This is an affecting spot to me. The stones and brick and mortar speak a language . . . .
Mary Lyon
Daybreak is the time to see any famous place deserted. At that hour even the Washington cherry trees in full blossom are as lonely as an orchard on the moon. Similarly a college campus goes back into prehistoric quietude at dawn.
To recall some lively episodes of Mount Holyoke's legend, I wanted to go out before sunrise on a morning after a snowstorm and find the campus off its guard, trackless and deserted - its thousand feminine tongues all silent, including my own. An awe-inspiring thought.
The reason for my wish will be clear to those who know the ways of students. I needed to ply about, gazing up at one representative building after another, and meditating on this and that. Gazing-and-meditating is not one of the recognized social activities at a college. That was why I planned to do it when the students were asleep, at a time of year when Mary Lyon and her 'Breakfast Circle' saw daybreak over the snowfields a century ago. In late November that 'Breakfast Circle' had to be on deck before daylight, and to emulate their prowess was my plan.
A light snow flew down from Labrador to my order, and froze to a crust as it fell. Next morning would be my time.
The only trouble was that I had no alarm clock. I could have borrowed one, but I was a privileged guest at Dickinson House (more familiarly known as 'Faculty House'), and I disliked to rouse my friends. The only way for me to be sure of the dawn was to stand awake all night. Watchmen do it; trained nurses do it; I did it. This gave me a chance to watch the night wheel over South Hadley, and to set the college completely in its sky.
Mount Holyoke has a wide planetarium sky. There is not a puff of smoke to blur the stars. At midnight Orion stood over South Campus commanding the Hitchcock roof-tree; at two he had gone to the top of the sky. At three a yellow quarter-moon got up behind Prospect, and sailed, rocker-side down, over the roof of Mandelle. I perched on my broad window-ledge to watch it, and as I watched, two meteors fell, one as if into Lower Lake and the other shooting off over Byron Smith at a slant. Just before five, Arcturus and Venus were traveling together over Morgan Road. Official sunrise would not overtake them for nearly two hours yet, but I knew that the first streaks of daybreak would begin to light the campus shortly after five.
The early street-car from Holyoke was rattling up with all its lights on when I left my window, put on my coat, stole down the stairs, opened the big west door like a burglar, and saw Orion standing to the westward near the top of Mount Tom. Through the snow-crusted branches of the apple trees Orion was enormous, and the heavy masses of the Mount Tom range lay dark against the twilight of the western sky.
Mount Tom as a landmark has always stood high in the imagination of the College. For a moment I looked at the peak, wishing that one could find out the authentic history of its name. Among rival legends, Doctor J. G. Holland in his History of Western Massachusetts gives preference to the tradition that in 1654
a company of the first settlers of Springfield went northward to explore the country. The party headed by Elizur Holyoke went up the east side of the river, and another headed by Rowland Thomas went up the west side. . . . At a narrow place in the river below Hockanum . . . Holyoke and Thomas held a conversation with one another across the river, and each, then and there, gave his name to the mountain at whose feet he stood. The name of Holyoke remains uncorrupted and without abbreviation, while Mount Thomas has been curtailed to the simple and homely Tom.
Enjoying this legend too much to ignore it, I made a respectful seventeenth-century curtsy to good Mount Thomas. Then I sped around the corner of the Faculty House, past the evergreens, past the birches, up the slope, and into College Street, described in old documents as 'the highway leading from the Meeting House of the first Parish in South Hadley to Springfield.' No mention of the city of Holyoke is made in early records, for the simple reason that the city of Holyoke did not exist. In 1837 the edges of West Springfield were mostly meadow-land. After the dam was built the community grew rapidly and the city was officially separated from West Springfield in 1873. But in Mary Lyon's day there was no Holyoke town.
So, up the 'Highway from Springfield' I looked toward Mary Lyon Tower. The clock was still alight. Mary Lyon Chapel, appropriately enough, now stands on the original plot of ground where the corner stone for Miss Lyon's building was laid on October 3, 1836. The deeds for the land were signed October 1, 1836: deeds for two lots, one from Joel Hayes and his wife Ann M., and the other, which was a narrow strip along the edge of the Hayes lot, from Peter Allen and his wife Abby. These owners, in the language of the deeds recorded later that year in Hampshire County, did 'grant, bargain, sell, alien, release, convey, and confirm' these two parcels of land that lay between the highway and the 'center or thread of the Brook.' In the campus parlance of the present, the plot extended from the street in front of Mary Lyon down through the grove and the Pageant Field as far as the middle of Stony Brook at the foot of Prospect. The 'parcels' cost respectively $894.25 and $443.75, and comprised less than ten acres - only a patch, but a central one, on the spreading campus of today. The boundary marks mentioned in the old deeds are intimate and delightful: 'a stone set in the ground by the side of the highway'; a 'small maple marked with a heap of stones about it'; and the 'thread of said Brook.'
