THE TAFT SCHOOL
http://www.taftschool.org/
History
Horace Dutton Taft got his start in 1890 as a schoolmaster when he was invited by a family friend, Mrs. Robert Black, to head a brand new college preparatory school for boys in Pelham Manor, New York. Until then Taft’s experience as an educator had been limited to tutoring Latin at Yale, his alma mater. Here, presented with 17 students of “extraordinary variety for how few they were,” Horace Taft plunged headlong into the complete education of the boy, and indeed his own as a headmaster. Mrs. Black named the small institution “Mr. Taft’s School.”
Pelham Manor
Often noted for his warmth, humanity, and sense of humor, Horace Taft described the first years at Pelham Manor: “It was a most comical beginning of a school. The furniture arrived at the same time the boys and their parents did, and I put both to work on the front porch opening boxes. Carpenters were at work upstairs, putting up the beds. Mr. Black was there, and he was moving around, entertaining parents and boys. Considering how few they were (seventeen), there was an extraordinary variety among the boys. An undue proportion of them had been in other boarding schools and knew more about the inside of one than I did.” As he would for the rest of his career as a headmaster, Horace embraced the education of the whole boy, and in true boarding school fashion, got a dose of the same experience himself. In addition to managing the school, Mr. Taft taught Latin and mathematics, and lived the 24-hour job of dormitory master.
“Discipline was primitive and direct. I had a room in the middle of the house on the second floor, and I could reach almost any boy. I waked the boys up in the morning, pulling the blankets off when necessary. There ought to have been a Mark Twain there to describe that school.” He soon cultivated what would become his life-long calling as a headmaster: “One thing cheered me mightily. I suppose that nothing pleased me so much in my plan for a boys’ school as the idea that I might be a lay preacher, that association with boys would give me opportunity for influencing their ideas and ideals. In my stay at Pelham Manor I learned a great deal about a headmaster’s work, even if a large part of it consisted of learning how not to do it.”
At the end of his second year at Pelham Manor, Horace married Winifred Thompson, a teacher at New Haven High School. By then he had decided to find a location for his school farther from New York City. In 1893 the young couple moved the fledgling school to Watertown, Connecticut.
Why Watertown?
The Tafts had been introduced to western Connecticut during visits to a friend in Litchfield. For a while they were determined to locate there, and seriously considered three possible sites. In the meantime, word of their search for a ready-made facility had gotten out. It ended in March 1893 when an acquaintance from Yale offered his family’s hotel, which stood languishing in a place called Watertown. Wasting no time, Horace and “Winnie” spent a frigid day inspecting the 30-year-old Victorian ark called The Warren House. It was, in Taft’s words, “a forsaken place,” cold and dirty. Despite “the chill of the visit” the young couple decided to lease the building and its six acres with an option to purchase the property in five years. The Tafts quickly realized that Watertown was more accessible to New Haven and Waterbury than Litchfield, and felt immediately welcomed by the community. Thus, with a $10,000 loan, they set about refurbishing the great old building. With the exception of the tremendous disparity between the room sizes, oft-mentioned parental fears about the “Firetrap,” and well water of dubious quality for drinking, the property seemed to the Tafts like “Paradise” after Pelham Manor, and served the fledgling school adequately for the next two decades.
The Warren HouseThe Taft School, Watertown
Mr. Taft’s School opened in the fall of 1893 in the Warren House, a large, drafty old structure which had seen better days as a hotel. There were five masters, 30 boarders, and a handful of day students. Latin, mathematics, English, history, and science comprised the curriculum, with Greek and modern languages (French and German) offered additionally to the older classes. Early on, Mr. Taft instituted the monitorial system as a way of teaching responsibility and introducing student self-governance. In 1898 he changed the name of the five-year-old enterprise to The Taft School.
