Who is Marjory Wright Upson?

Marjory Alexander Wright (born 1892 in Akron OH: died 1987 in Middlebury VT) and William Hazlett Upson (born 1891 in Glen Ridge NJ: died 1975 in Middlebury VT) were married August 18, 1923 in Middlebury, VT and settled in the Middlebury area in 1928. They lived at 24 Chipman Park in Middlebury in 1940 and 1950; sharing a house with two children (Polly and John) and the parents of Marjory (Charles B. Wright and Clara [Alexander] Wright). Marjory attended Middlebury Grade School, Middlebury High School, and Middlebury College (class of 1915), and was active in the Women’s Society of the Middlebury Congregational Church and Middlebury College Alumni. William graduated from Cornell in 1914 and was an author, well known for his books on Alexander Botts, a salesman for Earthworm Tractor Company. Marjory received her registered nurse certificate in 1920 from the University of the State of New York.

Marjory Upson was known to speak to local women’s and girls’ groups. Following is the text of a talk she gave in Middlebury late in her life. Although we don’t know exactly where, when, or to whom she was speaking here, she does reference “the expensive [high school] building off Court Street that we have now,” which provides some context.

“Middlebury From the Turn of the Century”

By Marjory Wright Upson

I have been asked to speak on Middlebury as it was on the turn of the century so many times in the last ten or fifteen years that I think a lot of my friends begin to feel that I ought to be stuffed and set on a shelf in Shelburne Museum along with the old cat that lives there. Be that as it may, conditions in 1900 would be rather difficult for you girls to picture. There was no radio, TV, and there were no long distance telephones, cars, buses, planes and supermarkets were unheard of. Middlebury had four doctors at the time, and if you went to their offices, the office call was fifty cents; if they came to your house, and the doctors in those days were willing to make house call, they charged you the great sum of one dollar. There were no women’s clothing stores in Middlebury, so if you wanted a new dress, and didn’t think you could take the train to Burlington and wait all day up there, and then take the train back, there were two dry goods stores in Middlebury and you bought goods by the yard, and if you weren’t a sewer yourself, a woman who was called a seamstress came and sewed from eight in the morning till five in the afternoon, with time off for noonday dinner, which you served her, and she charged one dollar.

The school at that time was in what is now the College Street building, and it drew students from what is now the MUHS district. You may wonder how people got to school in those days. The people from Weybridge and Cornwall, and students within a couple of miles of the school, managed to get in every day; either their families drove them in, or their various neighbors who had carts, used to bring them in. There was one boy in Cornwall who lived on the road between the Cider Mill and Rte 125, and he rode in every day on horseback, rain or shine, winter or summer. His name was Mott Hoyt and we referred to him as Young Lochinvar. How did the other people, the people from Bridport, Ripton, and Salisbury, what did they do? Well, they managed to get in some way on Monday morning, each bringing a large basket of food, and there were certain people in town who rented rooms to these people and gave them kitchen privileges, and these people boarded themselves and stayed in town till Saturday afternoon when it was arranged to get them home. And there were no school lunches in those days. For those of us who lived in town, the noon lunch period was from 12 to 1:30, and we walked home and ate, not what was called lunch in those days, but was called dinner. That was the state of things before Easter Sunday 1904. That day, the old building burned, and for over a year the schools were housed all over town. The high school was in the old Catholic church which was vacant at the time and stood down by the corners of Weybridge and Shannon Streets. The rest of us who were in graded schools at the time were housed in church vestries, flower houses, or club rooms all over the town. After the fire, the school board hired an architect, and he drew plans for a very beautiful new school building. It was to have twice the floor space as the old school building and everybody was very very happy until just before the meeting when the new school building was to be voted on by the voters. The insurance company came up with the information that they had examined the walls of the old building and they were perfectly solid and were worth at least $10,000. The penny pinching Middleburites voted down the new building, which was going to cost a little over $50,000, and then one change was made: instead of the high school being on the third floor, as it had been in the old building, it was on the second floor. Of course, the tragedy of it was that within five years that building became very overcrowded, and soon after, in about 1911 or 1912, they built a new high school building, and that is now the Municipal Building. If the voters had only voted the beautiful new building, it would have served both the high school and graded school for many many years, and then when the high school needed new quarters, it would have been quite sufficient for the graded school, and at that it would not have been necessary to put up the expensive building off Court Street that we have now. But that was just one of those things. And that was the way it was when our class entered high school in the fall of 1907, we went into the second floor of the old building down here on College Street, and our class numbered 60; out of that 60, 16 of us graduated four years later.

