This photograph, one in a series of images documenting the construction of the Loomis School, records a scene from Wednesday, September 23, 1914. Twenty-five families would be delivering their sons to Mason and Taylor Halls that afternoon. Twelve “day fellows,” five local girls, and eight students enrolled in a cooking class would join them the next morning for the start of classes.  But curiously, the school buildings were not ready. Headmaster Nathaniel Horton Batchelder, recalled, “We moved carpenters and painters out for a day, moved the pupils in, and then let workmen back to finish.” 

Building prospectuses promised a finished school by September 23, 1914. Excavation of the site began in July 1913, and firms for landscape design, construction, and engineering were selected before the first steam shovel dug into the Island terrain. Deliberate thought characterized the planning from the earliest work of the architects, Murphy & Dana of New York, to detailed communications between the Trustees, Mr. Batchelder, the architects, and each firm involved in the project. Mr. Batchelder and his wife Gwendolen visited almost daily to check on progress. Why an unfinished school on September 24?

When Mr. Batchelder first saw the Island in 1912, he “found a rather desolate bit of New England farm land. … [T]he site was small and unattractive.” Transforming this into the gracious Colonial Revival school designed by Murphy & Dana required earth moving on a grand scale. Mr. B recalled that “thousands of yards of dirt were moved about” and “grading went on all winter, with frozen earth blasted out and handled in great chunks.” A steam shovel, workmen with hand shovels and picks, and horses pulling carts of earth helped to dig out and level the quadrangle and “cut” an area for the gymnasium. Fill was put on future athletic fields to the west of the quad and “good black loam dug out of the swampy area around the brook until a clean-banked hockey pond appeared.”

More formidable were the deep layers of thick clay that lay underneath the topsoil. Consulting engineers Ford, Buck and Sheldon of Hartford warned after their March 1913 test borings that this made for “rather unsatisfactory foundation conditions” for most building sites. Footings had to be dug as deep as 20 feet to reach the hardpan. And then heavy rains came, submerging the footings and leaving Mr. B and the workmen to bail out the water and wait for what he called “better days.” At the gym site, the builders gave up trying to reach hardpan and, according to Mr. B, “’floated’ the building on huge, irregular chunks of concrete.” When it came time to lay brick, the weather interfered again. Mr. B recalled, “It was a bitterly cold winter, and no masonry could be installed with the thermometer below 20. Many a time we … sat in the superintendent’s shack watching the thermometer. But some days it was clearly not worth the trip.”

In the end, the entire building project required “weeks of redoing” and an extra cost of $30,000 “to subdue a rebellious land.” But did the unfinished school make an impression on those first students? Walter Wood ’18 described September 23, 1914, in an oral history interview he gave more than a half century later. He and his classmates “came that beautiful clear September day, excited, a little scared but feeling we had warmth and safety as we trudged ... down the path to the dining hall which was then [also] the headmaster’s office. …We felt safe and ready for what lay ahead.” 

The pioneering students were ready even if the campus was not.