Theodate, having ardently embraced many activities, began to narrow her focus. She had decided before crossing the Atlantic that she would found a school for boys as a memorial to her father.¹ Not only would she design the school, but she would also determine its educational program. As soon as she had recovered sufficiently from her shattering experience on the Lusitania, she set about inquiring into English school systems. The people most interested in educational reform were those she knew through their involvement with the SPR. In June of 1915 she visited Eleanor Sidgwick in Cambridge. Mrs. Sidgwick had collaborated with her husband not only in creating the SPR, but she had also become principal of Newnham College, founded by Henry Sidgwick, the second women's college in England. The college consisted of a complex of red brick Queen Anne buildings, designed by Basil Champneys to nestle informally around a large tree-shaded lawn. The students' rooms exuded a sense of coziness with fireplaces and Morris chairs and wallpapers. But perhaps more important to Theodate was its policy that course work be designed for the individual student. Central to the discussion of these two women, apart from SPR gossip, was the topic of English schools for boys.² Mrs. Sidgwick arranged an introduction for Theodate to the headmaster and founder of a boys preparatory school near Winchester.

One does not know whether she visited another major supporter of the SPR, Sir Oliver Lodge, as she had planned.³ He, too, was interested in educational reform. In 1905, four of his lectures to secondary school teachers had been published as School and Teaching School Reform. Like Theodate he was against rote learning. He felt that much of the importance of studying a language, whether it be ancient or modern, lay in its potential as a scientific study of words. Even multiplication, he thought, should be demonstrated, not learned by rote. The emphasis was on "doing." Geography students were to take field trips and learn to make maps and surveys. Given leisure time in boarding school a boy could take advantage of it with "intelligent activity" in a carpentry shop, a metal-working shop, a smith's forge, a garden, or a laboratory. Above all, Lodge insisted that secondary education had a purpose beyond that of preparing for the university. Its major goal should be to inspire the student with enthusiasm for humanity and a desire to serve his community and nation.

After returning to America, Theodate read John Dewey's works and eventually met him to discuss his educational views while her school was in the planning process.⁴ She absorbed the educational concepts he had formulated just before the turn of the century - ideas which are similar to those of Sir Oliver Lodge but go further. The American educator maintained that a school must not see itself as an isolated institution; that the educational process must be a vital social process that initiates the child into real life on a simplified basis. Moreover, the child must be prepared for strong, ethical leadership by assuming responsible positions and by directing himself and others. Dewey also stressed the virtue of manual tasks as mental stimulants, and attempted novel ways to involve students in more natural learning processes than through being text fed.⁵ She also consulted Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University and a corresponding member of the SPR; Charles Eliot, president of Harvard; and Porter Sargent whose book, The Future of Education, is in her library at Hill-Stead.⁶ Finally, she compiled a loose-leaf notebook containing a framework for the organization of the school's staff plus her educational views with quotations from some of these educators.⁷

Theodate considered that her real education had come through her reading, her varied life experiences, and travel. What had benefited her most in school were close relationships with a few teachers who guided her on an individual basis, especially in regard to her reading. Therefore, at her own school, she wanted to develop a tutorial relationship between teachers and students, such as existed at Eton, which in many ways was her model. Having hated learning by rote, she also wanted her school to embrace the progressive precepts formulated by Dewey and Lodge in both the classroom and in extracurricular activities. And, like them, her goal was to train boys to become leaders in society.

She wished her school to foster characteristics that would stimulate good citizenship. These included the kind of bold initiative that her father had so carefully encouraged in her, a rugged individuality a sound moral character, and the ability to reason and to think abstractly. She saw a lack of backbone, willpower, and initiative in the sons of her wealthy friends who attended the "St. Grottlesex" schools - St. Mark's, Middlesex, and Groton. Impressed by Edward Bok's account of the value of poverty as a stimulus to achievement, she looked for something to replace poverty as an aid to developing character.⁸ This she found in G. Stanley Hall's belief, based on his own experience, that the strong, old New England character came from growing up on a farm where chores were interminable.⁹ And, as she had written in her diary and recalled in her memoirs, her first year of a simple existence on her own in Farmington had given her a first taste of "real life."

