Shortly before the Riddles sailed to Europe, Harris Whittemore, always so loyal to Theodate, died unexpectedly in November 1927. Theodate considered his death a calamity, for not only had she regarded him as one of her "truest friends," but his belief in Avon's potential had bolstered her efforts in difficult moments. Moreover, as the financial adviser and treasurer of the Pope-Brooks Foundation, Whittemore had been able to keep the school's financial affairs under control. For the duration of her three-month absence, Theodate gave Froelicher authority to sign all requisitions. On returning at the end of February, she was horrified by the huge sums of money flowing out of Avon's coffers. Although she managed to reduce the amount of labor on the estate by $1,678 per week, that was still not sufficient to control a growing deficit.¹ She found building a joyful and creative way to spend money; maintenance was not. Theodate began to complain, and construction halted pending the maturation of additional bonds.

Her life style didn't change. She didn't know how she could manage without two butlers for the numerous large luncheons and dinner parties she gave. Annual trips to Europe continued. The summer of 1928 found John Riddle in Brussels and Paris while Theodate occupied herself with matters pertaining to Avon in her favorite English haunts - Winchester, Salisbury, and Broadway - which had inspired so much of what she had already created at Avon. She designed bookplates, bought pewter, and ordered ceramic tiles for the fireplace in the Tuck Shop, which had not yet materialized.²

After the Riddles returned in October, new problems arose. Theodate's authority as an architect and her methods of practice were questioned in a breach of contract suit filed by her former associate, Leland H. Lyon. She had dismissed Lyon in 1924 after her financial secretary had suggested that he might claim authorship of her designs. After construction had come to a halt at Avon, he sued her for $50,000, claiming that he had a right to stay on the job until the plans were completed. The case hinged upon whether he had a contract and, to a lesser extent, his role in the plans. In a preliminary hearing on April 24, 1929, in White Plains, New York, Lyon maintained that Theodate had furnished "rather vague ideas of how she wished the College built, leaving the detail work to say nothing of the large amount of research required before construction could even begin" to himself. Considering this charge libelous, Theodate described how she visualized buildings in complete detail. She won the case, when it came before the court almost a year later, since it was determined that there was no contract. Nor could there be any question about his responsibility for the designs, since on his application for membership in the AIA he had stated that in his work with Theodate, she was the designer while he attended to the drafting.³

More serious was the discovery that Avon's provost had taken to drink. Froelicher was forced to resign for reasons of ill health on April 30, 1929, and was refused severance pay. Not being told the real reason for his resignation, the faculty began to quit also, some following Froelicher to Colorado where he founded his own school. Theodate created an executive committee to engage another provost, and once again became an absentee landlord, returning to England. When Avon began its fall term in 1929 with one hundred and twenty-six students, George Frederick Cherry, who had been dean, was acting provost with authority subject only to the approval of the executive committee.

A fuming Theodate was brought back to Farmington in November by the news that the estate manager's duties had been so diminished he quit; that a flock of prize Dorset sheep and the Hill-Stead milk route, a business which belonged solely to Theodate, had been sold to raise money for the school; that Froelicher had been given $9,000 in severance pay against her wishes; and that a dormitory had been converted into an infirmary at a cost of $8,000. Despite these and what Theodate considered other misdeeds, the executive committee did manage to choose a new provost. Robert Dudley French, Head of Dwight Hall at Yale, accepted the position only to decline it on the grounds that he could not serve a peripatetic governess. He would accept it only if the executive committee assumed complete control of the school. Unwilling to relinquish control to a committee, which had the power to overturn her statutes and to change school policies, Theodate engaged Dr. Percy Gamble Kammerer, a Harvard graduate and former dean of the Episcopal Trinity Cathedral in Pittsburgh, who hired another faculty. She also drew up a Deed of Trust, which enumerated the functions of the provost, the aide to the provost, and the comptroller. The deed also preserved her ultimate control. The property of Avon, now valued at over five million dollars, was deeded to the Pope-Brooks Foundation, the trustee of Avon Old Farms; and Theodate put up a large collateral sum as a basis for operating expenses.⁴

With great optimism Theodate told a reporter from the Hartford Times:

With Dr. Percy Gamble Kammerer as provost of Avon Old Farms,... with men of probity as directors of the trustee, and the sound personnel of the new faculty, the founder places her unreserved confidence that Avon Old Farms will now be conducted in accordance with the highest educational standards.⁵

On their return in the fall from several months spent in London and Paris, Theodate could write with pride to her sister-in-law that Avon's community service and shop work programs were operating well, and that the boys had held their first election.

