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Scattergood at 125: A school, a hostel and perseverance
by Gregory R. Norfleet · News · June 11, 2015
Walking across the campus of Scattergood Friends School and Farm on the eastern outskirts of West Branch, this reporter saw numerous students and staff taking part in a work day Friday, just two days prior to graduation.
Head of School Christine Ashley stopped to introduce Admissions Director Alicia Streeter, actively spreading mulch around rose bushes on the north side of the center of campus.
Not just any roses, though. They’re called Quaker roses.
The reddish-orange rose, according to BackyardGardener.com, is a Hybrid Tea rose that repeatedly blooms through the summer and fall.
“Unfortunately, this favorite plant is quite susceptible to a variety of diseases and pests, many of which can be controlled with good cultural practices,” reads the Web site.
That is, they need careful and constant tending to survive.
Much like what it takes to keep a small Quaker high school going.
This year, Scattergood marks a milestone: 125 years since its founding.
The school will celebrate this weekend, June 11-14, by welcoming alumni back to the school and farm.
While Scattergood remained in existence since its founding in 1890, the school closed temporarily, became a hostel to shelter war refugees (for which it would later share in a Nobel Peace Prize) and reopened to grow into what it is today.
The history of Scattergood reaches back to 1854, when orthodox “Wilburite” Quakers — a more conservative yet smaller group than the “Gurneyite” evangelical Quakers — started the Hickory Grove Meeting, named after a grove of hickory trees on member John Heald’s property, where they first started meeting, according to Scattergood Friends School: 1890-1990.
The group grew and moved to the Samuel Fawcett farm, where they built their first Meeting House.
Counting 86 children among the families, the members began talking about starting their own school to shelter the youth from “worldly influences,” reads the book. In 1863, they began elementary-level schooling, and while these classes met only a few weeks at a time, interest started to grow in the “Scattergood Seminary.”
But taking the leap to starting a permanent, regular school got some help when Clarkson Sheppard of New Jersey and Joseph Henry Scattergood of Philadelphia visited Hickory Grove in 1873. Scattergood’s son, George, later wrote that his father “became much interested in the welfare of Friends” at Hickory Grove and recommended they “establish a boarding school in their own neighborhood.” Scattergood helped raise thousands of dollars to get the school started.
Acquiring 12 acres at $50 per acre and building its first school; the new Scattergood Friends School and Farm could handle up to 50 students. The first year, some 20 signed up to attend classes “two miles east and one-half mile south of West Branch” reads the book. Construction started in the spring; the first day of class was in December 1890. The 8-week fall term cost $25, the 18-week winter term cost $50; the 10-week spring term cost $25.
“Some got financial aid,” Scattergood Director of Communications and Giving Jody Caldwell said.
A gymnasium went up in 1923, and school continued uninterrupted until 1931, when the impact of the Great Depression reached the area and Scattergood went into debt and had to close.
The closure was considered temporary, and Scattergood hired Walter and Sara Stanley to live on and care for the property until it could reopen.
Conflicts in Europe began to reach the Quakers in Iowa, who discussed at a July 1938 conference how astonished they were by Nazism and anti-Semitism. Those conflicts would lead to World War II starting in 1939, when European Quakers began sending refugees to America. Hickory Grove offered up Scattergood as a hostel.
From 1939 to 1943, some 186 individuals found a temporary home east of West Branch. Of those, 25 were children aged 10 months through 16 years old, and the school-age ones attended classes in West Branch.
During their time, the refugees recovered from their ordeals and long travels, retrained to find new work, learned English and became acclimated to life in the United States. Scattergood renovated the school buildings into living quarters, raised money for appropriate furnishings and hired staff to care for the visitors.
West Branch residents had some concerns about refugees with Jewish ancestry, coming from Germany, Austria, France, Poland, Italy and Czechoslovakia.
“The West Branch community as a whole was not entirely friendly to having a group of foreigners among them,” read the Scattergood history book.
However, West Branch Methodist minister Rev. James P. Gable prepared a series of sermons that explained, and Mayor Williams Anderson was vocal in supporting, what Scattergood was doing. This helped the community grow to accept this “intense human experience,” as the Scattergood history book reads.
