Theodate Pope was a woman of indomitable independence and originality, with a strong social conscience, and a creative instinct that led her to build. These were traits she shared with her New England grandparents. Both grandfathers, as well as her father, had a passion for building houses, and her paternal grandfather preceded Theodate in establishing a school. That one set of grandparents were staunch Quakers helped stiffen her character and nurtured a deep sense of moral obligation.

She was also a rebel - rejecting the capitalism (but not the proceeds) that made her father rich, decrying the industrial transformation of the landscape, and censuring the strident contrast between the lives and dwelling places of the rich and poor in the rapidly developing urban cities. Her response to the major architectural concern of her day - the creation of a national architectural style - was to return to a vernacular idiom, time tested and developed by and for the common man. As an alternative to the modernization and mechanization of city life, which she saw as spiritually void, she yearned for the quiet order of New England towns with their ubiquitous white frame structures.

Theodate's paternal grandfather, Alton Pope (1807-1885), was the son of a Quaker manufacturer of woolen goods in Maine. Alton Pope worked for a while as a blacksmith before venturing into business as a partner in a small firm that manufactured oil-cloths. While attending a Quaker meeting he met Theodate Stackpole (1805-1887), herself the daughter of a wool manufacturer and a Quaker convert. They married in 1834 and, after the birth of three children, moved to Vassalboro, Maine. Here Alton Pope established his own mill, producing black broadcloth that took a first prize in London's Great Exhibition of 1851 at the Crystal Palace. As his business flourished, he acquired a large frame house, graced with four two story pillars, a front garden profuse with flowers, and a small fountain which added an accent of status. Here his youngest son, the future father of Theodate Pope, Alfred Atmore Pope, was born in 1842. At first the children, along with eight cousins, were tutored at home by a lame Quaker governess. Then Alton Pope and four like-minded Quakers established a Quaker school, called Oak Grove Academy, three miles from the Pope house.

The Quaker Society of Friends was the shaping force in the Pope family's life. They belonged to the orthodox branch, which emphasized a direct inward perception of God as an "inward light" present in every soul. At meetings of worship the Friends sat quietly to await divine inspiration, which would arrive when one of their members was moved to offer prayer or address the meeting in the capacity of minister. Theodate Stackpole Pope had a particular gift for speaking out, and she became widely known for the intensity and sweep of her spiritual vision. Throughout her life she maintained an austere dignity in correct Quaker dress, black with pleated front, her head covered by a starched white bonnet.

Despite its promising beginning in a sympathetic community, Alton Pope's mill ultimately failed. Hopes for a college education for the boys vanished. In her memoirs his granddaughter, Theodate, blamed the collapse on her grandfather's artistic temperament and his impracticality when it came to business.¹ The family moved from Maine to Weatheredville, a Quaker suburb of Baltimore just before 1860.

Then catastrophe hit again. On April 12, 1861, rebel troops fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, plunging the country into four years of civil war. An unruly mob with slaveholding sentiments attacked the 6th Massachusetts regiment, the first to be called up, as it passed through Baltimore on its way to Washington. Rebels began to destroy bridges in Maryland in order to halt the trains and the movement of Federal troops. By April 20th, Baltimore had become a hotbed of secessionist activity.² With people loyal to the Union fleeing north, the Quakers, believers in the equality of man, left too. The Pope family proceeded to Salem, a Quaker community in Ohio, and then on to Cleveland, leaving Alfred in Salem to attend a Quaker high school. Alton Pope's granddaughter, Theodate, would become another kind of pioneer by moving into a field sparsely populated by women.

It was in Salem that Alfred met Ada Lunette Brooks, who became his sweetheart and future wife. Her father, Joseph Judson Brooks (1807-1862), had taught school in Montpelier, Vermont, while studying law at night. Being tubercular, he moved west to the milder climate of Salem in 1833 with his mother and younger sisters. He found work as a clerk in a general store and taught one term of school. Then he opened the town's first law office. By 1838 he had prospered sufficiently to marry one of his former students, Judith Twing (1816-1860), the daughter of a wealthy Vermont iron mill owner. In anticipation of a large family, Joseph Brooks built a capacious house, which became famous for its indoor toilet and the hanging closets in the bedrooms. His daughter, Ada, claimed that her father was "passionately fond of construction" and that this was confirmed by his portrait, which showed him holding a folded ruler.³ This house belonged, until 1892, to Joshua Twing Brooks, Joseph's oldest son, whose daughter Elizabeth would become the closest friend of Ada and Alfred Pope's daughter Theodate. For Theodate as a young girl, this Salem homestead, overflowing with young cousins and older aunts and uncles at holiday gatherings, represented all the warmth that ideally envelops a happy family clan.