It is rather significant of the eagerness with which Mount Holyoke was founded that the corner stone was laid just two days after the deeds were signed. Miss Lyon's methods were brisk and so were her maxims; but there was no act more expeditious than the laying of that corner stone, and no writing of hers more enlivening to recall at daybreak than her informal memorandum for a talk to students on 'Gaining a Superior Education.' In her penmanship the lines move swiftly:
How high do you wish to rise in knowledge? How many things do you wish to know? How much time are you willing to spend? There are three classes of ladies who ought to consider well about striving to gain a superior education. 1st the few who have studied enough to love to study. They ought to beware how they form plans that will interrupt and break off their love for study. . . . But ladies are turned aside by a thousand things that never interrupt gentlemen.
Surely one of the most realistic texts in the annals of education for women: 'Ladies are turned aside by a thousand things that never interrupt gentlemen.' Poised on the slippery pavement I 'turned aside' and scudded down the pike, because I wanted to continue my campus pilgrimage near the margin of the southern boundary, at Hitchcock.
The elder Edward Hitchcock, once of Conway, later President of Amherst, taught the natural sciences to Mary Lyon. The name of Hitchcock House on the campus recalls also the memory of his son, Amherst's 'Old Doc' Hitchcock, who, like his father, served Mount Holyoke for years as trustee. Over from Amherst he used to come for Founder's Day, and on the platform he once practically 'stone the show.' While the reading of the Scripture was going on, Doctor Hitchcock rolled up the large Founder's Day program into a telescope and applied it to his eye. Then he focused this optical instruction upon the gallery where sat the college students all in white. The sunshine was streaming in through the stained glass windows over the heads of the girls. From one end of that angelic gallery to the other swept the lens of the telescope, not only during the Scriptures but also during the prayer. When the assembly in high good humor arose to sing, Doctor Hitchcock lowered his spyglass, turned to Miss Ada Snell who sat behind him, and said in deep and unembarrassed tones, 'Beautiful sight.'
Doctor Hitchcock's father, President Hitchcock of Amherst, would have enjoyed the fact that a campus house has been named Hitchcock, and even more the fact that the name was applied first to a cottage on North Campus and then to a house on South Campus; for dedicating and rededicating things was the elder Hitchcock's keen delight.
He had almost a mania for rechristening mountains and other natural objects [writes Claude M. Fuess in his history of Amherst, Amherst: The Story of a New England College. An Atlantic Monthly Press Publication. Little, Brown & Company.]. Assisted by the undergraduates - who had no aversion to controversy - he completely revised the nomenclature of the Connecticut Valley, thus arousing bitter animosity among the more conservative natives. When he tried to change Mount Toby to Mettawompe, by a formal ceremony of dedication . . . he found himself opposed by local opinion, and the name, though duly bestowed, never attached itself to that eminence. He deeply regretted that it seemed expedient to alter the name of Mount Tom, saying 'Every principle of correct taste reluctates against the name of this mountain.'
He led the Amherst students in the building of a path up the side of Mount Holyoke in 1845, and reports that a certain 'fleshy man' who had been climbing the mountain told him, 'You Yankees can do anything but I do not believe you can make a road there.' The people of the surrounding towns were invited to help, but apparently 'reluctated.' Whereupon, Professor Hitchcock in his recollections of Amherst continues:
I made a reconnaissance and satisfied myself that the work was feasible, though difficult. On stating my plan to Miss Lyon . . . she offered to meet us at twelve o'clock, at the foot of the mountain, with a dinner provided by her pupils, after we had completed the road. . . . We were promptly on the ground, and never did I see a body of men go into any enterprise with such a will and with better success. Before eleven o'clock the road was so far opened that a gentleman rode horseback over it, and by twelve o'clock the young men had the work finished and had made their toilet as well as they could with nothing but rocks for a mirror, and were ready to descend and meet the Holyoke ladies with their dinner ready by the welcome spring. This disposed of, the whole party ascended the mountain where several gentlemen made addresses and toasts were offered.
