AT WELLS COLLEGE
By Anne Whitehouse
THE DEER
My husband and I spotted the deer lying in the woods outside the college library. Through a tunnel of green leaves, she held our gaze.
Eighty years before our visit, his mother came here to college, a tall, shy girl burdened by her mother’s expectations. She found a young woman’s paradise. Stately buildings on sloping lawns housed lecture halls and classrooms, dormitories and common rooms, a dining hall with chandeliers and murals on the walls. There was a boathouse on the lake and trails through the woods. When she wasn’t studying, she loved playing the piano and sailing a Sunfish on the silvery lake.
MINERVA
When Wells College was founded in 1868, the founder’s son gave the school a marble statue of Minerva. It was a contemporary copy of a Roman statue in the Vatican, itself a replica of a Greek bronze. Generations of students venerated their goddess of wisdom. They kissed her feet for luck when they passed by. In the spring they decorated her with garlands of flowers. They painted her toenails in glittery colors.
In 1888, the Wells campus was destroyed by fire. Placed in the alcove to the Main Building and surrounded by thick walls, the statue of Minerva was the only object to survive the conflagration. In the aftermath of the fire, the college was rebuilt, and it thrived. In 1975, students at Hobart, the neighboring college for men, kidnapped Minerva from her pedestal and put her in the trunk of a car. She was too big, and it wouldn’t close. Stopped by a state trooper, the students were charged with grand larceny, and Minerva was restored to her niche.
VISIT
In the following years, my mother-in-law served on the Board of Trustees. She cherished her connection to the college that had nurtured her. She had no sisters of her own, and it gave her a sisterhood. It distressed her to vote to admit men to the incoming class of 2005, but she believed it was the only way to secure the future of the college, even if its character was changed.
That July day we visited in 2023, ten years after my mother-in-law’s death, members of the new freshman class were expected for orientation. In the Main Building, staff arranged welcome bags on long tables. A middle-aged woman who worked in the kitchen confided that she loved the college and hoped to work long enough to enroll her young daughter.
In the grand salon of the Main Building, there were prints and drawings on the walls by nineteenth and twentieth-century masters. The doors were unlocked. People walked in and out. I felt in a time out of mind.
We walked across green lawns down to the beach on the lake, where the college had a boathouse. Little waves lapped against the shore. Sequins of sunlight sparkled on the water. I listened to the rocking of small boats at their moorings—sailboats, kayaks, canoes.
FINALE
In April 2024, the Board of Trustees voted to close the college, citing inadequate finances, the global pandemic, inflation, and a shrinking pool of students. The class we saw being welcomed was the last incoming class, and they were marooned.
That June, after the students departed, maintenance workers were sent to move Minerva to what was called “a secure location indoors.” They lifted her from her pedestal, strapped her to a dolly, and laid her across a backhoe’s bucket.
While attempting to raise her from the bucket into the back of a truck, they dropped her to the ground. With a loud thud, her head broke off and rolled on the dirt.
Seeing the damage, the backhoe driver covered his face and cursed. News of the decapitation spread through the Wells community, provoking general outrage. The administration was criticized for attempting to move Minerva without protection or professional oversight. “On top of everything else, a final unraveling,” commented the local historian, who was a Wells graduate.
Idealism inspired the founding of Wells. At a time when higher education was denied to women, here they would thrive. Today women have more opportunities, but those making policy have less idealism. The Board closed the college without consulting alumnae, students, or faculty. To some, the decision seemed as precipitous as the destruction of Minerva.
My mother-in-law was a reserved woman. She kept to herself and was shy in company. Her connection to Wells sustained her. When her husband of sixty years died, the college president wept on the phone with her. The personal endures after the people are gone.
After my mother-in-law died, we found a heavy glass vase on the bottom shelf in the back of the glass-fronted maple cabinet downstairs. Its fluted sides curved gently in two parabolas.
On the front was inscribed, “In grateful appreciation, Wells College.” My sister-in-law gave it to me.
In spring and summer, I fill it with bouquets of flowers.
About the Author
As a Columbia MFA student in poetry, Anne Whitehouse (then Anne Cherner) was one of the editors of the first issue of Columbia: A Journal of Poetry and Prose (as it was known then) in 1977 and interviewed Stanley Kunitz with Elmaz Abinador and Cleopatra Mathis. She is honored to have her work appear in Issue 64. Anne is the author of poetry collections: The Surveyor’s Hand, Blessings and Curses, The Refrain, Meteor Shower, Outside from the Inside, and Steady, as well as the art chapbooks, Surrealist Muse (about Leonora Carrington), Escaping Lee Miller, Frida, Being Ruth Asawa, and Adrienne Fidelin Restored. She is also the author of a novel, Fall Love.
