I
F WE GO ALL THE WAY BACK TO THE EARLIEST
“ONCE-UPON-
a-time” days in the history of Holderness School, we finally arrive at that 1875 resolution of the New Hampshire Episcopal Diocese’s Standing Committee on
Education, the one that concerned the founding of a new church school “whose great object shall be to combine the highest degree of excellence in instruction and care-taking with the lowest possible charge for tuition and board.” For more than 130 years of school history, the excellence in instruction (at least as it’s traditionally conceived) has been a matter of teachers teaching in the classroom and—for the most part—these same teachers coaching on the slopes and playing fields. The caretaking has been everything else, the eating and sleeping and living together in one discrete community. Of course this is the essence of a boarding school. In a day school the community dissolves when the after-school athletics are over, when the classrooms and gym are empty. At a boarding school—even one that includes day students— the community persists, and its soul repairs to those other buildings on the campus skyline, the dormitories. In 1931, after Knowlton Hall burned down, Holderness School had not a single dormitory—only the Schoolhouse and the Carpenter Gym. That year students and faculty went to live in Plymouth at the Pemigewasset House, a hotel that otherwise would have closed for the winter. “Classrooms were set up in the chauffeur’s dining room, the smoking room, the tower room, and the lounge,” wrote Rector Edric Weld. “For most boys there was a bath for every pair of rooms. Daily a procession rolled down the drive for the Holderness campus, or for the horses stabled near the school, and for the gym and the athletic fields, and, Sundays, for the Chapel. . . .Fire escape ropes had been placed in the third-floor rooms, and of course there had to be one episode of trying them out.” Arguably the construction of its first dedicated dormitory— Niles House—is what saved the school from ruin. Only with great difficulty was Weld able to persuade the trustees not to close the school after the Knowlton fire, and instead to borrow money to build
Niles House, inside and out, circa 1937.
Livermore Hall in its place. If the school were to retain its belowmarket tuition rate and ever climb out of debt, though, Weld foresaw that the school would have to get bigger—and would need a dormitory. Construction began on Niles (with its 24 beds) in 1934, at a time when the school was under-enrolled at 29 students. Weld appreciated the gravity of this gamble, writing, “To go ahead and build a dormitory, when the small temporary rooms in Livermore were not
Arguably the construction of
all filled, required perhaps an even greater venture of faith than the building of Livermore.” Two years later Weld could cheer that “Faith was justified.” With 58 students, enrollment had soared to a point where not only was Niles filled, but so was a temporary dormitory built hastily to
its first dedicated
handle the overflow—Marshall House, which would enlarge on the
dormitory—Niles
planning had begun for Niles’ twin, Webster House.
House—is what
would not be relied on to stay long. “A situation was contemplated,”
meaning of “temporary” and remain in use until 2003. Even better,
In both dorms faculty housing was designed for single men who
saved the school from ruin.
wrote Weld, “in which about half the faculty would be unmarried, and in which it was hoped there would not be a turnover every two or three years, but with the supposition that masters would move to larger schools after five or six, since salaries could presumably never reach the height offered by wealthier schools.” So was this “excellence in care-taking?” At wealthier schools of the time students were often provided maid service. By contrast
6
Holderness School Today