On many counts we owe gratitude to Professor Hitchcock. If he had been a narrow or a selfish man, he could have been a formidable opponent to the plans of Mary Lyon. Those were panic years around 1837, and to see a woman who had been his pupil gathering funds for a new enterprise in the very region where he was trying to keep his own institution financed would have maddened a smaller man. But he lent aid and hospitality from the beginning, and later used to drive through the Notch to give Miss Lyon's students an extra lesson in Physiology wiht a remarkable mannikin that he brought; or a lecture in Geology illustrated with specimens that he had gathered in preparation for his work on the Geology of Western Massachusetts under the auspices of the State. In honor of one of his less-known books, Dyspepsy Forestalled and Resisted, I paused before the sleeping Hitchcock House and enjoyed my picnic breakfast in the twilight: two tiny cakes of maple sugar each made in the shape of a leaf. We are thankful that the fates 'forestalled and resisted' Professor Hitchcock's attempt to christen the new institution 'Pangynaskean Seminary,' and to name Prospect Hill 'Minerva's Seat.' But nobody could possibly fail to admire one of his Spartan health-rules for the forestallment of 'Dyspepsy' - that one should start each day at dawn.
It was light enough now for a shadowy view up into the campus, past Hitchcock's nearest neighbor, 'Byron Smith.' Mr. Byron Smith was another staunch friend of Mary Lyon. He was a very tall, white-haired old gentleman in a day that many of us remember, and he used to take us on sleigh-rides and straw-rides and Hallowe'en parties, with bonfires at the top of some rocky uplands that he owned. When we got to the marshmallow-toasting stage around the campfire, he would tell us stories of how he and John Dwight, the Doctor's son, put up furniture for Miss Lyon; and how John Dwight met his future wife, Nancy Everett, the Governor's relative, when she arrived at the Seminary in 1837 and found John putting down a carpet - and how John Dwight forthwith arranged to deliver milk at the Seminary every morning; and how, years later, after marrying Nancy, Mr. Dwight immortalized the friendly Cow that had facilitated the courtship, as the trademark of his brand of soda, the Cow Brand, which even today has the same South Hadley Cow upon the box, together with a picture of a little bird in the corner, and a card with a bird-picture on it inside the box. The Dwights were fond of bird-lore, and many a child's interest in birds today starts with making a collection of these different pictures that come in the soda box. Byron Smith would always wind up the narrative with the account of how Doctor Henrietta Hooker went to New York to ask Mr. John Dwight for an addition to the Plant House, and came back with the Dwight Memorial Art Building in her pocket.
Mr. Byron Smith was a capital story-teller, and one of our last picturesque links with the pioneer times of Mount Holyoke. This house of his used to stand where Student Alumnae Hall stands now, and it is his orchard, that flowery mass of pink and white in the spring, where out-of-door parties are held when the apple blossoms are in bloom.
Out through that snow-covered orchard I went now, for a look across South Campus at two more buildings whose names suggest early history: Safford and Porter. The Honorable Daniel Safford of Beacon Hill in Boston was one of Miss Lyon's first Trustees. He owned extensive ironworks, and built the fence around Boston Common. Mrs. Sarah D. Locke Stowe, in her history of Mount Holyoke's first fifty years, tells how Deacon Safford was present in South Hadley on a certain occasion when Miss Lyon was about to send back a shipment of defective bedsteads. Deacon Safford thought that Miss Lyon was unduly critical.
'Let them have at least a trial,' said he. Miss Lyon replied, 'I am not satisfied to have such beds set up. But if you say so, Deacon Safford, we will keep a few of them.' And one of them was set up in Deacon Safford's room. It broke down the first night, and Deacon Safford not only acquiesced in Miss Lyon's judgment, but paid the extra expense occasioned by following his advice.
Deacon Safford not only gave funds and time to Miss Lyon's undertaking; he gave all the ironwork in the first building, including the Rumford Oven. He gave a piano as well, and when the Seminary opened he was discovered 'tacking down a matting' on the platform of Seminary Hall.
Miss Lyon had a keen eye not only for sound furniture but also for substantial men. It was no accident, for instance, that Deacon Andrew Porter of Monson was Trustee for almost forty years. He was retiring from his active lumber business on account of poor health when Miss Lyon went to see him with her request that he become Trustee in charge of building. Deacon Porter explained that he was obliged to give up business affairs because of failing constitution. Miss Lyon pointed out that this would give him more time to be Trustee. We do not know whether he was amused or not, but we do know that he consented, and outlived Miss Lyon by more than twenty-seven years. He lavished his time and money on the work, often anonymously, as have many of our Trustees. Miss Lyon says in her letters that when the pledges of outside givers were belated in being paid, 'Dea. Porter' often advanced funds of his own to cover other people's subscriptions that sometimes were never paid at all. In the matter of this thankless service, Miss Lyon confides in a letter to her friend Miss Zilpah P. Grant, 'Dea. Porter is the only man . . . who will lift a little finger.'