In his early school catalogs, Taft touted Watertown’s “clear, dry, and bracing air” and made clear his expectation that the boys would “take vigorous part in athletics.” The Warren House property included some very wet fields for the first football and baseball games played against the Gunnery, Hopkins Grammar and other area schools. The first track teams competed on a horse race track which dated from the hotel’s early days. There was informal amusement, too, for boys and grown men alike. Old photographs reveal Horace joining in baseball games and sledding sessions down the Green Hill and into town. Although he was revered as the embodiment of all the school stood for—character, intellect, hard work—this consummately dignified headmaster was also beloved for his humanity and sense of humor. His students called him “The King.”
Horace D. Taft with studentsThe Taft Family
Horace Taft’s older brother, William Howard Taft, had been politically prominent as secretary of war under Theodore Roosevelt, but his career reached its pinnacle in his election as president in 1908. Horace and Will enjoyed a close relationship, and the president’s two sons graduated from Taft. Thus the year 1909 opened with great excitement for the Taft family. Will’s second son, Charles Phelps, was among the younger boys in the school when his father was elected president. Horace felt it only right that Charles should be allowed to attend his father’s inauguration. But how to how to justify to the rest of the school Charles’ absence? Horace’s solution was to rule that no boy could leave campus except to attend his father’s inauguration as president of the United States!
Later, in that same euphoric year that his brother became President, Horace Taft suffered a tremendous personal blow: the death of his wife from cancer. Winifred Taft had taken critical part in the operation and sustenance of the new school, supporting her husband in his ideals and work, managing the school’s finances, and in the myriad activities she planned with and for the students. She had also developed close friendships and associations in Watertown, and become a literary and intellectual leader in her circle. Horace Taft described her death as “the kind of blow that divides a man’s life in two.”
For years Horace and Winifred Taft together had envisioned a proper boarding school campus for their prospering enterprise, and planned to build it on their land on Nova Scotia Hill, some two miles distant. During the last years of her life, Winifred had been collaborating on architectural plans for a new school building with the New York firm of Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson. However, Mrs. Taft’s illness made the relocation impracticable, and the campus developed in situ, just off the Watertown Green. The present-day heart of the school, HDT and CPT Halls, which house the administrative offices, reception areas, classrooms and auditorium, date from the first major construction phases of 1912–13 and 1929–30.
In 1908–10 “The Annex”, the school’s first building project, was constructed opposite the Warren House, where the Taft parking lot is now. This large, gambrel-roofed building served as a dormitory for students and faculty for the next fifty years. In 1911 a wooden gymnasium was built where HDT Hall stands now. The school’s incorporation in 1912 was followed by the first major construction phase, with the building of Horace Dutton Taft Hall (1913–14), following Bertram Goodhue’s design.
A New Campus: Building in Brick for the Ages
In order to raise the necessary funds to develop the campus, the privately owned school was turned over to a board of trustees in 1926. With major new funds in place, the school built Martin Infirmary (now MacIntosh) and staff residence (Congdon). The main campus soon took on its present-day form as the Warren House was torn down and replaced with Charles Phelps Taft Hall and Bingham Auditorium in 1929–30. The student body had grown to 323 boys, the faculty numbered 27.
Math teacher, Ed Douglas, with studentsTaft’s mission was to educate “the whole boy.”
The masters were almost all Ivy League graduates who pushed their students relentlessly in their quest for excellence and high College Board scores. Most graduates in Mr. Taft’s time went on to Yale, and there many became class leaders and Phi Beta Kappa students. Although Taft academics were demanding, they were only part of the whole picture. According to a student at the time, while the classroom atmosphere was “rigorous and unyielding, there existed quite a close and warm relationship out of class between us boys and our masters. Perhaps that was due to the amazingly high ratio of one master for every ten boys. More probably it was fostered by the colorful personalities of the members of the teaching staff which drew young man to them. We knew them well, and they us, and the net result was very good indeed.” Athletics, music, drama, literary and other club activities provided outlets for various extracurricular talents, and an alternative context for student-faculty interaction.