Although problems with the large deficits at Avon continued to plague her, Theodate wished to push forward with the construction of the library, chapel, and gate house complex on the far side of the green. She had new plans, perspectives, and elevations drawn up by her draftsman, J.F. Taylor in 1933 (Figs.67-69).⁶ But she still lacked sufficient funds to build, although she thought intermittently about selling a few of her father's paintings, including several by Whistler and Cassatt (ironically the two painters she had known). She acquired an ancient bell for the chapel's bell tower from a Swiss bell foundry, and Dorset sheep once again appeared in Avon's meadows.

Completed or not, Avon had made it to the top by 1936, at least according to an article on "Twelve of the Best American Schools" in Fortune.⁷ Avon was singled out as the only boys school in the group that could "lay some claim to being progressive." In spite of this praise, enrollment fell to ninety-six.

Theodate's renown as a traditional architect spread although she had not taken on any new commissions since starting Avon. In 1938, George H. Hamilton included her work in an exhibition at Yale titled Three Women Architects of Connecticut.⁸ And in 1940, she also received a silver medal and a diploma awarded by the Fifth Pan-American Congress of Architecture for her Avon plans.⁹

However, her reliance upon an English vernacular idiom seemed increasingly dated, especially after the Museum of Modern Art's Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, organized by her cousin Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock, came to Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum in the spring of 1932. Chick Austin, the director, fanned publicity by praising the new style as seen in the buildings of such architects as Le Corbusier, Neutra, Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe. At an architectuaral forum to discuss the exhibition, Theodate had held her ground, deprecating the idea that architecture should be efficient and streamlined like a machine. Architecture could not be purely intellectual and people did not want to live in machines, she had said - architecture must fill emotional needs.¹⁰ She could not see the emotional and beautiful qualities perceived by Hitchcock and Johnson in the new International Style. The common man may have agreed with her but she saw her position eroding.

By the end of 1939 not only was her architecture considered outmoded, but another major crisis was brewing at Avon. Theodate had become increasingly disenchanted with the performance of Provost Kammerer. She could no more abide anyone she thought weak-willed than her provost could support her overbearing interference. Moreover, Kammerer was discovered to be indulging in immoral conduct. Early in January, 1940 he resigned "for reasons of ill health." This time Theodate came up with one candidate, the trustees of the Pope-Brooks Foundation with another. At a meeting of the Board of Directors at Hill-Stead, Theodate forcibly proclaimed, "Since I cannot out-vote you, and cannot out-sit you, I shall leave you, and go to bed!"¹¹ After some Byzantine maneuvering, the Reverend W. Brooke Stabler, the board's choice, was made provost.¹²

Once more Theodate turned her attention to the chapel and library, engaging Lloyd Westbrook as her associate architect. In the fall he hired J. Floyd Yewell, who had earlier executed the color perspective drawing of the Connecticut State Farm for Women, to execute new perspective drawings of the chapel and library (Fig.70). Costs computed for the chapel and its tower were estimated at $144,000 for the building, reaching $163,000 when the organ, telescope, sculpture, furniture, and heating system were included.¹³ Specific directions to the Tidewater Construction Company were also issued, covering details down to the peen-hammered surfacing of the stone that was to come, as before, from the quarry.¹⁴ But that was it. The Riddles left for Florida's Useppa Island in early February, and when they returned in mid-March, construction was put on hold.

