By Grace Kronenberg ’06
Illustrations by Phil
You’ve driven past it on your way to points east (or west if you were approaching Middlebury).
You’ve picnicked there. You’ve studied there in the summer. You’ve sat in an Adirondack chair amid its distinctive mustard-yellow buildings, reading Shakespeare or Frost. You’ve wandered its meadows and marveled at the bucolic setting.
Yes, you know Bread Loaf. But how much do you know about Bread Loaf—both the mountain campus itself and the School of English? (No doubt you’re well-versed on the Writers’ Conference, having read all about it last fall in this magazine.)
We feel there are at least 17 facts, anecdotes, and stories relating to Bread Loaf that every well-informed Middlebury alum—and heck, well-informed person—should know.
#1 The Bread Loaf Inn—the main building on the mountain campus—used to be an actual inn, housing guests from 1866 until the mid-1920s. During the early years of the School of English, guests and students coexisted at the idyllic locale.
#2 The Bread Loaf School of English takes its name from Bread Loaf Mountain. Rising 3,835 feet above sea level, the mountain is part of the Green Mountain chain and is shaped like a fat loaf of bread. Folk wisdom holds that Bread Loaf was formed by a loaf-shaped meteorite that fell from the sky and landed squarely on the mountaintop. Science counters with a different hypothesis: Bread Loaf Mountain, and all its companions to the north and south, once formed the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. Roughly 450 million years ago, the North American and African continental plates collided, forcing and folding the sea floor skyward into jagged peaks—Vermont’s Green Mountains.
#3 If Gamaliel Painter was the founding father of Middlebury, then Joseph Battell was Bread Loaf’s paterfamilias. The son of a wealthy attorney, Battell grew up in Middlebury and enrolled at the College in 1856. Poor health forced his withdrawal, but after convalescing in Europe for several years, he returned to the Champlain Valley in 1863 and began to dabble in the cattle business. It was in the summer of 1865, while riding on horseback through Middlebury Gorge, that he happened upon a farmhouse set in a clearing in the shadow of Bread Loaf Mountain. He was awestruck by the picturesque setting; the following year, he purchased the house and 300 acres of land. From that point, Battell began to buy large tracts of land surrounding his new mountain homestead; he came to own nearly 40,000 acres of forestland in the Green Mountains, making him the largest landowner in the state at the time of his death in 1915.
Though Battell developed the Bread Loaf area and encouraged tourism—expanding the farmhouse into an inn to accommodate summer visitors and leasing plots to friends interested in building vacation cottages—his primary goal was to ensure that the vast lands he owned remained pristine and undeveloped in the face of the rapid industrialization that marked late-nineteenth-century America.
Battell bequeathed 31,000 acres of his Bread Loaf landholdings to Middlebury, providing the College with a prime location for the founding of a graduate program in English literature. Without Battell, there would be no Bread Loaf campus, and the College would likely be a much different institution.
#4 One of the more distinctive buildings on the mountain campus is the large barn, which now serves as a reading salon and social area for the School of English and the Writers’ Conference. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, Battell operated a dairy farm on the property and used the barn to house his cattle. His agricultural products were highly sought after and considered among the best in Vermont.
#5 Though the Bread Loaf School of English was officially founded in 1919, its roots stretch back a decade earlier.
As early as 1909, Middlebury College held summer courses in a variety of subjects—woodcarving, drawing, English literature, classical languages, and music, to name a few—which were offered to local Vermonters as a type of continuing adult education program. Though the course offerings in English were not organized into a degree program, collectively they gained a reputation as Middlebury’s “summer school” for English. College trustees, not wanting to be in the inn business, identified the Bread Loaf Inn and its surrounding cottages as a potential site on which to develop a formal graduate program in English. After a few years, with the School well established, the College closed the inn for business.
#6 The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference can be considered an offspring of the School of English. Wilfred Davison ’13, the dean of the School, noticed that many Bread Loaf students came to the School in order to write literature as much as to study it, so he sought to create a symposium where writers could meet, discuss manuscripts, and attend lectures and discussions on their craft. The first conference was held in 1926 and has evolved into the country’s premier writers’ conference.
#7 For more than 50 years, the Bread Loaf School of English had only one campus: the mountain site in Vermont. In 1978, the School established a second site at Lincoln College of Oxford University, and in 1991, Bread Loaf ventured westward, opening a school in Santa Fe, New Mexico. During the past decade, Bread Loaf has added a site in Juneau, Alaska, on the campus of University of Alaska Southeast, and, this summer, the School celebrates its fifth opening—on the campus of University of North Carolina, in Asheville. Most students earn their degrees over four or five summers and study in at least one of the non-Vermont locations.