In those days, three courses were given - - college preparatory, teacher training, which, when a girl graduated from Middlebury High School having completed teacher training courses, she could teach in one of the one-room country school in Addison County. Those were pretty good jobs because many of the girls who had them picked up very nice farmer husbands. In the college preparatory course, there were four years of Latin and English required, two years of math, and two years of a modern language. There was one year of ancient history, then there were electives; you could take three years of Greek, one year of Advanced Math, one year of Chemistry, and one year of Physics. There were five people on the faculty - - the Principal and four women teachers. My sophomore year, six of us in the college preparatory course took Greek. I might say, before I go into that, that in the English course, that was given for people who were not dropping out of school just then, but who were in school just then because they didn’t have anything else to do. In my sophomore year I took Greek, and then in my junior year I had two days of Greek before I dropped the course. There were two reasons why I dropped it. There had been six who took it the year before, and this year the person who had been sixth in the class as far as marks were concerned had dropped out, and I didn’t want to be fifth in a class of five. And also there was another reason - - Anne Smith who had taught Greek the year before had gone on to greener pastures in another job and so there wasn’t a single person on the faculty who had studied Greek. So, they went up to the College and got hold of a young junior to come down and teach the course. His name was Wayne Bosworth and I determined that I’d had enough Greek so I knew how to read Fraternity pins, so why should I take any more Greek from a man who didn’t even have a college degree? So I dropped it and enrolled in Miss Francis Warner’s course in Physics, and I have always been very glad I did. She was a marvelous teacher and I learned a lot in that course which had been very valuable to me ever since. Then the next year, I had a course in chemistry with Miss Warner, and at the time I thought it was a very good course, but I was not given college credit for the course, so when I wanted to take Chemistry 1 in the college course, it seemed to my amazement we had the same book, the same textbook, that we had used in high school, only the course was not nearly as good as Francis Warner had given us, and we only did half the experiments that we had done in the year we had it in Middlebury High School.

As far as recreation that we had in high school, athletics didn’t amount to much. I have vague recollections of boys playing baseball behind the College Street building. I do not remember football; skis were unheard of, but, in the winter time, tobogganing was very popular. You had these big travises, as they called them, and six or eight people would get on one and would start up by Old Chapel and go down the college walk and finally stop in front of the present municipal building on College Street. And that was considered a very very interesting winter sport. And also they did a great deal of snowshoeing in those days. Then, in spring and fall, we did hiking and rode bicycles - - I neglected to say that we did a lot of skating in winter. Fisher’s Pond, which is out the Creek Road, usually froze up in time for Thanksgiving weekend, so that weekend, when we weren’t eating turkey, we spent a great deal of time on the ice. Later in the season, after snow covered the ice, there were some enterprising people who used the clear the snow off the rink on Otter Creek near where the present sewage disposal plant is, and magnanimously let us skate all afternoon on that rink for the modest sum of 10 cents. Then also, if the snow hadn’t come, we did a great deal of skating on the river from the railroad bridge up to the three mile bridge which was on the road that went from East Middlebury to Cornwall. We did not go in for figure skating at all, but went in for distance and speed skating, and had lot of fun doing it.

The conditions in high school became so crowded that in 1911–1912 they built the new high school which is now the Municipal Building. That was in use until the fire of 1954. Of course, it must seem to you that there were a lot of fires in those days, and there really were. At that time, the MHS district was formed and since then there have been countless school meetings about additions, budgets, new buildings and this job and other, and I don’t want you to get the idea that I am completely unsympathetic with our penny pinching citizens who are always voting against school bond issues and things, because I know for retired people on fixed income, the average taxes are very heavy and hard sometimes. Our being taxed in three towns, Middlebury, Ripton, and Salisbury, for MHS, I know that the taxes do mount up, but we consider the schools very important and I hope that when you people get to the state when you can go to school meetings and vote, that you will realize that there is nothing that has done more to bring about the marvelous changes in sciences, etc., that has taken place since 1900, nothing has done so much as the fact that many more people are getting a good higher education: and if it is a question of buying a new car or voting an improvement in schools, for the sake of the next generation vote for new improvement.

