Nature Notes December 2019
As many of you who visited Jeannie over the last year know, I
bought Jeannie a couple of stuffed animals to entertain ourselves with: Foxy Fox and the Sloth, her sleep
mentor. For many months, we joked that
Foxy Fox wanted to go to Allandale Farm, about a mile from our house, to check
out their chicken coop. Allandale is a wonderful place – a combination of
farm/farm stand/gardening center with a couple of huge, shaggy, black,
long-horned Highland Cattle, Willard and Curtis, out in the back field. Next to their field is a small pond that
sometimes has hooded mergansers during migration season. Allandale is the last working farm in Jamaica
Plain and neighboring Brookline and has been in the same family since 1665. After months of joking about Foxy Fox going
to the chicken coop, one day I finally took him there and got some selfies for
him to show his fox friends.
The Eliot School, too, has an interesting history – it is the
fourth oldest school in the US (the oldest is Boston Latin, where students
still study 3-4 years of Latin). The
school’s website says:
“The Eliot School is one of a small group of early colonial-era schools that survive today. In 1676, a group of local residents donated corn and land to support a school in Jamaica Plain. That year marked the end of King Philip’s War. In 1689, Rev. John Eliot, known as Minister to the Indians, endowed the school with an additional 75 acres, with the provision that it educate Native Americans and Africans as well as colonial children. For the next two centuries, it was a grammar school, adapting to the times.Beginning in the late 19th century, the Eliot School turned increasingly to the arts. In 1874, it left the public school system and by the late 1880s had added sewing and carpentry classes. Wood carving flourished. Plumbing, basketry and millinery also had their day. The school offered manual training for schoolteachers, instruction for adults, and classes for children both after school and during school time.During this transition, neighbors Robert and Ellen Swallow Richards [who lived 2 doors down from the school] played a significant role. Professors at MIT, they were proponents of vocational education and home economics. Their efforts helped make “shop and home ec” staples of 20th century American public schooling. Robert Richards sat on the Eliot School board for over sixty years until he resigned at the age of 100 in 1944. [And I have to add here, that Robert Richards was the first head of my department at MIT and Ellen Swallow Richards was the first woman student at MIT, receiving her degree in 1873. She taught at MIT for her entire career, although MIT never made her a professor.]Throughout the 20th century, students attended the Eliot School “to satisfy that instinctive desire of human beings to create,” and as “relaxation from their sedentary vocations.”Today, we continue to offer classes to people of all ages in fine and applied arts. We maintain an active relationship with Boston Public Schools, and still provide an outlet for people to relax from sedentary vocations and satisfy their need for creative expression and for making things by hand.”
Boston had a bumper crop of acorns last fall; one day I noticed
that someone had raked a dense carpet of acorns under one of the oaks in the
Eliot schoolyard. By late December,
there was acorn detritus all over the place.
On Christmas morning, I heard a thump against the kitchen window
and went to see what it was – to my astonishment, I saw a hawk (Cooper’s?) in
the raised bed next to the window with an upside down robin in its talons; the
robin must have hit the window in a desperate, unsuccessful attempt to flee the
hawk.
:))
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