#8 Each Bread Loaf campus has a curriculum designed to reflect its location. For example, Bread Loaf in Santa Fe offers courses in Latino and American Indian literatures; Asheville, courses in Southern and African American literatures. In Juneau, where students live on a stunning campus situated near a lake, a temperate rainforest, and a glacier, popular courses deal with writing on exploration, wilderness, and the natural environment.
#9 A vast majority, more than 80 percent, of Bread Loaf’s 550 students are secondary school teachers earning their M.A. or M.Litt. degree.
#10 “Bread Loafers” hail from all corners of the country—and the world. Some of the most remarkable of this international cadre come from Muslim schools in India, Pakistan, and Kenya. These are teachers at progressive, English-speaking schools operated by the Aga Khan Education Services, one in a bevy of development agencies administered by the Aga Khan—the spiritual leader of the Ismaili Muslim sect. Upon returning to their home schools in Asia and Africa, the Aga Khan schoolteachers hold Bread Loaf-style workshops for their colleagues.
#11 In an era when less than half of secondary school teachers have a degree in the field they teach—most hold their degree in education—the Bread Loaf School of English graduates are experts in literature, theater, and in the teaching of writing.
#12 In a recent nationwide tour, the National Commission on Writing, a nonprofit organization that seeks to improve the way writing is taught, used videotapes of Bread Loaf teachers in their home classrooms, to illustrate the best teaching practices.
#13 Hardly a stand alone entity at Middlebury, the Bread Loaf School of English has strong ties to its sister institutions. More than five percent of the Bread Loaf students are Middlebury graduates, and the administrators for the School of English are talking with their counterparts at the Writers’ Conference about forming a jointly sponsored M.F.A. program. There is also a link between the School of English and the C. V. Starr-Middlebury Schools Abroad: each year, students from the College’s partner universities in France and Germany come to the United States to spend the summer immersed in the study of English literature.
#14 In 1984, Bread Loaf launched a computer system that would link the home classrooms of Bread Loaf teachers. As it has evolved over 20 years, this telecommunications tool, named BreadNet, has allowed teachers to collaborate with their colleagues around the globe, opening their classrooms to different practices and ways of thought. While BreadNet is open to all Bread Loaf students, those who attend on fellowships are required to participate, thus partnering with other fellows and creating cross-classroom exchanges.
Secondary school students in these classrooms are faced with a new task: to write, not for their teacher or for a grade, but for an audience of their peers in other schools across the state, the nation, or the globe. Teachers have found that their students’ writing on BreadNet improves dramatically over the course of the project, as does their level of engagement with the text under study. A side benefit: teachers say that initiatives like BreadNet build a personal and pedagogical support network in a profession that can otherwise be frustratingly lonely. A sense of connectedness develops among those who use BreadNet, one that serves as an antidote to the high attrition rate among new teachers nationwide.
#15 With anchors in all four corners of the United States—and a small, yet venerable piece of Great Britain—the search for a new Bread Loaf site begins to take on an international focus. Though America has been a melting pot since its birth, the influx of Hispanic immigrants over the past several decades has begun to change the demographic makeup of the nation in ways that can only be anticipated. Nowhere is this change felt more than in the classroom, where more teachers each year are faced with children who have a limited command of English. Teachers across the country are eager to learn Spanish and to gain a greater understanding of Hispanic cultures in order to relate more fully to their heterogeneous classrooms.
Middlebury has considered Mexico as a venue for its next Bread Loaf site. (In fact, in 2004, the College experimented with a campus in Guadalajara.) Though all courses would probably be taught in English at first, there is a distinct possibility that future Bread Loaf sites may begin to offer courses in foreign languages.
#16 While many Bread Loaf students teach at the leading private institutions in the country (independent schools often fund their teachers’ continuing education, while public schools often do not), the School has made a strong push to attract—and achieve funding for—teachers from underserved populations. Early returns are positive: in rural Colorado, Maria Roberts, M.A. English ’02, and Lucille Rossbach, M.A. English ’02—are employed in districts so tiny that they alone form the English department in their respective schools. Because their schools are so small, Roberts and Rossbach are each solely accountable for the performance of their students on state standardized reading and writing examinations. A year after receiving their degrees, Roberts’s school was number one in Colorado on those tests; Rossbach’s was seventh. The following year, both schools ranked in the top five.
#17 Even before Hurricane Katrina, Bread Loaf was working to create a network of teachers in New Orleans (and in four other communities around the country). These networks, functioning as support systems for teachers in low-income and underprivileged school districts, were created under a 2003 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. Since Katrina, the connection between New Orleans teachers and Bread Loaf has grown stronger. Middlebury has been working to bring teachers from hurricane-ravaged districts to the Asheville campus, while many Bread Loaf alums are collaborating with Jim Randels, the co-director of a New Orleans-based writing project that trains high school students to become writing mentors for peers.