There have been in Middlebury a lot of very generous people: they have been generous not only with their time, but with their money. Two of those that come to mind are Dr. Dorey and Mr. Joseph Battell for whom your Honor Society is named. I remember when I was a little child, hearing my family tell me about the bridge - - a wooden bridge over the river in the center of town on Main St. In 1895 the bridge burned, and divided the town in two. The only way they could get from one part of the town to the other was to go through the Pulp Mill Bridge or up around up a very very cheap iron bridge. Mr. Battell stood up at the meeting and said “I will take the contract to build that bridge.” Instead of putting up the cheap iron bridge, he put up the beautiful stone bridge which is an exact replica of the San Angelo Bridge in Rome, Italy. We regret now that he did not build it 10 or 15 wider, but that was back before the days of cars, when the Morgan horse was the idol of the people in Addison County. Then after the fire, he bought up all the property, all the land on which was the burned waste, the whole town burned from the bridge to the railroad track, everything except the building where Lazarus now holds out. Mr. Battell bought up the lots where the buildings had been burned and added greatly to the dignity of the town by building, in stages, the Battell Block. Those three parts toward the railroad track, then where the Skihaus is, he built the one for the post office, then when that became too small, he added the part where White’s store is, and that was the post office until it was moved to its present location. Mr. Battell had many interests, but one of his principal ones was Bread Loaf Inn which he ran as a loss usually, but entertained very congenial friends from New York, Philadelphia, and all over the country, and they in turn recommended the place to other congenial people and they came and had a beautiful time at Bread Loaf.

Along about 1900, some people began to consider Mr. Battell very eccentric because he didn’t receive a guest that arrived in an automobile. He was not eccentric. There was a very good reason for that. If you people could remember the Ripton Gorge the way I remember it, even when we first lived up there, it was a single track road, with turn outs about every 500 or 600 feet. There were no guard rails, the road just dropped off steeply into the gorge; one of his guests had been driving a Morgan horse down the road and met a car and the horse wasn’t used to cars and was scared and shied and there was a bad accident. Naturally, as long as the road was in that shape, Mr. Battell didn’t want to risk the lives of his friends and their beautiful horses by allowing cars on the road. There was another thing that some people didn’t understand. On the walls of his office were a lot of beautiful girls. Why should this aging bachelor have all these beautiful girls on the walls? There was a very good reason for it. These girls were either the children of friends of his who were in hard luck financially, or they were girls of exceptional ability who had been recommended to Mr. Battell and he paid their way either in College or at Music School or some such place.

Before his death he gave the Battell Campus, that is the west portion of the campus where we are now, to Middlebury College. Then on his death, he left Camel’s Hump to the State of Vermont, Chipman Hill and Battell Woods to Middlebury town, and Middlebury College was made the residuary legatee of his estate. In addition to leaving them the Battell Block and Bread Loaf Inn, he left 30,000 acres of valuable forest land which was sold to the National Forest and some of the money was used to build Forest Hall which is the Senior Dormitory up here on Middlebury Campus. Just to show his interest in the education of one woman, he put in his will that $1000 every year was to be given in 10 grants of $100 each to girls from Addison County who needed help to go on to college. $500 of that was to be given to girls from Addison County who were going to Middlebury College and the other $500 could be used in any way. I have discussed the matter with Mr. Reichert yesterday, and he said the sum is still used all the time. Of course, the specification was that they could only give $100 to each girl. That seems like a drop in the bucket now, but in those days, tuition at Middlebury College was $80 a year and the laboratory fees were another $20, which made it $100, which was just what Mr. Battell thought would suffice for those girls’ tuition.

Which all goes to show you’re growing in a different age then the one in which we grew up. I wish to thank you girls for listening so patiently to me, and I wish to thank Mrs. James for giving me another chance to speak to the high school girls and my friends before I am put in the Shelburne Museum.

Malcolm W. Chase, Church Historian