New Doors to Open on Campus Northfield Mount Hermon has seen its share of new construction in the past decade—the Rhodes Arts Center, the Bolger admission building, the Mackinnon and Shea dormitories—yet it’s been nearly 50 years since a new faculty house was built on campus. That is about to change. During reunion weekend in June, NMH broke ground on the north edge of campus for a neighborhood of six new faculty homes, one of which will be named after Mary Ellen “Mec” Peller, the longtime math teacher, dorm parent, and coach who died of cancer in 1997. “Mec always welcomed students into our home so they could relax and feel loved,” Dick Peller told the crowd that assembled for the groundbreaking. “A house for faculty is the best way we can honor her.” Building the six homes will cost an estimated $4.5 million, $1 million of which is needed to connect the homes to NMH’s wastewater treatment plant, electrical system, and generator. The school is funding the project with the proceeds from sales of individual properties in Northfield, the interest from a $10 million gift from Richard Gilder ’50 (the principal will fund a new science, math, and technology facility), and gifts from donors. The lead gift came from Cyndy Gelsthorpe Fish ’78, who remembers Mec Peller as a mentor, a big sister, and “a teacher in all ways.” The Pellers “had a complete open-door policy because they truly loved teenagers,” Fish says. “Anytime you went to their house, there were all these kids from different parts of campus who had a question about math, or they wanted to talk something over, or they just needed some advice.” One of those kids was architect Douglas Wilk ’83, who designed the Mec Peller House and incorporated the red wooden
Mec Peller (lower right) with students in 1993. One of NMH’s six new faculty houses, currently under construction, will be named after her.
P HOTOS BY GLEN N MINSH AL L AN D C O U R T E SY O F D IC K P E L L E R
door from Dickerson House, one of Mec and Dick’s former homes on campus. The remaining five houses were designed by the Breadloaf Corp. of Middlebury, Vt. Construction began earlier in the fall, and will be completed next spring and summer. Faculty families are expected to move in by the beginning of the 2014–15 academic year. Each home will be built in a Queen Anne farmhouse style, with four bedrooms, a porch, a full basement, and two and a half bathrooms. Because energy efficiency is a top priority for all new campus buildings, the houses will have one-foot-thick walls and highly insulated roofs and basement slabs. When NMH began its consolidation in 2005, the goal of the board of trustees and the administration was to eventually house the entire faculty on one campus with the students. Currently, a dozen faculty members still reside in the town of Northfield. The new homes will make room for most of them on campus. “NMH’s residential life program includes appropriate living spaces for our faculty as well as our students,” says Head of School Peter Fayroian. “Comfortable, spacious, and welldesigned homes improve the quality of life not only for our teachers and their families, but also for the students who regularly visit with them. And the placement of these new houses, in close proximity to the central part of campus, is a reminder to our students and their own families that they are part of a residential community.”
fall 2013 I 7