131604_04_11:features 20-27 3/23/10 10:35 AM Page 6
THE SPRING
of 1952, when Chuck Jarecki and his father arrived in Lakeville from their home in rural Pennsylvania, Headmaster George Van Santvoord told them stories about the Woods Squad he had founded 20 years earlier, which was then reaching a peak of popularity. Its primary activities – building cabins, clearing trails, and cutting firewood – were part of a robust outdoor tradition going back almost to the dawn of Hotchkiss time, when second Headmaster Huber Buehler kept a log cabin in the woods for entertaining friends and faculty. “I couldn’t wait to get to Hotchkiss so I could go out and chop down trees,” Jarecki remembers. “Woods Squad was my passion.” Of everything that makes Hotchkiss one of the world’s outstanding independent secondary schools, the Beeslick Brook Woods are the most quintessentially New England. Also known as the Hotchkiss Woods, this 200-acre span of hemlock, white pine, oak, ash, cedar, and sugar maple that lies south of Route 112 is the School’s wild heart, where deer forage, ferns grow from rock clefts, and yellow trout lilies bloom at brook side. Like so much of northwestern Connecticut, it’s also where layers of history peel away to reveal stone pasture walls built by 18th-century farmers, old railway ties from the Central New England Railroad, and even – unique to Hotchkiss – a group of structures created by hardy Grateful Dead fans of the 1970s: Mars Hotel, Terrapin, and Shelter from the Storm. It makes sense, then, that for generations of Hotchkiss students the Woods have provided shelter of one kind or another: Mysterious, inspiring, educational, and restorative, they serve as a respite from the pressures of academic life and a living laboratory whose unique value is increasingly recognized. “There are traces of the environment the way it was 25, 40, 80 years ago, and clues that help you read the history of the landscape and discover how the forest there now came to be,” points out Instructor in Biology Chris Oostenink, who teaches Introduction to Chemistry and Biology, popularly known as bio-chem, a core class for Preps and Lower Mids. “If they’re city kids, a walk in the woods is just a walk in the woods; they have no idea why a particular tree species exists in a particular place. No real sense of how the historical human impact on the landscape continues to shape it. But if you can get them to a point where they can start seeing, just opening their eyes to a different way of seeing the world, that’s a pretty incredible thing.” Part of a greater campus ecosystem comprised of newly acquired Fairfield Farms, the still-incipient Arboretum, and shimmering Lake Wonoscopomuc, the Beeslick Brook Woods have long been a resource for teaching students to see what they might otherwise miss. The practice likely began with George Van Santvoord ’08, the School’s fourth headmaster, “an
6
H
O T C H K I S S
M
A G A Z I N E
amateur naturalist and a great lover of the out of doors for its own sake,” according to Into the Woods: 1893-1950, written by Archives Assistant Joan Baldwin for an in-depth, eponymous School exhibit in the spring of 2008. Van Santvoord organized the Woods Committee – a dozen or so students and a handful of hardy faculty members – to appeal to boys “with interest in outdoor exercise” and “experience in woodcraft” but little interest in regular team athletics, according to The Record of November 1932. Rules were established for the construction, maintenance, and ownership of cabins, deeds to which could be transferred to lowerclassmen when seniors graduated. Over the next two decades, a thousand pine trees were planted, a pair of ski jumps constructed, apple trees were pruned, and geese and swans kept. A few students even tried their hand at beekeeping. In the mid 1950s, English teacher Blair Torrey ’50 began offering an elective for seniors dedicated, as a Hotchkiss Magazine story on his retirement noted, “primarily to the business of seeing and the close observation of nature.” Today’s nature elective carries on in the same spirit, thanks to Geoff Marchant, the L. Blair Torrey ’50 Chair, who reports that after the
OPPOSITE: Students joined a supervised walk in the Hotchkiss Woods on MLK Day in January. BELOW: Richard Brinckerhoff ’37 drew this beautiful map of the Woods when he was a student. Brinckerhoff went on to chair the science department at Exeter and publish two textbooks.
BLACK-AND-WHITE PHOTOS AND THIS MAP OF THE WOODS WERE PROVIDED BY THE HOTCHKISS SCHOOL ARCHIVES.
IN