Joseph Brooks, apart from building a distinctive house, went on to become the first attorney for the Western Division of the Pennsylvania Railroad, which was routed through Salem, and president of Farmers Bank. Having established himself in a successful career before marrying, Joseph Brooks saw no reason why Alfred Pope should not do the same. Ada was sent off to school at Grove Hall in New Haven in close proximity to two of her brothers who were studying at Yale. She was forbidden to write to Alfred for a year.

In the meantime Alfred Pope's father, Alton, had gone to Cleveland where he built a mill and again set up a wool business with his two older sons. He lived on the banks of Lake Erie in a two-family, gray frame house shared at first with his eldest son Edward, who had married, and then with his second son John and his wife, Frances. Frances Pope recalled that Quaker meetings were held in the large rooms of Alton Pope's part of the house. Alfred joined his father's firm in 1865, marrying Ada Brooks a year later. He brought her home to a house on Wilson Street (now Davenport Street) to which his parents as well as his brother John had moved. By 1867 Alfred and Ada took up housekeeping on their own, living in a succession of houses until Alfred was able to construct one just to his liking on fashionable Euclid Avenue where his brother Edward lived.

Alfred Pope's career began its ascent in 1869 when, leaving his father's business, he seized an opportunity to join the newly formed Cleveland Malleable Iron Company, though he had to borrow heavily to do so. He secured loans totaling $7,000 from his Brooks brother-in-law Joshua, who had succeeded his father as president of Farmers Bank, and from Robert Hanna, one of the original incorporators and first president of the Cleveland Malleable Iron Company.⁴ Within ten years of his entry into the firm as secretary and treasurer, Pope became president, retiring only in 1913.

Blackheart malleable iron was much stronger than forged iron. It could not only be cast but could take tremendous pressure and repeated shocks. Its potential for the railroad was enormous. Products made from malleable iron were already being produced by an eastern firm, Tuttle and Whittemore, in Naugatuck, Connecticut. It was John Howard Whittemore who largely assisted and directed the small group of Cleveland businessmen who started the first malleable iron plant on the edge of town.⁵ With Whittemore's continual backing the company expanded to encompass a group of midwestern malleable iron companies in Chicago, Indianapolis, and Toledo. These were consolidated in 1891 to form the National Malleable Castings Company.⁶ The productivity of the firm, plus real estate investments, made Alfred Pope a very rich man.

He did not have much time for his daughter, his only child, born on February 2, 1867. Seventy years later she would state in her memoirs:

I was born at midnight of February 2nd and 3rd - arriving before I was needed and greatly to my mother's resentment. In the two years following, mother deliberately brought on two miscarriages, and, as a very small child, one of my earliest memories is hearing her tell my father that she would not bear a child for him every year.

My life as an only child was the extreme of what the lives of only children usually are. I do not look back upon this with regret because I feel that the solitariness of my childhood days developed in me an independence of thought which has made it possible for me to make independent judgments.

I have no memory at all of ever sitting in my mother's lap. My father was so occupied with affairs that I was fifteen years old before he realized he was losing his child.⁷

Ada Pope wanted no more children because her mother, who had borne eight sons and daughters at regular intervals, died shortly after a miscarriage at forty-four. This made her fearful of childbirth. Her only child did grow up surrounded by cousins, however. Later, when Theodate was nineteen, there was a question of the Popes taking in an orphaned five year old Scottish girl. Although Theodate strongly favored a new addition to the family, her mother ultimately decided against it.

The Popes' daughter was christened Effie, after one of her mother's sisters. Although plump and shy, she was also quick witted and strong willed. At nineteen she exchanged the name of her aunt for that of her grandmother, Theodate Stackpole Pope, who had only one more year to live. The name Theodate, which means God's gift, was softened to Theo by her parents and friends. It was not just love that fostered identification with her Quaker grandmother, however. Nor were the Alfred Popes practicing Quakers, although they addressed each other as "thee" and "thou." Like her grandmother, the younger Theodate felt strongly driven to "see clearer into the invisible, spiritual part of this life," and "wanted to satisfy herself in regard to the hereafter."⁸ It is also possible that she witnessed in her grandmother the same intense sensory awareness that she herself experienced at intervals - that this, in fact, was God's gift. But with young Theodate, the gift was double-edged. Unlike her grandmother, she suffered periodic bouts of depression and insomnia from her teens onward. This curse would overshadow much of her life, bringing dark episodes during which she felt estranged from her body and suffered what she called "over consciousness."⁹

