Three elaborate door surrounds define the architectural vocabulary of William H. Loomis Hall, the school’s original dining hall, designed by New York architects Murphy & Dana and completed in 1914. Each bears a broken pediment supported by half columns and capitals decorated with rows of acanthus leaves and scrolling, projecting volutes—this combination a hallmark of the Composite order, the most ornamented of classical architecture.  Rows of dentils outlining the pediment’s triangular shape quietly echo more ample modillions running along the base of the room’s ceiling molding. A fourth surround frames the room’s fireplace.

Events during Loomis’ early years suggest that the dining hall played a key role in facilitating the multi-threaded vision of Loomis’s first headmaster, Nathaniel Batchelder, for a homelike, democratic, and growing institution. Loomis Hall’s elegant Georgian Revival interior may have helped implicitly connect, and perhaps explicitly elevate, daily conversations shared around the dinner table with venerable ideals at the heart of the school’s mission.

Walter “Fargo” Wood ’18 was among the first students to take meals at Loomis Hall. In memoirs collected more than six decades later, he recalled the building’s “wonderful family atmosphere.” Students at the boys’ school ate family-style with faculty and, as Wood remembered, “learned proper table manners and etiquette which served us well…the rest of our lives.” All boys took turns waiting on table, underscoring Batchelder’s often-spoken words on the importance of shared labor for the common good.

America’s April 1917 entrance into World War I transformed a lively campus discourse on the meanings of democracy. Mr. Batchelder announced in January 1918 that the school would institute meatless and wheatless menus on certain days in accordance with the US government’s call for home front sacrifice.  The school made more remarkable efforts producing food consumed in the dining hall, and Walter Wood, as a student in Loomis’ Agricultural Program, was extensively involved in these labors. He reminisced, “The nation now had accepted its responsibility of feeding this country…So we at the Loomis farm worked from dawn to dusk seven days a week to help.”

During the spring and summer of 1917, cultivation of over sixty-five acres raised all the vegetables consumed in the dining hall over the next year.  The following spring, Wood worked the school’s fields as the farm prepared to raise another year’s worth of produce. He broke the standing Northeast record for number of acres plowed in a single day by a single man. Into his Loomis scrapbook Wood inked a caption under a photograph of the school’s tractor: “A country worth fighting for is a country worth plowing for.”