The efforts of the larger Quaker organizations that sent the refugees to hostels like Scattergood — the Friends Service Council (in London) and the American Friends Service Committee — earned the attention of the Nobel Peace Prize committee. In 1947, the two groups were awarded a Nobel Peace Prize.
“The Quakers have shown us that it is possible to translate into action what lies deep in the hearts of many: compassion for others and the desire to help them — that rich expression of the sympathy between all men, regardless of nationality or race, which, transformed into deeds, must form the basis for lasting peace,” Nobel Prize Chairman Gunnar Jahn said in his speech on Dec. 10, 1947, according to Nobelprize.org. “For this reason alone the Quakers deserve to receive the Nobel Peace Prize today.”
Caldwell said the success of the hostel reinvigorated interest in reopening the school that had closed 13 years earlier. The 1943 Yearly Meeting committee set a goal of raising $10,000 to invest in this effort, which it accomplished in March 1944.
The school hurried to hire staff and recruit students, and on Sept. 5, 1944, the Scattergood School reopened.
The following year, Scattergood “enrollment included the first black student (the first American Indian student was at the school for only two weeks in the fall of 1944) and the first black faculty member, reflecting a firm interracial policy which did not pass unnoticed in rural Iowa” read the Scattergood history.
“We chose our students and faculty very carefully in those first few years,” staffer Leanore Goodenow said in a 1986 interview. “We were being observed very carefully.”
The school’s reputation grew, and some parents began registering their children at birth to ensure a spot in one of the dorms, read the book.
Yet despite the demand, many students still needed financial help, and the Iowa Friends “were stretched to their limit” and the Yearly Meeting “could not meet the needs of the school,” read the Scattergood history. That meant Goodenow — crew chief, business manager, teacher, nurse and driver — had to let go of some of her on-campus responsibilities so she could hit the road and raise money.
Tuition at the time the school reopened was $200. That grew to $600 by 1958, $1,250 by 1973, $2,500 by 1975 and $8,411 by 1989.
Today, the school has some students who drive to campus each day, and others who stay in the dorms. Day student tuition is $18,350 for the 2015-16 school year, according to Scattergood.org, and $29,850 for boarding. Both of the numbers are followed by an asterisk, which takes readers to a note that explains how 65 percent of students “receive some form of financial aid, “with over half of these students receiving maximum financial aid.”
Streeter, the director of admissions who was spreading mulch around the Quaker rose bushes, posted a welcome message on the school’s Web site, starting off by dispelling some of the images people’s minds might conjure up when they hear “boarding school,” like “fiesty teens and tough love to stuffy dress codes, privileged families and ivy-covered halls.”
“Upon arrival … you might be greeted by Jet or Cocoa (our four-legged ambassadors), help yourself to a crate of surplus tomatoes near the front door, wave to a student skateboarding to AP Calculus class … and what you think you know about boarding school quickly dissolves,” she writes.
Jaci Tentinger of Paullina, Iowa, just graduated on Sunday after four years on campus, and she agrees. Her brother, stepfather and grandfather all attended Scattergood.
“A lot has changed since my grandfather was here,” she said. “But one thing is consistent: The experience and the friendships.”
Tentinger said when some people think of boarding schools, they think of “students with issues” — parents sending their teens there to get straightened out — but the school “looks for students who will thrive in this community.”
Fellow senior Brais Galvan of Spain just finished two years at the Quaker school. He did not know anything about Quakers before coming, but said he found a place there even though he had a Catholic background.
“After the first week or so, I felt like I had known everybody for five years,” he said. “Quakerism is not so much a religion as it is a way of living. It’s a lifestyle that helps you grow up. They teach you values that are critical to grow as a person.”
125th Celebration
Scattergood Friends School & Farm this weekend, June 11-14, will host a celebration marking its 125th anniversary since its founding in 1890.
While the school organized registrations for the event to plan housing and meals for visitors, Head of School Christine Ashley said area residents are free to visit the campus to learn more about it.
Thursday: Celebrating the classes of the 1940s through the 1970s with wine and cheese at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library
Friday: Celebrating the classes of the 1980s through the present with a barbecue at Hoover Park, ultimate frisbee, soccer and planting a commemorative tree
Saturday: Farm tours and an all-school dinner and dance
Sunday: Meeting for Worship and farewells
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