Since he gave the lumber that went into the original building, and since Deacon Safford gave the iron, it was especially appropriate that when the building, after fifty-nine years of service, was destroyed by fire in 1896, the fire insurance money was used to build the two residence halls, Safford and Porter, in memory of these two men. Deacon Porter is also commemorated, as will be seen in a later chapter, by his Hat.
Miss Anna C. Edwards used to tell us how, at the time of the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary, Deacon Porter said: 'Of one thing we must be sure - the public are not going to give us any more money. We have this large building and eleven acres of land down to the brook. What more can we expect?'
That was in 1862, in the darkest period of the Civil War. Mount Holyoke has seventy buildings (counting some that it rents to members of the Faculty) and two hundred and ninety acres now, and in the ghostly light of daybreak I wished that our beloved 'Dea. Porter' might walk these fields again to see how things have gone around in cycles: now in the stress of rapid growth - now in a lull of pause and tension with its recurrent motto, 'What more can we expect?' - and now in the half-twilight of a restless dream that comes just before a new and unguessed dawn.
This was going to be a beautiful morning in South Hadley. Above the eastward hills there was rose-color and faint turquoise and shell-iris - so delicate as not to dim the great star and the planet and the little tipped boat of a moon still holding a course in the upper sky. The coming day reflected slantwise on the snow with that sea-pearl color that floats over an ocean sometimes in a windless dawn. Against that pale light the buildings of the campus were made of coral. And indeed the college has grown almost as a coral reef has grown, even the physical structure of the buildings representing the contribution of many individuals - some of them still working among us, and some of them perhaps not now to be found anywhere in the world except as their gifts have become part of the living College that is here.
In every college that has not been conjured into being at one blow by some prosperous magician, there are to be found three sorts of creators at work on the growth of the place - and the buildings often lend a clue to some of their names. First there are the men who have been deeply concerned with the history and policies of the institution or bound up in its progress in some determining way. They are represented on our campus by everything that bears such names as Safford, Porter, Williston, Skinner, Whiting, Stimson, Dwight, and a host of others, not forgetting the hospitable and imaginative associations of 'the Towne-House in the Country.'
Another part of the material growth of a college is the direct gift of students, members and friends of the Faculty, and graduates. Typical examples of such gifts, to select only a few, are Student Alumnae Hall, Play-Shop, Peterson Lodge, Mary Brigham - and there again is a name that means a flash-back into history. For Mary Brigham was the fourth of the often-mentioned 'Five Marys' who have been appointed to Mount Holyoke's leadership. The first, of course, was Mary Lyon. The second was Mary Whitman, the same who, when she was Miss Lyon's associate, audited Emily Dickinson's cash account and the accounts of all the other students, down to the last 'mill'; the same who, in the demure language of the Seminary Journal, later decided 'to unite her destinies with Dea. Morton Eddy of Fall River.' The third was Mary Chapin, who had been a pupil of Mary Lyon.She saw the Seminary through the Civil War, and Miss Edwards pleasantly remembered her presiding over the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary, 'so modest and inconspicuous was she, bringing others to the front and doing them honor.' She left to be married in the spring of 1865, and some of the girls who went down to the wedding, traveling through avenues of flowering orchards, remembered May 17 as the ideal moment for springtime scenery in New England because on that day the blossoming fruit trees along the roadside had been so lovely for Mary Chapin's wedding.
All together, now, the five Marys: Mary Lyon, Mary Whitman, Mary Chapin, Mary Brigham, Mary E. Woolley.
There was an Acting Principal whose name was Mary too: Mary Ellis, who acted for one year in 1873; but we are counting only those who were appointed to full authority.
The 'Mary' tradition has been broken upon occasion. Sophia Hazen Stoddard, another ex-associate of Mary Lyon, served as Acting Principal for two years after Mary Chapin left. Helen M. French (later Helen French Gulliver) was Principal from '67 to '72. Julia Ward took office during the severe slump that followed the panic of '73, when so many institutions went under; and her administration partook of the rigors of the times. She kept Mount Holyoke alive, but became so tense in the process that when a certain girl was elected Class President she called her in and gave her a portentous lectore on her responsibilities to help in the emergency. Finally the conscientious young officer broke down and cried. Instantly Miss Ward, full of contrition, brought out Deacon Porter's mahogany tea-table, Deacon Porter's silver, and Deacon Porter's best china, laid th etable with her own hands, ordered up the most elegant of suppers, and plied the weeping student with rare foods. That very girl came back for reunion not long ago, and after telling this story said that it was very typical of Miss Ward, that when she found she had made a mistake she was more than anxious to 'atone.' And she always overdid the 'atoning' just as vigorously as she had overdone the original mistake.
