This is a story about the Rockefeller Quadrangle. It begins in the White Mountains, in 1857, and with school founder Osbert Loomis sketching the landscape before him. From a perch overlooking a valley and distant hills, Osbert drew the expansive, commanding view. He added small symbols to the drawing—each keyed to notations written in the margin of the sketch—as a means to record the movements of clouds and light during one September morning. It’s a rudimentary time lapse telling the story of sun and shade on that fall morning.

This sketch, now in the Loomis Chaffee Archives collection, had me wondering if such a prospect on the Rockefeller Quadrangle could exist. And might it offer a view of movements, not on a single day, but over generations of school life? What larger story might be understood from this collection of single images captured over time?

The best view of this quad would undoubtedly be from the cupola of the William H. Loomis Hall, one of the school’s original 1914 buildings. For most of the school’s first half century, one would have seen farm fields, dairy barns, faculty houses, and playing fields stretching to the southern end of the Loomis campus. And then the scene changed, first with the construction of Clark Science Center in 1960. The Katharine Brush Library and the Wilbur Dining Hall, added in 1970, were essential elements in the master plan welcoming the Chaffee School to the Island and setting the foundation for coeducation at Loomis Chaffee. In 1986, Carter Hall expanded the girls’ boarding division. The 1995 opening of Kravis Hall established the quad’s fourth façade; it was now a place for living and for learning, for boys and for girls. Neighboring dormitory Cutler Hall extended this fourth periphery in 2016.

Some will remember a low brick sitting wall at the quad’s northern end in the 1970s and 1980s. Others may recall Book Moving Day, in spring 1970, when Loomis and Chaffee students and their teachers hand-carried library books from Founders Hall to the not-yet-opened Brush Library. Later that fall, Chaffee School’s Committee X marched through this quadrangle dressed in togas, escorting the beloved sculpture “Minerva” and completing its migration from the Palisado campus to the newly completed Chaffee Hall at the south end of the Island campus.

On October 15, 1960, Science Department Howard “Squirrel” Norris ’28 prepared the contents of a copper box—a time capsule—to be sealed into the wall of Clark’s entrance lobby. A ceremony marked the occasion as did the building’s dedication one year later. Dr. T. Keith Glennan, President of Case Institute of Technology and former head of NASA during Eisenhower’s presidency, gave an address that day. He described the Clark Science Center as being for “the common good of the country” in the efforts to “engage in a vast effort toward scientific literacy among the entire American people” and to accelerate the development of American science and technology, a race—the Space Race--, Glennan noted, that “we are beginning to lose.” Even the cupola offering this prime vantage point on the quad gained new historical significance during the Cold War. At a November 1962 faculty meeting, Headmaster Frank Grubbs and Business Manager Norman Smith told of plans for the school’s Civil Defense preparedness “following the recent Cuban crisis,” including the installation of an air raid siren in the “cupola over the dining hall as part of a general warning system.”

The quadrangle bears the name of Winthrop Rockefeller ’31. A moderate Republican who served as governor of Arkansas from 1967–1971, he sought advancements for his constituents in economic development, education, and racial and social justice—values that guided his philanthropy as well. As a Loomis student, Rockefeller founded the Student Endowment Fund, raising significant monies with his peers that helped to make possible projects needed by the young school. As a Trustee, he advocated passionately for coeducation and for economic and racial diversity of the student body. These values he supported generously in both word and deed.

In 1874, when Osbert, his sister, and three brothers wrote the school charter, they looked out onto the future of American education. They hoped their school would provide knowledge and inspiration for its students to energetically take up the responsibilities and opportunities of citizenship in a democracy. They envisioned connections between their school and the larger world. The view onto the history of the Rockefeller Quadrangle, with its many narratives and links to movements beyond the Island, would please the Loomis siblings.