The same year that Effie changed her name to Theodate, she started jotting down her innermost thoughts in a diary, in an attempt to understand herself and forge her own identity. The first entry, dated January 31, 1886 starts:

Uncle Jud, Aunt Hennie, Aunt Alice and Uncle Ned are here. This afternoon Uncle Jud [Brooks] gave me some good advice. He suggested my keeping a diary, saying that by so doing I could train my mind to grasp hard topics better. And that is what I most need. In reading a serious work, perhaps on theology I find it so hard to retain the few ideas that I am able to understand. Uncle Jud also advises me to commence reading Carlyle's essays. He says that if I make a study of the works of Carlyle, Emerson and Goethe I will find that the thoughts that other authors embody in their works are but echoes of the thoughts that those men have treated of so finely in their writings. Uncle Jud again advises me to keep my own individuality when reading a book. Keep on the outside of a book so to speak. Not let my thoughts and ideas necessarily be those of the authors.

Reading as a method of self-education and forming an independent judgment from that reading would be important tenets of the educational program she designed in her later years for Avon Old Farms.

The diary entries continue, intermittently, through the spring of 1891. Then comes a yearlong gap. In 1892 she described only a summer trip to Alaska with her parents. The next two volumes cover September 1900 through December 16, 1902, with a last isolated entry for March 28, 1903. The last volume, a day book, contains random entries from 1903 until 1906.¹⁰ Letters to her mother after her father's death, and to close friends, also give insight into her activities; but it is the diaries that best reveal her character and her aspirations and that illuminate the major themes of her life.

Throughout the diaries she expressed a strong drive to achieve something beneficial. On the one hand, she wanted an occupation in which she could reach out to others. Having a gift for words and an original way of expressing herself, she hoped that writing might be a possibility; for example, she fantasized about writing a novel sympathetic to the Quakers. But nothing materialized. She could not, she confided to the diary, "wrap her tongue around her pen to talk with it on paper." At the same time, she showed a talent for art and design. Her father, who supported her ambition, suggested she take up architecture. This appealed to her as a way of bringing beauty to an increasingly mechanized society. On the other hand, she wished to aid the less fortunate directly by charitable acts. Her favorite dream was to have a farmhouse in the country where she could take in poor children and also invite her closest friends to share this endeavor. This last theme, often repeated, harks back to an Edenic country existence in a large comfortable house, near the malleable iron plant, on Cleveland's outskirts.

When Theodate was seventeen, the Popes moved to the city's fashionable Euclid Avenue. She deeply regretted those lazy country days, finding nothing to make up the loss in the society her mother loved. But it was exactly this society, which, as an irritant, served as the catalyst to spur her on to fulfill her early aspirations. Architecture, the farmhouse, and aiding poor children would all materialize in time.

The diaries start with her last year at Mittleberger's school in Cleveland. Already harboring feelings of being an outsider, she labored to meld with her classmates. Yet she was bored and often depressed. By her own account she daydreamed in class or argued against the material presented. This included mental philosophy, Latin, physics, and English. She gravitated towards abstract thought, questioned her teachers incessantly about whatever she did not understand, and abhorred learning by rote. She also sought a close friendship with her teachers, giving presents of books and dinner invitations; turning to them for the love and understanding she felt missing at home. Perhaps she was already formulating ideas about educational reform, for in the summer she spent several months reworking an old composition, "An Ideal Educational System," which she hoped to send to Saint Nicolas. It is not surprising that she would favor a tutorial approach in the progressive educational program she founded at Avon Old Farms some thirty years later.

Her mental philosophy class set her to thinking about theological questions. She refused to accept religious doctrines on faith, much to her teacher's dismay. Her Quaker background led her to discard the idea of the Trinity or the concept of God as an individual being with a human personality. God, she decided, was a supreme force with a mind, a spirit present in all things. Christ was not divine but an ordinary mortal with a uniquely high moral sense. She started to attend church regularly, even though she had little regard for the sermons. But while the preachers' words carried no weight, she hoped they would help her to reach a more thorough understanding of theological terms and concepts. Increasingly she became interested in the possibility of the individual soul's attaining immortality through the development of a strong moral fiber and the attendant good deeds.

