Shattuck's Plan: Early Stages of School Building 1858 - 1880

Almost immediately after St. Paul's School was established in very modest circumstances "a farmhouse, a family group, and the intense soul of the doctor", [5] as John Jay Chapman put it--it began to expand its town, beginning with a chapel , 1858-60, designed by George Snell (1820-1893), an English-born architect who had just opened a practice in Boston in 1850.[6] A modest Victorian essay in the English Gothic style, the chapel, especially after it was enlarged and enhanced in 1868, established the language if not the diction for most but not all of the school's buildings to follow. With fine but not fussy brickwork, elaborate woodwork at the eaves and, inside, strongly colored stencil and tile work, this was a bold and self-confident proclamation that one could be traditional and modern.

In the early 1870s, amidst post-Civil War prosperity, the school began to grow. New buildings were required to meet the needs of new divisions. For the older boys who had previously lived outside the Schoolhouse walls in neighboring cottages, a new building, the Upper School , was built (1871, demolished 1962), quite off to the side, near the present quad that includes Manville and Ford.[7] A severe, rectangular grey granite block, with a central hall lined by small bedrooms on each of its three floors, the Upper offered little in the way of amenities.

At about the same time the Big Study (1872), designed by the now forgotten firm of Martin & Slack, went further in the direction of Victorian bravado than had the chapel.[8] With elaborate brick work, granite lintels and water course, and a richly varied skyline of big and small gables and dormers, the Big Study , though not without individuality or merit, was a somewhat pale reflection of similar work at Harvard (Memorial Hall, Ware & Van Brunt, 1866-68) or the new midtown campus of Columbia College in New York (C.C. Haight, 1859). A red brick gymnasium (1878-79), designed by another now-forgotten architect, George H. Young, was an early example of that breed of multi-purpose-type buildings beloved to American school trustees, buildings which never seem to quite suit any purpose perfectly, yet somehow seem to "make do."[9] The gym had a large room on its second floor that functioned as the school's auditorium until the construction of Memorial Hall. It served for a while as a dormitory before it was demolished in 1957.

In the summer of 1878 the school's original building, the so-called "mother house," burned.[10] An oft-renovated and enlarged facility, by the final stage of its evolution this once-modest building had taken on the scale and character of a mansarded mansion. George H. Young was called back to Millville to design a new schoolhouse (1878-80, demolished 1929)[11], originally called "The School," which was sited on the east side of the Dunbarton Road, but, as Heckscher puts it: "set back about a hundred yards and breaking the pattern of the village street. The building's bulk and height, with its somber tessellated surface, shattered the existing scale and made it at best an uneasy neighbor."[12] The School was imposing, confronting Dunbarton Road from a slight rise, with a 160-foot-long, 80-foot-high mass. Young described his design succinctly: "A central pavilion and three wings, to the right, left, and rear of the central part.".[13] Inside, the new schoolhouse combined alcoved dormitories on three floors and dormitories in the attic with masters' accommodations, dining room, and a common room finished in exposed ornamental brick to form a totality that was, from Heckscher's point of view, "institutional and cheerless in aspect."[14] Like the gymnasium, the School was only vaguely Gothic, but featured a restless profusion of gables, chimneys, and crocketing that other wise modified its imposing character.

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5 John Jay Chapman, "The Influence of Schools," in Learning and Other Essays.

6 See "Death of George Snell, Architect," The American Architect and Building News 39 (March 4, 1893): 129-130. Among Snell's most important works was the Boston Music Hall (1852), one of the earliest and most successful applications of modern acoustic science to building in the United States. Located on Hamilton Place, it was converted in 1915 to Boston's first cinema, and more recently to the Orpheum Theater. See "Boston Music Hall," Gleason's Pictorial (Boston) (December 18, 1852): 1; Walter H. Kilham, Boston After Bulfinch: An Account of its Architecture 1800-1900 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1946), 56; Susan and Michael Southworth, AIA Guide to Boston (Chester, Connecticut: The Globe-Pequot Press, 1984): 10.

7 D.S. Pool, "Conover Country Club to Close; Reunion Held for Old Members," Pelican 17 (May 16, 1962): 1; Heckscher, 49-50.

8 Heckscher, 50.

9 "Gymnasium for St. Paul's School, Concord, New Hampshire," American Architect and Building News 4 (December 7, 1878): 190, pl.; "The New Gymnasium," Horae Scholasticae 12 (December 1878): 48-51; "Dates of School Events, Building, Etc.," The Record (1968-69): 101.

10 Heckscher, 87-88

11 "The New School," Horae Scholasticae 13 (March 1880): 64-65; "St. Paul's School, Concord, New Hampshire," American Architect and Building News 11 (May 20, 1882): 234, pl.; Horae Scholasticae 62 (June 6, 1929): 230-31; "The School House," Horae Scholasticae 70 (October 1936): 9; Horae Scholasticae 63 (October 23, 1929): 11-12; Heckscher, 90.

12 Heckscher 90-91.

13 Young quoted in "The New School," Horae Scholasticae 13 (March 1880), 64.

14 Heckscher, 91.