It was around her time, and to some extent in the regime of her successor Miss Elizabeth Blanchard, that Mount Holyoke acquired a somewhat peppery repute for stringent 'Rules.' There had grown up an outlandish elaboration of the old 'Regulations Positive' and 'Regulations Negative,' left over from still earlier days and embellished to an extent that had sharply antagonized some of the most talented girls, such as Mary E. Wilkins and Sarah P. McLean Greene. If Emily Dickinson was amused at the attempt of 'Mistress Lyon' to prevent the sending out of valentines in 1847, she still could write in one of her letters, 'I love this Seminary, and all the teachers are bound strongly to my heart by ties of affection.' [From The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson. By her niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Houghton Mifflin Company.) But Mary E. Wilkins and Sally McLean simply blew up and left the earth in a fire-balloon at the restrictions later on.
A certain alumna whose academic name was 'Wild-Cat' has given me an account of the asperities that were still noticeable in Miss Blanchard's reign - notably a rule against buying edibles at the village stores. One gathered that the ex-Wild-Cat had never been one of Miss Blanchard's devotees. On a certain winter afternoon, Wild-Cat was fetching home a quart of oysters in a paper bag when she met the Principal on the highway. Miss Blanchard, suspecting contraband, joined herself conversationally to Wild-Cat, and walked her up and down the South Hadley streets, chatting of intellectual matters (Wild-Cat was bright) - while the oysters did wnat oysters eventually will in paper bags. Just why did the girls of those days choose to smuggle oysters, of all uncontrollable things? They seem a surprising favorite for an inland dish.
Evidently, from all accounts, Miss Blanchard was a combination of dynamo and martinet. She taught Latin superbly, and developed a course in the History of Art when this proceeding marked her as a pioneer. She kept her finger on every least detail of the running of the institution, steadily pushing it along toward becoming a college - against the opposition of many of the graduates and some of the Trustees. The slogan of the opposition was 'There is a need for just such a place as this is now.' In spite of all objections Miss Blanchard and her cohorts campaigned the matter through the Legislature, and won the College Charter in 1888. Whereupon the Trustees elected Miss Mary Brigham to be the first College President, over Miss Blanchard's head.
There is no doubt that Mary Brigham was an excellent choice. She was President of the Mount Holyoke women of New York, and had made an almost spectacular success of a school in Brooklyn Heights. She had twice been invited to be President of Wellesley, to succeed Alice Freeman Palmer; and Smith College had offered her a position on the Faculty there. These invitations she had declined, and at first she declined the Mount Holyoke election too. But since she was an alumna, after due pressure she reconsidered. When it became known that she was 'reconsidering,' the carriages of the ladies of Brooklyn were called out one slushy morning; and hither and thither the ladies went, gathering signatures on a petition asking Miss Brigham not to go. She did accept the office, but she seems to have had strange misgivings. In a letter she wrote to a friend, 'If it be not God's will that I am to be president of Mount Holyoke, he has the power to yet remove me.' On a certain railway journey she said to a friend who was in the same car, 'I have traveled from Westboro to Brooklyn many times during the past twenty-seven years, but have never had an approach to an accident, and I do not know why I should fear one now. But I do believe something is going to happen.' Something did happen. Not long after she made the remark there was a train wreck and Miss Brigham was instantly killed. Miss Caroline Boardman Greene remembers the afternoon when the news arrived - seeming so unreal and incredible a contrast with all the beauty of spring.
Already under Miss Brigham's leadership the alumnae of New York and Brooklyn had been raising a fund for the building of a 'cottage' on the campus. This fund was augmented in her memory, until, in 1896, the Hall of Residence as a memorial to her was put up so quickly after the old building was burned that the first hearth-fire in Mary Brigham Hall was lighted from embers dug up out of the depths of the ruins of the old 'Seminary Home.'
The windows of Mary Brigham Hall were glimmering now with the rosy light from the east, and so were the beautiful casement windows of Skinner Hall near-by. When Mr. Joseph Skinner and Mr. William Skinner built that Hall, were they surprised, I wonder, that it was instantly taken into the heart of the College, not only as the choicest of realms for classwork and conference, but for gatherings of seniors and alumnae upon its steps? The President of the College, the President of the Board of Trustees, and the President of the Alumnae Association stand on these broad steps every Commencement time to watch the long procession of reunion classes pass in review. Alumnae and all sorts of other gentry may stand on those steps, but traditionally only seniors are supposed to sit there. Sweeping my glance cautiously around upon the sleeping dormitories, I was tempted to sit down like a senior and see if the heavens would fall. But at daybreak after a snowstorm Skinner steps are cold. I decided to stick to my part as alumna-on-tour-of-inspection, and to my topic of the interest that the College has inspired among its graduates.
