A New Chapter for Manor Mill & Oldfields 

When, in 1867, Anna Austen McCulloch, oldest of six children, settled into the rolling hills of Glencoe, having moved from Staten Island on the heels of the Civil War with her husband and eight children, she arrived to a working farm with horses and chickens and into her brother’s tiny yellow clapboard “Old House”, that had no electric or running water. Her interest in education was met with a desire to educate her children, which soon included relatives who lived nearby and which evolved into an all-girls boarding school, with classes in the natural and physical sciences, reading and writing, sewing and riding. 

Perhaps, on one of those cool October Fridays, when the day’s schedule was more relaxed, Anna took the train two stops to meet her friends at The Monkton Hotel, having just opened in 1858 or gathered with them to take a long ride through the country, stopping in at Manor Mill to pick up some flour, which would later become hot rolls to go alongside the smothered chicken, coleslaw and a cold glass of milk from a silver tankard, filled that afternoon.

And perhaps, as you strolled through campus today, you could imagine what Anna did: a bucolic place to grow up and to learn, and you could picture what a marvelous place that might have been, and still is. 

That Manor Mill, in its 281-year life, has now become a community built around creativity, music, and the arts, and Oldfields, celebrating its 157th graduating class, should partner to create something special seems almost obvious: things like this seem to want to happen as much as they are made to happen.

But it is not without work and effort. I am so grateful to the Head of School Ansley Smithwick who, as I imagine Anna McCulloch to be, is as hard-working and committed, continuously open and unafraid to try. And I am equally amazed by Vanessa Eskridge, the director of this play who I watched take the scrap of an idea called Manor Mill Playhouse and turn it into an incredible performance which you are about to see. I cannot thank the teams of volunteers and help at Oldfields and Manor Mill enough. 

Surely Anna McCulloch had moments of doubt and worry as she thought back to her days in New York City and wondered how she would make do with ornery horses, crowing roosters and wayward cows. I share in those moments of doubt and worry. But I am reminded every day how a community can come together to not only support the unknown but to embrace it. And here we are, together.

And for that I am deeply grateful.

Angelo Otterbein

Manor Mill