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In the Valley of the Clan THE STORY OF A SCHOOL BY WILLIAM HUDSON HARPER
THEY call it Their Valley, and I who have seen it, them, and their works, will call it Their Valley, too.
The other day, in quest of a school and home for a homeless boy, I climbed the precipitous steep of a verdure-crowned hill in Southern Wisconsin. A Vassar girl, summering thereabouts, guided and set the resolute pace. She, also, knew things. Upon the summit a joyous vision opens and goes far. Toward the four winds you turn, hungering to see; and withersoever you turn is the peace and sublimation
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possessing the basest when he gazes from aloft upon broad reaches of the earth. To the north and east stretch the valley of the Wisconsin River, a stream meandering, wide and placid, amid green and cultivated bottoms. To the south sweep a great ridge of hills, Bryn Mawr, the eminence that uplifts you; Bryn Canol, the second and Bryn Bach, the
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third. From the west smaller valleys dip to the greater valley of the Wisconsin. Roads tie them with golden ribbons; green fields of grain and pasturage carpet them; herds fleck them; lesser hills make them strong but winsome; farmhouses give them life and purpose. From hills to river, from river to hills, the gaze passes irresolute, for the hills rejoice, while the river entrances.
From this hilltop, if ever a savage climbed thus far for fleeing game, some red man, in the month of June, 1673, saw two paleface canoes paddling toward the Mississippi, which he perhaps knew to be the true "Father of Waters," but which these voyagers below, Joliet and Marquette, sought definitely to discover and add to the map of New France. They found that majestic flood, and the strife of the colonizing races for the conquest of the regions of the Great Lakes and the mid-continent in after years followed. What the savage must have looked upon with pleasure, and what I viewed with pleasure and surprise, is a landscape of New England contour and variety, and with quite the charm of some of the scenery of the English lake region about which we read with more or less reverence and voyage many salt miles to see. As the gaze passes from the broad river bottoms, resting with interest upon the wooded islands at the foot of our lofty viewpoint; upon the delicately eroded rock base of the wooded cliffs of the western shore; and upon the irregular knobs and hillocks defining the tributary valleys coming in from the west, the nature and isolation of these many eminences bid an instant's retrospect, and the picture of old earth in making uplifts its huge and horrid bulk. But we have not to do with things primeval, only with their fruits; with a secluded and happy valley, with hillside rising upon hillside, with an ideal environment for a home or a school; or, as the present instance truly is, a home and a school, one and inseparable.
In the decade of the '40's a Welsh hatter, seeking better fortunes, crossed seas and pioneered even out to Wisconsin. This man was Richard Lloyd-Jones. He pitched his tent upon a hillside in one of the western valleys trending toward the Wisconsin basin, and upon which we have just looked down. He multiplied, and honor rests with all his tribe. One is a sturdy captain in the fight for a saner, purer civic life in Chicago. Three are farmers, making green and rich these Wisconsin valleys and hillsides in this very region whose peace and charm and health I am herewith trying to make thousands of others feel with me. Two are exceptional women whose work as principals of a school for boys and girls in this lovely countryside I now hope to help questioning parents understand and appreciate. In 1887 Ellen Lloyd-Jones and Jane Lloyd-Jones, on the site and in the original frame of their pioneer father's farmhouse, opened a school for boys and girls, which from the first, after the nature of its founders, became a home school for boys and girls. It might have been a school for boys alone, or for girls alone, but it wasn't. Its founders essayed the harder proposition, and won. It was and is a school, a home school for boys and
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girls, and its altogether excellent name is the Hillside Home School, founded, as I have said, in 1887, incorporated in 1903.
Upon entering the state of Wisconsin from north, east, south or west, you may say to the train conductor, "Drop me off at Hillside," and confidently abandon yourself to the beautiful farm landscape whirling by, wherein, with a self-respect that commands yours, looms up the great red barn that is the "In hoc signo vinces" of Wisconsin prosperity. But it would save confusion were you to mention Spring Green as your specific railway destination, and then you would be set down at a thriving little village on the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway, 218 miles northwest of Chicago, 133 miles west of Milwaukee, and 35 miles west of Madison. At Spring Green, if you are provident --and if you are, your spinster hostesses will be more so--there will be transportation waiting, and over the pleasant bottoms and over the big river you will be comfortably carried until you poke your curious head into the Delectable Valley, into Their Valley, into the valley of the clan of the Lloyd-Joneses, when you promptly surrender all conservative misgivings in one optimistic outburst--"Whatever is is right." But lest you are resistant--as the prudent are--and lest my mountain top grandiloquence hasn't awed you, nor my summary three-and-ahalf-mile gallop from station to valley caught you short of breath and submissive, let us proceed more slowly, proving all things, and especially holding fast to the sisters Lloyd-Jones. The proposition I have thus far sought the reader to take in, simply is, that up in Wisconsin on a hill in a valley is a school--in beautiful, picturesque and healthful Wisconsin, on a gentle hillside in a lovely valley, a very good school, a very good school conducted by two admirable and interesting women, Ellen and Jane Lloyd-Jones. Particularly, this unusual sanctuary for children who need home and school combined--and what child does not?--is of soul and substance as I shall now describe.
To think of the Hillside Home School rightly, one must think not only of teachers, houses and apparatus--the scholastic life--but of a free, glorious and abounding nature existence, the outdoor life. Nothing impresses the observer more favorably about this unique home school than the inducements to be happy and sound, and in becoming so, to learn the forces and laws of living. First, the school property is a practical farm, and it adjoins other farms whose interests, for kindred's sake, are one with the management of the school, and therefore with the high objective to make hillside and valley, near and far, a safe and inviting field for exploration and pastime, and a laboratory for research into every science that excites the eternal juvenile "Why." In equipment the school has grown and grown until accommodations scarce remain for the three-score children and youth now occupying as domiciles and workrooms a half-dozen buildings. The school plant is extraordinarily attractive and efficient. On the farm side, the country house side and the school side, manifest purpose, intelligence and art everywhere declare that the means are here at hand to make a
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child happy and bring it up in the way it should go. Approaching the school property from the valley highroad, the main school dwelling rises gabled and green-shingled from the green hillside. Vines clamber upon, and wisteria sways luxuriantly from its porches. The windows look upon you hospitably, while the touch of weather in the ensemble suggests the rigors of storm and winter, for there are many degrees of winter here, yet not too many for the training of an American. Around about are no "Keep Off" signs, not even over the luscious strawberry patch. Steeply pitches the lawn on one side to a neighboring thickly-willowed ravine. Fine trees shadow this lawn. On the other side, the immediate setting of the main mansion and attendant houses merges into a hillside garden; into the barn properties; and in one direction into the foundation of the tower of an artistic brick
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windmill--an architect's creation, evidently--where water is drawn from sources at the level of the Potsdam sandstone, 150 feet down, and deposited for lavish use about farm and house in a rock cistern of great capacity. In another direction there rises a stubborn elevation significantly named Toboggan Hill, whence in winter any venturesome boy may plunge off the edge of the earth with an expedition something fierce and grand. From this summit, looking riverward, and one that would have been citadel-crowned in mediæval Europe, rises a big flagpole that on festal days flies a noble banner and tells even Spring Green, lying indistinct beyond the Wisconsin, that brave things are doing at Hillside. On the rear of the little plateau bearing the main
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