How to
Build a School Northfield Mount Hermon is largely built of brick. During a period of campus expansion that began after the turn of the 20th century, 12 major buildings went up on both campuses, and, with the lone exception of Sage Chapel, they were built of brick. Not just any bricks. Each one was stamped with the word “Pray.” Despite the school’s evangelical heritage, these bricks carry not an injunction but a proper name. Robert E. Pray was a brick manufacturer in Greenfield. Buildings at Northfield and Mount Hermon were built with bricks from Pray’s manufactory, which employed 30 people and turned out 4 million embossed bricks every year until the early 1950s. Stray bricks can still be found on campus, embedded in the backyards of faculty homes; they even turn up on eBay. Definitely not turning up on eBay is granite left over from the construction of Memorial Chapel. The chapel required 629 cubic yards of granite, and an NMH legend contends that Mount Hermon students hauled the granite from quarries in Northfield across the frozen Connecticut River. Receipts dating back to the fall of 1897 put this myth to rest. The work was carried out by groups of hired laborers, who charged 90 cents a ton to bring the rock from Northfield. One quarryman moved 224,440 pounds of stone in 12 days, and charged the school $100. The men took their loads across the Connecticut on a ferryboat in the fall, and after the river froze, over an out-of-the-way railroad bridge. The ice may have been thick, but apparently no one wished to trust it under a load of granite.
40
NMH Magazine
Courtesy of NMH Archives
By Peter Weis ’78