Alumnae have been indirectly connected with another great class of 'creators'; persons not officially identified with the place, but interested in it through knowledge of its graduates. Mary Ella Pratt, of the class of 1867, had to do with two buildings in this way.She was the heroine of that curious old tale about the telegram. The Acting Principal of the moment, Sophia Hazen Stoddard, received and read a telegram for Mary Ella Pratt, and as gently as possible broke the news to her that her mother had died. Tragedy descended on the place, and preparations for going home were under way when it occurred to Mary Ella Pratt that she would like a look at the telegram. It turned out to be not from her family but from the gentleman she was engaged to marry; and it was his mother who had died, not hers. She was so completely overwhelmed to learn that her mother was in the land of the living that she threw her arms around the Acting Principal and kissed her - even in those days a very astonishing act indeed. It was Mary Ella Pratt, later Mrs. Henry C. Houghton of New York, who interested Mr. John D. Rockefeller in giving a skating rink and a dormitory to Mount Holyoke - the second of these gifts perpetuated later by his son in the present Rockefeller Hall. And Doctor Houghton made possible the Pratt Memorial Music Building, to be named in honor of his wife's family.
Mary Ware Wilder, of the class of 1852, was the inspiration of two other buildings. Her husband, Mr. Charles T. Wilder of Wellesley Hills, gave Wilder Hall in memory of his wife, and in addition made possible the funds for the building of a dormitory in honor of Elizabeth Storrs Mead.
And that brings us up to very modern chronicles. After the death of Mary Brigham, Miss Louise F. Cowles was Acting President for a year. Mrs. Mead was elected President in 1890 - the first President of the College actually to serve. It is more than interesting, after all these years, to notice how certain of those who held office under her, one after another, rise up and ask that Mrs. Mead shall be given her 'dues.' She arrived at a moment when the Faculty was sharply divided. One faction wanted a clean sweep of everything old, and the opposing faction resisted with the firmness of diamonds the slightest scratch of change. Their rigidity was partly resentment, for they had always felt that it was most unfair, when Miss Blanchard had worked so hard to build up the Seminary into a College, that she should be denied the honor of acting as its first President. It was like the Biblical tales of an old leader left behind at the entrance to the Promised Land. It speaks volumes for Mrs. Mead that she actually 'passed the miracle' of going forward with that troubled Faculty, and handing it over to Miss Woolley as a working whole.
Mrs. Mead was a member of the same family from which descended President Marion Edwards Park of Bryn Mawr. Many years earlier, Mrs. Mead had been in South Hadley as the young minister's bride. She had sympathized with the students in their rebellion against the myriad 'rules,' and came back to South Hadley with the avowed purpose of making changes, and of staying in office only ten years. Both these purposes she carried out. She abolished nine tenths of the rules. She abolished the tiresome oral examinations at graduation time and the reading of essays on Commencement Day. She made some capital appointments. She established the hospitable custom of Founder's Day, and by her social amenities she made many friends for the College. She sat on the steps of Cook Cottage after the great fire, and when the girls waited upon her with a petition begging her not to send them home, she replied, 'We shall go right on.' With the building still burning, telegrams were coming in from parents biddin gthe girls leave for other colleges. Even President McKinley telegraphed his niece that he had made arrangements for her at another college and that she was to go at once. Grace McKinley telegraphed back that she was staying where she was - perhaps one of the first times when a presidential 'Must' from Washington had been abrogated by a college girl. Not a student went home. Mrs. Mead had her crowd with her in that emergency - though some of her sayings in quieter moments have never been forgotten for laughter.
She had a knack for saying quotable things and saying them more than once, so that they became catchwords. Repeatedly she used to warn the students against what she invariably called 'Unprincipled Men.' The girls of the Gay Nineties, far from being terrified at the warnings, made the phrase into a chemical formula - 'U. P. M.,' and spoke of the U. P. M.'s whenever they conveniently could. Also they never forgot Mrs. Mead on the subject of gingerbread. Mount Holyoke used to serve a particularly delicious kind of gingerbread; and, like A. A. Milne's 'King's Breakfast,' it was even more blissful with 'a little bit of butter' on it. The girls at Mrs. Mead's table, one evening, saved their butter to put on the gingerbread which they knew was coming for dessert. Mrs. Mead rebuked them in the name of all that was decorous, and added, 'You wouldn't butter your gingerbread in the White House, would you?' As it happened, one of the students at the table, Gertrude Hyde, was cousin to Grover Cleveland, who was host at the White House just then. She knew that His Excellency would certainly butter his gingerbread in the White House, or anywhere else if he wanted to. Thereby the remark lost some of its force, but none of its quotability. For more than a college generation afterward, any breach of ceremonial behavior was greeted with the lilting chorus, 'You wouldn't do that in the White House' - like a line in a tropical song.
