. And so, as a complete surprise, our early Trustee, after almost a century of absence, comes back in silhouette to preside over the treasures in the Mary Lyon Room. A reduced copy of this much-traveled shadow will be found among these pages.
The return of the old adds to our treasures. But the most striking sort of unexpected event is the arrival of something new. For instance, the printer's ink was hardly dry on the galley proofs of the early chapters of this book when a beautiful new Chapel was presented to the College, anonymously, to take the place of the crowded old one which had to shelter many other activities under its wings. Henceforth the view from Cornelia Clapp Tower will not survey the phenomenon of a post-office doorway directly under the Chapel, or any procession of wayfarers going in under the organ-loft to patronize the Bookstore and Junior Lunch. Mary Lyon Clock Tower will stand, vine-covered, as of yore; but the Chapel next to it will be altogether a place of worship. Doubtless before this chapter is published, other unexpected projects will be stirring. Mount Holyoke's President-Elect Roswell Gray Ham already has commented on the challenge of what lies ahead.
Few things could be more tantalizing than to be making a sketch of the College just at the moment when a second century is rolling its first eventful days up the sunrise edge of Prospect, into our view.