The school’s first headmaster, Nathaniel Batchelder, reported on the construction-to-date of Palmer Hall in the Loomis Alumni Bulletin of fall 1937. In addition to the dormitory, which established the west facade of the main school quadrangle, he described various projects at the building’s site. His spouse, nationally acclaimed sculptor Evelyn Longman, designed “a memorial tablet to the Palmers, who so generously provided the building.” Mr. B continued, “Fred Brown ’20 was here yesterday with designs for the two gardens at the end of the building. … Boys passing from the quadrangle to the gymnasium or athletic fields will go through the gardens, and every passer-by will look into them. One will be evergreen, the other dominated by azaleas — two lovely spots for the enjoyment of faculty, boys, and visitors.” During the following spring, the gardens were planted and, Mr. B noted in a subsequent issue of the Bulletin, “Mrs. B’s garden centerpieces are set … .”

Each garden features a circular granite medallion bearing incised motifs complementing the plantings in Brown’s original vision, pine boughs and pinecones for the north medallion and dogwood blossoms for the south. Created by cutting these design elements exactingly into the stone and maintaining an overall flat surface — a process known as intaglio — and placed into the ground just slightly above the level of the gardens, these objects diverged from much of Longman’s previous works. By the mid-1930s, she was well known for her figural, allegorical sculptures done in life-size or monumental scale and her low relief art, mostly profile-view portraits that emerge gracefully from their backgrounds of marble or bronze. 

Longman modeled four pieces of sculpture for the building itself, and each employed, to some extent, an intaglio approach to working design elements. The Palmer memorial tablet, a low relief profile of donor Virginia Palmer, bears incised swirling vines and tendrils surrounding Virginia’s portrait. A flat bronze terrace medallion set into the dorm’s back portico is decorated with an elaborate stylized depiction of the four compass directions and an allegorical figure evoking the wind, all worked with incised features. These and the garden medallions reference Longman’s 1932 design for a frieze set along the roofline of what was then the Hartford, Connecticut, U.S. Post Office. Carved with angular steep lines, Art Deco-style riders and horses depict the Pony Express. The Palmer projects are more traditional in their subject matter and employ a lighter touch with shallower, naturalistic lines. As a group, they demonstrate Longman’s flexible thinking in using her artist’s skills to best suit the dormitory site. 

In May 1940, two years after Palmer Hall opened, James Willard Williams, a faculty member at the Gunn School in Washington, Connecticut, visited campus, possibly to attend a gathering of English Department faculty from Connecticut independent schools. Just as Mr. Batchelder had predicted would happen, Williams lingered in the Palmer-flanking gardens. He wrote to Evelyn Longman with admiration for her art. “May I send you a line to tell you of the very great pleasures I had yesterday in studying the two carvings that hold the centers of the two small gardens between the buildings at Loomis? I have not seen anything so fine in many months as your pine and dogwood designs. The latter, in particular, is wonderful for its accuracy as well as for its beauty of design and its perfection of execution. Few artists would ever have done the twigs with such genuine feeling for the peculiar contours of dogwood. I must thank you for many happy moments to come, as I remember these two lovely cuttings.”

Longman contributed to the dormitory in other ways. She critiqued drawings for the Ionic caps to the building’s impressive columns and consulted on a Greek key design for the social room’s ceiling molding. She and Mr. B selected a large landscape painting from the New York studio of painter and friend Chauncey Ryder to hang in the social room. With recent renovations to Palmer, this landscape painting now hangs in the Katharine Brush Library, where students, faculty, and visitors can be found, just as James Williams had in the gardens, lingering to appreciate the beauty of its design.