Theodate's last effort was to engage a sculptor to execute a model for a relief depicting Mary, Joseph as a carpenter, and a twelve-year-old Christ for the chapel entrance. Her letter to the sculptor, Lee Lawrie, who had designed the finials and relief over the school entrance, is remarkable not only for the details she supplied but also for her knowledge of how to achieve the effects she wished in different conditions of light.¹⁵ She brought the same thorough attention to this endeavor that she had applied to the methods of construction at Avon. And yet, try as she might to give substance to her vision, she suspected that her chapel would fail to materialize. She stipulated that the model was to be executed in miniature because she didn't know when the chapel would be built. John Riddle's death early in December, 1941, canceled any further thoughts about construction.

Why had she concentrated on the chapel and not the library when the school was nonsectarian? In 1941 Stabler, who was attempting to run Avon as a conventional Episcopal school, had brought in a "Hodgson Portable Chapel." Earlier, to avoid a farm school connotation, he had succeeded in changing the name of the school from Avon Old Farms to Avon while the Riddles were on one of their lengthy trips. But to bring in a prefabricated architectural structure was something more than Theodate could bear. She made it clear, according to the widow of the dean, that "she would tolerate changes to her curriculum, to the name of the school, to the format of certain customs, but NEVER to her architecture!"¹⁶

A confrontation was inevitable. The last straw snapped when Stabler changed the clothing regulations that Theodate had written into her Deed of Trust. She demanded the students wear a gray jacket, vest, and pants in the classroom; knickerbockers at work; and formal attire in the evening - a black double-breasted coat and vest, gray striped trousers, and a white, stiff-collared shirt with a bow tie. These had been worn since the school opened. When Brooks Brothers was unable to obtain the proper materials due to wartime exigencies, Stabler permitted the students to wear what they wished. This was at odds with Theodate's view that a clothing code would not only lead to the gentlemanly habit of proper dress, but would also help to impress on the students the special nature of their experience at Avon. Then, on May 28, 1943, Stabler requested a free hand to operate the school for one year without interference from either the founder or the board of directors of the Pope-Brooks Foundation. A repetition of the Froelicher crisis loomed over the school, spoiling the atmosphere. When Theodate refused to accede to his demand for a free hand, Stabler resigned in March 1944, followed by the entire faculty in May.

Theodate was seventy-seven. She had spent a quarter of a century and seven-ninths of her fortune in building and supporting Avon, whose extensive physical plant was running at a deficit of approximately $117,000 a year. She was stunned by this disloyalty on the part of the faculty. In a general letter to her faculty, she remonstrated:

If three or four of you who had been at Avon so happily for so many years, those of you whom my husband and I admired and considered our friends, had stayed by me, I would have felt that I must struggle to keep the school alive, and it could have been done. But a kindly Providence came to my aid when the Army was not only willing, but enthusiastic over the prospect of taking over Avon as a center for the rehabilitation work for those blinded in the services.... Of course, I cling to the hope that after the war is over, Avon will reopen and function clearly as the school I founded.¹⁷

President Franklin Roosevelt's friendship with the Riddles led to the army's choice of Avon Old Farms as a vocational rehabilitation center for blinded veterans. Braille, farming, and various crafts were taught to about 850 men who went through a four month training period. When it was decided to add a swimming pool, Theodate enthusiastically offered the largest single donation of $1,000. The center closed during the summer of 1947, a year after Theodate's death on August 30, 1946.¹⁸

Theodate's tenets that architecture should rely on a nurturing vernacular tradition and good craftsmanship, and that the beauty of such architecture could inspire aesthetic and moral values, lost credence in the wake of the vast destruction of two world wars. In mid-century, Avon Old Farms seemed to many an anachronism at odds with a prevailing antivernacular modernism. But good architecture transcends fashion, and Avon's students had highly valued the school and their experience there. What a pity then that Theodate could not see her school thrive again. One year after her death, the Pope-Brooks Foundation decided to reopen the school, having received enthusiastic responses in a poll of Avon's alumni. Today Avon Old Farms not only continues to flourish but has expanded, its new buildings consistent in style with Theodate's original architecture.¹⁹