Campus

Emma Willard's Gargoyles

Emma Willard School Architectural History

ur permanent residents inform and amuse. They are all over the Emma Willard campus. They flirt, chase butterflies, drink tea, and study. They play with kittens, listen to their record players, turn somersaults, and talk endlessly on the telephone.

Emma Willard students? No.

Their numbers include past presidents of the United States, literary figures, and a British contemporary of Madame Willard.

They are the gargoyles who adorn Slocum and Sage Halls and the Alumnae Chapel, the permanent residents who stay as generations of students and faculty members come and go.

The specifications for the three buildings of the "new campus" on Mt. Ida, designed by the Troy firm of Cummings and Sons and submitted to the trustees in 1908, call for elaborate stone decorations on all the buildings. The gargoyles are mentioned only briefly. Whose idea they were remains a mystery.

By 1910, the three buildings, Sage and Slocum Halls and the Alumnae Chapel—then the gymnasium—were designed, and Abraham K. Mosley, an English architect, had been engaged to draw sketches for the stone carvings. Mosley's formal training was in engineering; his love was English architecture, especially the collegiate Gothic style selected by the Emma Willard trustees for the new campus.

A native of Staffordshire, Mosley was responsible for all the stone decorations on the buildings' interiors a well. He made over 300 sketches for Emma Willard, which were executed under his supervision by English and French stonecutters and carvers. Mosley considered the Emma Willard carvings his finest work and stayed in Troy after their completion. Shortly before his death in 1951, he spoke to Mary MacLear, then librarian, about them. Although some of the gargoyles represent historical figures, he recounted, most of them are imaginary. The carvings were made from clay or plaster models. "The contract," he said, "did not call for any models to be provided. Thus it necessitated quite a lot of data and sketching between myself and the carvers to furnish ideas and subjects to carve the required figures." There are well over one hundred gargoyles. Each is different and each reflects, in some way, the purpose of the building to which it is attached. Mosley's conception of those purposes is often witty and perceptive.

The Alumnae Chapel, original used as a gymnasium (it still houses the swimming pool and a bowling lane), is decorated with some 30 gargoyles who run, bowl, wrestle, and somersault their way around the building.

Slocum Hall, then as now the academic and administrative center of campus, is adorned with figures from history and literature. Renaissance scholars converse with Medieval monks. A dour New England minister preaches to the fields on the northeast side. Shakespeare is joined by one of his own creations, Hamlet.

Decorations on the third of the original buildings, Sage dormitory, most clearly reflect Mosley's creativity and his understanding of young women. Himself the father of two daughters, Mosley was able to communicate– through stone caricatures–a sense of the lifestyles of Emma Willard students that remains in 1982 as accurate and witty as it was in 1912 when the first girls arrived on the Mt. Ida campus.

Many of the Sage Hall gargoyles are female figures. Two on the Pawling Avenue side hold a conversation over steaming teacups. There are several musicians, a youngster playing with a kitten, and a student, fast asleep, holding a book open. A mother cuddles her baby, an impish coquette flirts over her fan, and one gargoyle—steering his roadster around the corner of the building—overlooks the parking lot.

Also adorning Sage Hall is a carved portrait of Abraham Mosley's grandmother. Shortly before Mosley came to Troy to design the ornaments for Emma Willard School, he visited his family home in Kingsley, England. In a conversation with a cousin, he learned that 50 years earlier—roughly the time when Madam Willard was petitioning the New York State legislature for funds to create the Troy Female Seminary—the British Parliament had made a study on the conditions of the working classes in Britain. A member of the Royal Commission had visited Mosley's grandparents' home and found his grandmother a fine example of domesticity and industry. She was later singled out in the official report.

Upon his return to Troy, Mosley began work on the figures. The porte cochere of Sage Hall, he found, contained five stone blocks, each the size of a human face. To four of these, he gave the impish faces that characterize the gargoyles. For the fifth Mosley carved a portrait of his grandmother in her lace bonnet. He later explained that he had selected her as a representative of the great mass of female workers of the previous century and noted that she, like Madame Willard herself, was a strong and hardworking woman.

Granny Mosley is not the only historical figure to adorn the buildings. Teddy Roosevelt rides rough on the corner of Alumnae Chapel and presidents George Washington and Abe Lincoln look out over Pawling Avenue from the front of Slocum Hall.

Whether historical or imaginary, the gargoyles reflect the wit and sensitivity of their creator, and they both capture and add to the atmosphere of Emma Willard School.