Mrs. Mead dressed so well that in a triumvirate called by the students 'The World, the Flesh, and the Devil,' Mrs. Mead was 'the World.' And she was so good-looking that one of the men who used to have a good deal of work to do on the campus in those days was talking with me about it only yesterday. 'Which was the prettiest,' I asked him, 'Mrs. Mead or -' (two other notable beauties that I named).
'Well,' said he, giving the matter the judgment that it deserved, 'they were all good-looking, but I think Mrs. Mead had the prettiest face on her.' And with that ultimate tribute, I think that Elizabeth Storrs Mead would have been quite pleased.
She also should be credited with the fact that when Miss Woolley was elected to succeed her, she turned over her desk and affairs to the new young President in a two-hour interview, which, as Miss Woolley reports it, was anything but a deluge of advice.
With the irony of accident, Mead Hall is near the Gymnasium - an edifice for which the students of Mrs. Mead's administration were responsible in no ordinary way. Disregarding all the hierarchy between them and the Trustees, they sent a courier to Boston to interview certain Trustees and ask for a gymnasium. They got it too, but not without a most prodigious stir. That gymnasium was the place which the Glee Club from the University of Pennsylvania paused on their rounds when they were serenading the dormitories after 'Sophomore Concert' in 1900, and, in the words of the Mount Holyoke Monthly Magazine, 'serenaded the gymnasium, but getting no response concluded that it must be the residence of the Faculty, and so passed on.'
Students on the rampage can do much. But there is one more class of campus-builders besides all these: unexpected friends whose gifts seem to come out of a Blue Sky. In actual fact, however, that sky has usually been 'conditioned' in some way. One thinks first of Pearsons Hall in this connection. On the day when the newspapers announced the fire of 1896, Doctor D. K. Pearsons of Chicago telegraphed instantly the gift of Pearsons Hall, out of a clear sky. But Doctor Pearsons had been an ambitious young physician in Chicopee and South Hadley Falls in Mary Lyon's day, and had come under the inspiration of Miss Lyon.He went out to Chicago early, and bought lands in the center of town, believing that some day such land might increase in value. As an old gentleman of Northampton once said about a similar purchase of pasture lands in the spot where the business of Holyoke now flourishes, 'The investment proved to be a sound one.' Doctor Pearsons not only gave the Hall that is named for him, but also sped the increased endowment of the modern college blithely on its way.
Another still more unexpected blue-sky episode took place when a lady from a distant part of the country went to her attorney to plan her will. After most of her affairs had been dealt with, she discussed some gifts she intended to make to colleges, in addition to several that she already had in mind, and asked her attorney for advice. He told her about the two colleges he personally knew best, and she designated funds for these. But she also wanted to give some college for women in the East. Her attorney said that he had been playing golf recently with Mr. White of Mount Holyoke's Board of Trustees, and knew that Mount Holyoke would make any gift count for a great deal. Accordingly, into the document went a bequest. And some years later, behold, out of a clear sky, enough funds to cover the building of beautiful Mandelle, with its high windows to the rising sun, and its porches to the west wind that blows past Lower Lake.
Curious to reflect that nearly all the varied growth of the campus as we know it has taken place during the administrations of Miss Woolley and Mrs. Mead - and that not even Williston Observatory, which Mary Lyon with her interest in astronomy would so have loved, was built when she was here. There is at least one thing on the campus, however, that was in its place before Mary Lyon came, and she must have seen it often: the old White Oak tree in the grove. Along the path that cuts through between Safford and Porter I went now to look at that giant oak - its great boughs spread on the wintry air in twisted grandeur, like a drawing by Arthur Rackham for a fable of Druid prayer. One of the branches as big as a tree stretched far out over the slope near the grave of Mary Lyon. That little enclosure in the grove, with its marble shaft, snow-capped now, was very quiet in the early light. A flake of ice fell from overhead and I glanced up. Two gray squirrels sat motionless on the branch of the White Oak tree, looking down. Beyond them, in the tall birch tree near Porter, a lively red squirrel, little Gymnicus, was 'swinging birches' from the slender twigs at the ends of all the branches. Down the tree he swerved, scampered over the crusted snow without leaving a track, and ran over to climb another tree near the tower of Cornelia Clapp. Doctor Clapp used to say that she could always remember how old she was, becuase she was born the year that Mary Lyon died, and if she forgot the date of her birth, all she had to do was look on Mary Lyon's tomb - 1849.