She planned a farm school as the best environment to achieve her goals. Growing vegetables, tending a herd of sheep, milking cows, and forestry were an important part of the program. The boys in the four lower forms were required to work on the farm eight hours a week in what would be called community service. An alternative to farm chores could include work in one of the shops - the smithy, the carpentry shop, the printing shop, or the power plant. On the importance of handwork, Theodate liked to evoke Ruskin:

It would be part of my scheme of physical education that every youth...should learn to do something finely and thoroughly with his hand.... Let him once learn to take a straight shaving off a plank, or draw a fine curve without faltering, or lay a brick level in its mortar; and he has learned a multitude of other matters which no lips of man could ever teach him.¹⁰

The boys were encouraged to learn the use of money by being able to borrow from the school bank for such individual projects as raising livestock or vegetables; the profits were theirs after the return of the loan.¹¹ Each boy was to have his own account.

The projects and community service would set up standards of achievement apart from those gained through academic training. Achievement, she felt, was "one of the most important things in the world," and she considered that one of the major offerings of her school would be the great variety of projects, scholastic and otherwise, from which a boy might choose.¹² The variety of extracurricular activities would also give the boys an opportunity to develop their potential, thus helping them in their future choice of occupation. On this point she liked to quote Elbert Hubbard, the Roycrofter and American follower of Ruskin and Morris: "Blessed is that man who had found his work."¹³ She even planned for a psychologist from Yale to make up psychological tests so that the school could help each boy develop his capabilities.¹⁴ There was yet another aspect to these activities. Theodate, who thought of herself as a socialist, wrote in her preliminary prospectus sent out in 1924, "Acquaint yourselves in youth with homely tasks, that you may be one in spirit with those who labor." But she was quite emphatic that she was not creating a trade school.

She felt, like Dewey, that the school should not be an isolated institution but a microcosm of society in embryonic form out of which she wished to produce potential leaders. She conceived of her school as a New England village, the village of Old Farms, in which all the school residents would be participants. To foster the practice of citizenship, she gave a measure of self government to the student body by granting a charter to form a government modeled on that of a New England town. The students governed themselves under the supervision of the dean. Town meetings were held twice a year for the election of officials from the two upper forms. These would include a judge for a court system and a board of seven councillors.

In her notes on educational policies Theodate explains her desire to create leaders, independent in thought and strong in moral principles. Based on the results of army intelligence tests, which showed that 45% of the soldiers examined had mental ages of twelve or below, she surmised that this statistic could probably be applied to the population at large.¹⁵ She concluded that a high percentage of citizens were thus uneducable:

We are in the habit of speaking of the illiterate classes and thinking that education will cure the ills of democracy. The ills due to democracy cannot be cured so easily as long as we have such high percentage of citizens who are not only uneducated but uneducable. This class of citizens is an easy prey for [an] unprincipled demagogue. ...

In a democracy where every adult citizen has a vote the political power of this uneducated and uneducable class is appalling. There is, however, a fact well worth noting and it is that although the herd cannot be trusted to deal with an intellectual concept, it can always be trusted, under the guidance of an ethical leader, to perceive a moral issue.

As she was mentally building this male microcosm, Theodate took a step that surprised many of her friends. At forty-nine, almost a year after the Lusitania disaster, she married the kind of man she wished her future students would emulate - John Wallace Riddle (1864-1941). A former diplomat, he was what Theodate considered "a gentleman of the old school," being intelligent, broadly educated, and well-traveled, besides having beautiful manners.¹⁶ He was agreeable to her projects, replacing the moral support her father had once given. On his side, the marriage promised financial security.

Theodate luxuriated in the expansion of her family through the addition of her husband's siblings and the enrichment of her social life through marriage. She was quite fond of her husband, choosing a pet nickname Totem, referring to his height. He was tall and lean, his bushy eyebrows and bristly mustache creating a forbidding expression which belied his patient kindness. Yet the word "totem" also suggests that he was to Theodate the factotum she would have attempted, albeit unconsciously, to turn any husband. As for her own name, she decided to keep it; her professional activities remained her priority. When John Riddle took up service in military intelligence with the entrance of the United States into the First World War in 1917, Theodate did not follow him to Washington.

John Riddle was not the only male brought under Hill-Stead's roof at this time. After little Gordon died of polio in December of 1916, Theodate took on two more wards. She felt that if she were going to be involved with a boys school it would be valuable to have some first-hand experience. The first to arrive, in April 1917, was Paul Martin, a ten-year-old orphan. He was followed the next year by Donald Carson who was the same age and described as the child of missionaries in Africa. Theodate thought that the child of missionaries would have benefited from a strict upbringing and have the appropriate genetic material to mold.¹⁷

Donald Carson remembers traveling alone by train to New York to be picked up by the Riddles and being awed by their car and chauffeur. He had been given a nickel, and at dinner, when asked what he wished for dessert, he replied, "ice cream, and I can pay for it myself," handing over his small treasure to Theodate who took it. Years later when he left the east, she gave him back this nickel. She had tremendous respect for the young, and she enveloped them with a warm patience that was never overbearing.

