Columbus School for Girls - Topknot Yearbook (Columbus, OH)

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. 4' 'XRELY can a school find its beginning in the idea of a pretty young woman, twenty-three years old, with blue eyes, and softly curling' 'hair,'a love ofgaiety, and not much systematic education, Yet such was the inception of Columbus School for Girls, Florence Kelley was a graduate of Miss Phelps English and 'Classical School for Young Ladies and Children in Columbus, Ohio. This was a boarding and day school, drawing its pupils from Columbus and from a considerable area of the middle and southern states. The head of the school was a gentlewoman from the South. Her purpose was to give her young ladies moral and religious instruc- tion along with the usual school subjects and to finish them by inculcating in them such manners and cultural ideals as should fit them to become prominent in fashionable domesticlife. She and her associates in the school took' no part in the woman's movement then rising in Columbus, and remained unaware that the prospect of continuing their edu- cation in college, as their brothers did, might be stirring in the minds of the more serious of their young ladies. Miss Phelps was moved to resentment and indignation when one of her own recent grad- uates suggested opening a school for girls with eastern college preparation as its main object. There had been many private schools in Columbus-for through- out Ohio., as in the eastern states, there were private schools long before public schools were established. Such a school as Florence Kelley proposed would be, t 4 FLORENCE f KELLEY W1-HTRIDGE Barn in Dayton, Ohio April 1, 1876 Diedzin New Canaan, Connecticut ' Mmb 14, 1952 however, the first of its kind in Columbus, and Miss Phelps told her that her idea was preposterous. Miss Kelley was a young woman of determination, however, and Miss Phelps' disapproval did not deter her. With the courage of youth, she began to look about for some one to share her project. She ap- proached Mary Bole Scott, with whom she was slightly acquainted. Miss Scott had recently been graduated from tl'ieiOhio' State University, then a small in- stitution with a few hundred students, and it was rumored that she was going in for teaching. She was ,the youngest of a family of excellent teachers, four of whom had already found place in the public schools. She hesitated about joining in a scheme which seemed to her and her sisters fanciful, and financially precarious: but she laughingly remarked that there were in the public schools about as many Scotts as the system could absorb -and threw in her lot with Miss Kelley. Mrs. Kelley promised to help with the housekeeping and, after the two had trudged the hot city streets all summer in quest of pupils, the School opened in the autumn of 1898. A photograph of that first year shows a total of twenty-eight persons, comprising the two heads, sev- eral part-time teachers, girls young and old, and little boys! Steadily the School grew in numbers. The pupils in those first years have a ,joyous memory of the early days, when Miss Kelley with her group -...1...4..M .,..... A.- -- .-...,, A

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of little ones and Miss Scott with her admiring older girls looked forward with eagerness to the adventure of each opening day. Most schools which have survived over decades have been founded by experienced teachers having educational theories and moral or religious purpose, financially supported by friends with faith in their views. Miss Scott and Miss Kelley had only their youth and enthusiasm to guide them. They had no financial backer, no bank accountg only so many dol- lars and cents could go out as had first come in from tuition fees. Yet from the start, the School was a good school, with sound teaching, high stand- ards. and serious work. At the end of the first year Miss Kelley's ambition to prepare girls for eastern col- leges was realized when one hundred per cent of the graduating class received cards stating that they had been accepted by Wellesley! There were just two of them-Bernice Davis fScarlettJ and Eleanor Kurtz fBeatonj. After three years Miss Kelley and Miss Scott, ac- companied by Mrs. Kelley, moved their school into a large house in the neighborhood. Discarding its former name of Elmhurst, they called it Parsons Place. because from the time it had been built in 1840, it had been in the possession of the Parsons family. The School continued to grow and prosper. At the end of six years there were ninety pupils, forty-live in the high school, forty-five in lower grades. In 1904, however, Miss Kelley and Miss Scott left the school they had established, to pursue their separate ways. Neither had any further professional connec- tion with education. Miss Kelley married a pros- perous young business man, John Clifford Whitridge, president of the Buckeye Steel Castings Company. Miss Scott said she was tired of teaching and sailed off to Europe, chaperoning a group of young women. Miss Kelley found as her successor Miss Alice Gladden, part-time English teacher for the two years previous, a woman of character and educational ex- perience, who was a real asset to the young School. Miss Scott's successor was Miss Grace Latimer jones, an aluma of Bryn Mawr, with some slight teaching experience. Hitherto generally known by its nickname, the Scott-Kelley School now assumed what had from the beginning been its official title- Columbus School for Girls. As Mrs. john C. Whitridge, Miss Kelley now re- turned to the life for which Miss Phelps School for Young Ladies had prepared her, becoming one of the popular young matrons of Columbus. At that time there was in the city but one recognized social set, which continued to maintain traditions of the previous century, derived largely from the south. Though for a time she lived not far from Parsons Place, for thirteen years she never set foot inside the door she had left on the day of her marriage. The new owners had come in to find faded flowers amid the wedding decorations left behind in the old blue drawing room where she had been married. She came at last about 1917 to enter her daughter, Betty Steele, in the First Form. Her elder child had been a boy, John C. Whitridge, Jr. Until 1936 Mrs. Whitridge lived a pleasant social life, busy with clubs and charities, in daily contact with friends of her girlhood days. That year came the crushing blow of her husband's death. In 1939 she' left Columbus to make her home in New Canaan, to be near her two children, both married and living nearby. Here with her gift for making friends, she was soon one of a congenial circle. Sorrows and changes came fast upon her. Her daughter's husband died, leaving one small daughter, Betty Steele's second happy marriage, however, soon gave her another granddaughter. An overwhelming sorrow came again in 1946 when, in a yachting accident on the Sound, her son was lost, leaving four small children. To all associated with the School, it was a great joy when she came to Columbus to walk in the Fiftieth Anniversary Commencement procession and to address the alumnae at the annual June sup- per, telling them about early events in the School. of which no record existed. It must have been a great satisfaction to her, on that soft june evening, to sit with the two members of her first graduating class, and under the rising moon, to look out over representatives of fifty classes grouped on the lawn and round the swimming pool in the garden of Eleanor Kurtz Beaton, one of the two who had first iustified her idea of founding a college preparatory school for girls. No one present that evening will ever forget the beauty of the scene. The young alumnae looked with wonder and admiration on this youthful-appearing, slender woman, with the winning manner and the sweet voice, who founded their School so long before-at a time when many of their mothers had not been born! During her remaining years, Mrs. Whitridge showed renewed interest in the School. She was in frequent communication with her former pupils in an attempt to gather facts and to restore records which she had long forgotten and which had been lost. Her former colleague had died long since. There were so few left to ask, so few who remem- bered. Many were slow to answer her letters- and typing what came was growing difficult for her. The facts she so painstakingly collected, she put into the hands of a former head of the School, Grace Latimer Jones McClure, to use as occasion might arise. On March 18, 1952, she was buried in Columbus. During the brief service at her grave, with her daughter and her Columbus friends, stood the present headmistress of the School, and ten representatives of the Class of 1952, wearing dark blue blazers with the insignia of the Columbus School for Girls. -Grace Latimer jones McClure.