Much of her moral viewpoint came from her insatiable reading. Her favorite novelist was George Eliot, whom she fiercely defended against family members and friends who favored Dickens as the best novelist of the time. It was Eliot's delineation of character and the development in her protagonists of an unswerving rectitude that she found most appealing. Those characters who could not measure up to Eliot's high standards of Christian love, charity, and duty died or suffered terribly. Building strength of character and purpose would become one of Theodate's major educational tenets.

Alfred Pope wanted art, which was very important to him, to be a part of his daughter's life. When her art teacher at Mittleberger's stopped giving drawing lessons, Theodate began taking several lessons a week in drawing and painting from John Kavanaugh, a local painter and family friend. Kavanaugh had already been commissioned to paint portraits of Theodate's mother and grandparents.¹¹ He instructed Theodate in the techniques of figure studies, still life, and landscape. Among the possessions that Theodate saved are several drawings that include a few figures in a Kate Greenaway style. More important, considering her future profession, are three mechanical drawings of a bearing, a bearing on a drive shaft, and a drive shaft.¹² These drawings, of the type of steam engine parts that her father's firm was manufacturing, may well have been done at this time. Although she continued to take drawing lessons at her next school, Miss Porter's in Farmington, Connecticut, there is no record of her taking instruction that would have enabled her to execute architectural renderings. That she tried her hand at architectural rendering can be seen by three ink drawings she kept of a classical column shaft and base she drew at Paestum in 1889, a perspective drawing of a groin vault, and an elevation of the facade of Yale's Athenaeum, which was destroyed in 1893 (Figs.5, 6).

As Alfred Pope began to prosper, he focused some of his creative energies on his house. In 1884 he commissioned William Ralph Emerson to design an Americanized Queen Anne style mansion on Cleveland's Euclid Avenue (Fig.7).¹³ Chimneys, dormers, balconies, and an arcaded front porch jutted out from this yellow brick edifice. The ornamental railings of the porch and upper balcony, plus the elaborately spiraled wrought iron railing mounting the front steps, provided a sense of textural relief. The corner of one room, probably the smoking room, featured an inglenook or chimney corner with built in benches typical of Queen Anne and the early Arts and Crafts style houses (Fig.8)¹⁴ All the wood trim in this room, including the door, the built in seats, the baseboard, the inglenook frame, and the paneling over the mantel, is gouged out to give a highly stylized effect of hand hewn beams. There is an also abundance of purely decorative pegs, and the large hinges on the door were attached by nail studs. The Texas long horns over the mantel convey the ultimate touch of American rusticity.

Alfred Pope must have been considering the embellishment of his house with French paintings when the estate of Mrs. Charles Morgan, the wife of a steamship magnate, came up for auction in New York in early March, 1886, for he acquired a copy of the luxuriously illustrated catalogue. Thinking that this was a good opportunity for their daughter to learn a little connoisseurship, the Popes decided to permit Theodate to absent herself from school to accompany them to the New York auction. There was a lot of publicity, the New York Times covered the event as "the greatest sale ever held in this country." The Popes joined the large crowds which came to see the French nineteenth-century academic and Barbizon paintings displayed in the exhibition rooms at the American Art Association.¹⁵ Theodate was very enthusiastic about a "Head of a Young Republican" by Couture and a landscape by Daubigny. She did not like Millet at this point. Unfortunately one does not know whether the Popes bought anything. Theodate wrote that the prices were high, and, indeed, Jules Breton's Communicants fetched the huge sum of $45,000. The Popes dined with the Whittemores who, presumably, also attended this sale.

Not long after returning from New York, the question of Theodate's future education became a dominant family issue. Her mother wanted Theodate to attend Miss Porter's School for Young Ladies in Farmington, Connecticut. In addition to a cart and horse, Theodate was offered an added carrot in that her favorite cousin, Elizabeth Brooks, would join her as a roommate. Theodate's teacher suggested Wellesley instead. Since she felt pulled in both directions, her mother took her in May on a trip to New England to visit Wellesley. What pleased Theodate especially was an excursion to Concord where the beauty of old New England architecture made an indelible impression. She saw the homes of Emerson, Alcott, and Hawthorn whose works she had read. They also stopped at the old whaling ports of Marblehead and Salem. Wellesley was not a success, at least not architecturally, Theodate declaring it to have the appearance of an asylum. Her major reason for turning down college in favor of Miss Porter's finishing school was that it would have taken too long to prepare for the regular college program, and her summer would have been blighted by having to study math, a subject she did not relish. She wanted to get on with her life, and her father assured her that "if there was anything in a person, of real worth, it would come out whether they went to college or not."¹⁶