Taking in these two boys was not merely an experiment in education on the home front. This was part of the realization of Theodate's early dream to surround herself with children, friends, and animals (which were acquired in abundant succession, from dogs and cats to ponies and parrots).

While Theodate planned her educational program, she continued to move on other fronts. After she bought the initial parcel of land for her school in 1914, she began to acquire additional acreage, accumulating nearly three thousand acres of forests and fields on the west side of the Farmington River, four miles from Farmington. Realizing that she would carry a tremendous financial burden (the funds for construction would have to be borrowed and, even after the school opened, there would still be the cost of maintenance), she incorporated in the spring of 1918 by setting up the Pope-Brooks Foundation. Named after her parents, this foundation, which she provided for in her will, included members of her family - her husband, mother, Henry F. Pope (Alfred Pope's nephew who succeeded him as president of the National Malleable Castings Company), and Harris Whittemore, who became the foundation's financial advisor and treasurer. Though this arrangement provided peace of mind for the present, Theodate could not foresee that her joy in planning and building would have its equal measure of irritation over expenses and problems with provosts.

In May of 1918, Theodate pencilled four steps for herself on a scrap of yellow paper: "Think it out; look for strength and ask no support from any man; begin with work on paper; provide in will."¹⁸ The design for the whole complex in relationship to the site finally crystallized in June. Having tramped over her Avon farmland countless times, a solution flashed to mind as she was relaxing with her husband on the Hill-Stead porch. She urgently requested her draftsman to meet her at her office on the Hill-Stead property.¹⁹ Here she seized a piece of charcoal and drew quickly a rough outline of the location of all the buildings. Shortly afterwards she began to design elevations while developing the plans with the help of her draftsman. The plot plan, which had taken the form of a small village that followed an English rather than a New England idiom, was finished on August 23, 1918 (Fig.43).²⁰

Her creative process was largely visionary. In her memoirs she recalled that on driving from New York to Hill-Stead the hum of the wheels set her to visualizing part of the school complex:

I saw the buildings completely surround the Village Green at Avon - none of which existed at that time. They began moving, coming forward and receding, shifting slightly and finally one of them backed off. I eventually omitted that building in my drawings. Of course there is a great joy in this which can never be brought out by any effort.

The relaxation of being driven often produced such a result. She never knew beforehand when she might visualize a design, but once an image materialized, she could fix it with all its details vividly in her mind until its rebirth on paper. While designing some of Avon's buildings she noted:

I never make an effort. I have had no training. I simply see a building very suddenly in its every detail. It is so stamped upon my mind that, once seen, I never have to make a note of it. The picture will remain with me as long as eight or ten months, until I am ready to make use of it.²¹

She relied on draftsmen to perfect what she would sketch for them, working, as she claimed in her biographical notes, "with them and over them as an inventor would" as they prepared elevations and perspectives.

The 1918 plot plan for the Pope School for Boys, as Avon Old Farms was originally named, developed, like all of her buildings, from her vision of the relationship of the parts to the whole. She had never started with a preconceived plan into which she had to fit the individual parts. At Avon the organic relationship of the buildings to each other is especially apparent - a major feat considering that she has combined two different modes. She brought to her plan both an admiration for the English college quadrangle and a love for English village vernacular, the traditional domestic architecture of farm and village houses.

The first school plan is carefully balanced but not symmetrical, the main entrance to the oblong quad, which contained dormitories, being off center (Fig.43). Behind the quad, on a vertical axis to this entrance, the provost's and dean's houses looked out upon her village green. On the northeast, the green opened up to an extensive view overlooking the farmland fields below the bluff on which the school was to be situated. A library joined to a chapel by a cloister, a guest house, a gate and gate house, a bank, a refectory, and an inn for parents called the Cock and Bull, were designed to encircle the remaining perimeter. The far side of the quadrangle parted in the center to reveal another semi-enclosed area with a duck pond faced by a cluster of shops, including a post office and a general store, tailor and boot shops. These were flanked by Tuck Lane, leading to yet another enclave with a well as its focal point. Here at the Tuck Shop (which never got built) boys might order tea and "tuck in" sweets in front of a cozy fire. Theodate had second thoughts about the cloying quaintness of some of these features. A later plan, which divided the quadrangle into two, substituted a clubhouse in place of the artificial pond, and the well and inn disappeared (Fig.44).²²