Down the slope toward the Botanical Gardens I hurried now, with only a glance, for the present, at Lydia Shattuck Laboratory beyond Cornelia Clapp. Mary Lyon taught Lydia Shattuck. Lydia Shattuck taught Cornelia Clapp. Cornelia Clapp taught - not only the students who 'took' her courses, but in many a brisk and brilliant way most of the alumnae now living. The work of those three sparkling women almost spanned the century. For inspired teaching certainly they handed on a torch of flame.
It was almost time for official sunrise now, and I slithered down through the gardens, past the Talcott Arboretum, where the banana trees and the orchids looked enviable tropical behind their frosted glass, and around Cowles Lodge to the road behind Prospect at the edge of the eastern campus. I got there just in time to see the first bright rim of the enormous sun blaze up behind a cornfield of one of the distant farms. The bare elm trees stood dark against the sweep of a red-gold sky, with only enough of a trail of cloud running up over Granby to catch the color and to carry it around toward Bear Mountain on the north.
Too chilly to wait for the globe of the sun to come quite over the edge of the world, I scrambled up the slippery back of Prospect Hill, and brought the sun up faster as I climbed. In 1885, Mr. E. A. Goodnow of Worcester bought this hill from Byron Smith and presented it to the College. Up through the evergreens I clambered to the top, where the old Pepper-Box used to stand. Who remembers the Pepper-Box? Raise hands and I will tell you how old at least you are, to remember that little landmark - octagonal summerhouse, seats inside - the thing we climbed to, the place where we did ghostly things on Hallowe'en - the place where the class of 1911 had its Freshmen Frolic at sunrise when the sophomores were asleep and never knew we were up there until we marched down with war-songs of triumph and formed our class numerals on the slope below Mary Brigham Hall. Yes! Pepper-Box, Pepper-Box, where have you gone? Along with golf-capes and tam-o'-shanters and high-buttoned cloth-topped shoes. I thought of the shoes because I had just started down hill and had scooped a shipment of freezing snow into my sensible oxfords. Prying it out with a balsam twig, I slid down Prospect - not by the winding road through the larches and pines into Goodnow Park, but straight down the bare south slope through frosted wild strawberry vines to the Mandelle footpath, down the steps, across the bridge at the foot of Lower Lake, and up past the Music Building into the orchard.
I was on my way to breakfast, but I stopped still in my tracks half-way across the orchard, for there, under a very old apple tree on the crusted campus between Peterson Lodge and Student Alumnae Hall, a little red apple in the snow was having a private sunrise of its own. That particular tree, I knew, was what Mr. Byron Smith used to call a 'native' apple tree. He had brought it in from a woodlot himself and had set it out in the orchard. The apples were small, but remarkable 'keeping apples.' Every May or June, Mr. Byron Smith would bring around a few of them left over from the winter barrel, to show their bright color to his friend, Mr. Asa Kinney. It was one of those little fruits that was perched on the campus now.
Very red was the glossy little apple; very white in a ring around it was the snow; and within this ring of whiteness, an amusing circlet of grass, under the eaves of the apple, was very green. On that crisp ring of bright verdure, the durable South Hadley apple, so trim and so small and so resplendent, comfortably sat. But the most enchanting thing about that brilliant little nubbin was its shadow, blue-gray on the snow in the level beam of the sun - a long spindle-shaped shadow, six times as long as an apple, and at the tip amazingly thin.. I was measuring it by the known length of my own shoe with something to spare when the girl with the morning newspapers whizzed past me on her wheel and I jumped guiltily. Who was I to be found measuring the shadow of an apple on the campus in broad day? I looked up toward Mary Lyon. The shadow of Prospect was hitting the building at the level of Mary Lyon Garret now, and the Tower was in full sun. Quarter past seven by the clock. The first chime of the college day began to ring.
Back to Dickinson House I sped with cordial thoughts of breakfast. The Mount Tom range, where Orion had stood scarcely two hours ago, was now in a dazzle of bright sunshine. I looked from the range back at the college, and memory flung the campus one more thought - the enthusiastic remark that Miss Lyon made to her 'scholars' when the fresh and vital air of the place was still racing in her mood:
'This institution is destined to exist thousands of years!' exclaimed Miss Lyon. 'It is founded on a strong basis. . . . It is of vast importance, and could we look back upon fifty years of its existence, we should see its utility.'
Fifty years? We're looking back on a hundred years just now. We have seen its vivacity in the past and in the present. But perhaps the full scope of its 'utility' for the future has not quite dawned on us yet.