Courage and Character

For many students the June 1914 assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, marking the start of World War I, was a sidebar in a summer of travel, sailing or camp.

Hotchkiss opened its doors in 1892 to 57 boys, ages 13 to 19. By 1914 it had 262 students, from 26 states, one territory and two foreign countries, China and Egypt. Led by the dynamic headmaster Huber G. Buehler, Hotchkiss was a school that believed responsibility rests with  individual students who needed to act with honor, self control, earnestness and cooperation.  

In 1914, Hotchkiss was a 237-acre campus dominated by the Main Building, a sprawling yellow brick and stucco confection. Just as today, the building was bisected by its main corridor. Inside, it contained the chapel, study hall, classrooms, laboratory, library, dining hall, senior room, and offices on the first floor.  On the second floor were bedrooms for 97 students and unmarried faculty, while the ground floor offered a gymnasium, swimming pool, squash courts and a locker room.

A second yellow-brick dormitory, Bissell Hall stood north of the Main Building. Bissell contained rooms for 63 students and suites for unmarried faculty. South of Bissell was Cleaveland Cottage (today known as Baechle Ayres), home to 16 boys. The remaining students were housed in faculty homes or  boarding houses in Lakeville.

World War I came slowly to Hotchkiss. As the School filled with war news, students moved tacks across a map in the main hallway to mark the Allies progress. They raised money for war-related causes. After war was declared, they travelled less for athletic events, ate less meat in the dining hall, drilled with the Hotchkiss Battalion in the afternoons, and considered the merits of enrolling in military training during summer break. They wrote strident editorials about “how best to consecrate their lives to service,” They helped the war effort by working on the School farm, and worried about whether they would be good soldiers. 

In May of 1917 representatives from 35 boarding schools, including Headmaster Huber G. Buehler, met in Hartford, CT, and Lawrenceville, NJ.to consider how to harness their students “energy and patriotic spirit” for service to the United States now the country was at war. The group focused on food production, asking each school to organize a unit of the School League for National Service by farming their own land or aiding local farmers.
 
Headmaster Buehler charged a committee of faculty with everything from gathering supplies, drafting letters to parents, recruiting and organizing student volunteers, as well as housing and feeding them.
 
A month later the board met to authorize the creation of an “Emergency Farm” at Hotchkiss. Using portions of the golf course and additional leased land, the School hired 25 of its students at $4 per week. They planted potatoes, sweet corn, field corn, dry and lima beans, and cabbage on leased land. Plagued by poor weather, a late start, and inexperience on the part of Hotchkiss students and faculty, the School scaled back its 1918 farming program, planting potatoes on its own land and cover crops on its leased property. 

By October of 1917, buying bonds became synonymous with patriotism, and students and faculty at colleges and preparatory schools throughout New England pledged thousands of dollars. Here at Hotchkiss the response was enthusiastic. The School participated for the first time in October of 1917, purchasing bonds from Robbins Burrall Trust in Salisbury. The School’s goal was $13,000 or $50 per pupil. In the end, Hotchkiss pledged $13,100. This was combined with the town of Salisbury’s pledges for a grand total of $102,350. 

Like many other New England preparatory schools, Hotchkiss students and faculty watched as its alumni and some of its younger faculty eagerly volunteered for military service. Four of the 28 members of Yale University’s “Millionaire’s Unit,” the United States’ first naval air reserve unit were Hotchkiss graduates, Albert J. Ditman ’04, Artemus “Di” Gates’13, Kenneth MacLeish’14, and Kenneth R. Smith’14. They followed another group of alumni who had already experienced the battlefront as ambulance drivers for the American Field Service, a group that included Headmaster George Van Santvoord ’08. Once in Europe they joined former classmates like Douglas Campbell’13, the first American aviator to become an ace; Frank Hunter’13 who scored eight victories over German pilots, and Jack DeWitt ’13, a member of Eddie Rickenbaker’s 94th Aerosquadron who shot down the last German plane of the war. In the class of 1914 alone, 51 percent of Hotchkiss students volunteered garnering four Croix de Guerre, two Purple Hearts, two Legion de Honor, two Navy Crosses, and two Flying Crosses.

But the War was not all glory. It tested everyone. In September 1919 Headmaster Huber G. Buehler wrote, “Like all other headmasters of my acquaintance, the last twelve months have been the most difficult and trying period of my Headmastership. I would not have believed in advance that a world war could so disturb academic shades. There was not a nook or cranny of our life, official or private, that the upheaval did not disturb in some way.”

And whether the headmaster, faculty and students recognized it, change was already lapping at the door. In barely five years, the School would have a new headmaster, himself a veteran, a man committed to transforming Hotchkiss into a modern educational institution.

Completed in 1923, Memorial Hall was designed by architect Cass Gilbert. It was the first of three dormitories Gilbert constructed on the east side of campus. 

The total cost for Memorial was $250,000 donated in memory of the 22 Hotchkiss students who gave their lives in the Great War. A bronze tablet in the first-floor corridor lists their names.
 

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Originally built for 57 boys and four masters, Memorial set the pattern for dormitories to follow: A ground-floor reception room, three floors of single rooms, and bachelor-master quarters in the center of each floor with bathrooms across the hall.