The end of the war ushered in an extraordinarily busy period, Theodate juggling her architectural work with travel and an active social life. The winter season at the beginning of 1919 brought the Riddles to New York where they gave small pre-opera and theatre dinner parties. Theodate found time to work with a new draftsman, Leland Lyon, only at odd moments. In addition to her work on Avon, she was designing plans for the Connecticut State Reform School for Women in East Lyme - a public competition she did not win. J.F. Yewell's rendering of Theodate's elevation, all that remains of this project, shows an English idiom which had become Theodate's preferred style (Fig.38).

That spring the Riddles embarked on an extensive journey to Asia - to China, Korea, and Japan - where Theodate had never ventured. An incident reveals Theodate's formidable determination to have things her way. While crossing sweltering plains in China, the train compartment containing the Riddles became stiflingly hot. Determining that a thick window screen failed to allow proper ventilation, Theodate requested its removal. This being refused, she took out her penknife and cut open the screen. The damage discovered, Theodate was threatened with arrest by the train's angry authorities. She countered with imperious hauteur that they get out of her sight, and, indeed, they slunk away.²³ It is this aspect of her character that struck many as daunting, and no one dared cross her.

Another experience on this trip illuminates a different side of her nature. She could, on occasion, slip into a feeling of heightened perception and response, an almost extrasensory awareness of her natural environment. She recalled in her memoirs that while she and her husband were staying in a small hotel in the mountains in Korea, they saw:

...a flow of green growth between mountains of rock that had been formed by the silt of thousands of years. It threw me instantly into a mystic state that lasted for three days. We rode in our rickshas and saw the ocean and brown bodies in bathing and it seemed as if the world were new - just finished by God's hand. John was so understanding that my mood was not broken for three days and three nights.

Was she impervious to the buildings in Japan that had already inspired so many contemporary architects, Frank Lloyd Wright among them? She mentioned in a letter to her mother that Wright was designing a new hotel in Tokyo. Perhaps the ridges, curled up at the extremities, which appear at Avon are a faint echo of Japanese roofs.

Theodate returned from the Far East in September 1919 eager to take up her school project. Having earlier given up her New York office, it seemed like a promising arrangement when Leland Lyon, whom she had hired earlier on a part-time basis, offered to lease an office in his name for her if she would pay the overhead and give him all of her work to execute. This he did in November at 402 Madison Avenue, a few steps from her apartment at the Ritz-Carlton on 47th Street. He became her head draftsman and office manager, eventually assuming the title of associate. This freed Theodate to design without having to concern herself with tedious and time-consuming office details.

Additional work came her way. On the penultimate day of December, she was chosen, largely through the endorsement of Anna Roosevelt Cowles, to design the reconstruction of Theodore Roosevelt's birthplace. This entailed not only rebuilding the house where the former president of the United States had lived until he was fourteen, but adding, on an adjacent lot, a connecting wing for the affairs of the Roosevelt Memorial Association. For Theodate the challenge was to treat a private house in a monumental way (Fig.45).²⁴ However, no sooner had she submitted her ideas and sketches to Lyon than she became seriously ill and was hospitalized for mastoid surgery. From her hospital bed she worked frantically with Lyon to finish the preliminary floor plans. And it was there that she presented them to the Women's Roosevelt Memorial Association Committee (Figs.46, 47). While still in the hospital, she informed her mother with pride that the designs had been definitely approved and that she had been asked to proceed with the working drawings. She especially wished her mother to appreciate the fact that she had met her deadline even under the duress of serious illness - a testament to her strength of will.

You know they say in England of people riding to the hunt - 'it is no disgrace to be thrown if you keep hold of the bridle.' Well I was thrown all right all right but I kept hold of the bridle. I never lost control of the designing during my illness - but I am feeling reaction now."²⁵

Then on May 6th Theodate's mother died in Pasadena. Mrs. Pope had tactfully turned her spacious Hill-Stead bedroom, with its view of the sunken garden, over to Theodate on her daughter's marriage, retreating to the suite of two rooms which originally had been reserved for Theodate and Mary Hillard. She had also kept an independent distance by holding to her old schedule of wintering in California. Although Theodate's letters to her mother were always affectionate and respectful, one senses that their relationship thrived best when apart. The deep love that Theo craved, she had found or tried to find in others.