The town of Farmington lies in a fertile valley on the Farmington River nine miles west of Hartford. English colonists settled there around 1640 and not long after erected a Congregational meeting house. Architecturally Farmington is one of New England's most impressive towns. Several seventeenth-century buildings have survived, and superb examples of Georgian and Federal style houses line Main Street.¹⁷ The present Congregational Church, built in 1771 by Judah Woodruff, a local architect/builder, still presides over the street along with Miss Porter's School.¹⁸

In her memoirs Theodate described her first night at Miss Porter's in October 1886. The eight girls in her house, which included her cousin and Alice and Agnes Hamilton, sat on the floor in their dressing gowns.

There was a great buzz-buzz. Alice, with her curly black hair and red dressing gown, stamped herself upon my memory when she startled us by saying she was going to be a doctor. I pulled up something evidently from my subconsciousness [sic], because I heard myself saying that I was going to build an indestructible school for boys.¹⁹

If true, her ambition at this point was an odd idea, a crossover into a male domain that she might control. Yet there is a source for her idea. The Pope family watched and even had a share in the development of a new type of boys school that opened in September of 1885. Newton Anderson created a private institution that included manual and physical education as part of its curriculum and offered the first swimming pool in a Cleveland school. Alfred Pope played a role, although he was neither a director nor on the executive committee responsible for the school. He lent the large country house his family had just vacated in moving to Euclid Avenue for use until the school could complete its own neo-Gothic structure nearby.²⁰ However, whether or not Theodate Pope was weaving a mythical texture into her memoirs remains a moot point. The three girls became close friends.²¹

Alice Hamilton in her own memoirs, Exploring the Dangerous Trades, describes Miss Porter's as a school which inspired love and loyalty in spite of the fact that "some of the teaching we received was the world's worst."²² An elective system allowed students to evade their weak subjects. But all the students took mental and moral philosophy. She continued:

These last we studied with the aid of Noah Porter's books, but studying meant simply committing so many paragraphs to memory and reciting them to an elderly German who kept his eyes fixed on the ceiling, for he claimed that he knew both books by heart and need never look at the text. There was no discussion, and no explanation. The only one in the class who rebelled against this mode of instruction was Theodate Pope. She had an idea that mental philosophy really meant something and she would mull over Noah Porter and try to puzzle out some ideas instead of just memorizing it ...²³

The methods of teaching were evidently very much the same as at Mittleberger's school. Theodate's courses included French, Latin, mental philosophy, geometry, universal literature, and a Bible class, but she soon began to drop some of them. She wrote in her diary of at first being too high spirited and then becoming depressed for no apparent reason. Most of her last term, the spring of 1888, she spent recuperating in a clinic in Philadelphia and then at home with a trained nurse. These bouts of depression would recur throughout her life in periods of stress.

One wonders whether part of her neurosis was not caused by anxiety in trying to conform to what was expected of her by her parents and friends when she clearly saw herself as different. In a moment of despondency she confided to her diary that she should not be at boarding school because she was old enough in her feelings to be the grandmother of her classmates; that all she really had in common with them was her love of the dancing that took place after study hall tea. She was also troubled by her acceptance of a friendship with a girl who lavished her with kisses. She decided to cut the relationship off, which brought her only temporary relief from a depression that grew increasingly severe. If, indeed, feelings of physical attraction to women gnawed at her self-esteem, she did not enter them into her diary.

Whatever benefits Theodate received from her formal education at Miss Porter's, she remained very attached to its personnel. She valued highly the favorable opinion of the school's headmistress and founder, Sarah Porter, who became her model of a creative, charitable, and, above all, independent woman. Another woman, who was in charge of one of the houses at Miss Porter's, was even more influential. Mary Hillard, the daughter of a Congregational minister, was only five years older than Theodate. She took Theodate under her wing, giving her the affection she craved, guiding her choice in reading, and discussing the spiritual and moral questions that puzzled Theodate but which were not of interest to her schoolmates. In short, Theodate discovered a sympathetic muse and a friendship which continued to deepen and intensify long after she left Miss Porter's. Some twenty years later Theodate would design a school for Mary Hillard to preside over as headmistress.