Reflections of Havergal: 1994-2019

PREFACE

TABLE OF CONTENTS

HAVERGAL’ S F IRST CENTURY

decision was made for the future of Havergal. The board decided to purchase twenty-seven acres of the Anderson farm at Avenue Road and Lawrence Avenue for $6000 per acre, with 20 per cent of the price to be paid in cash. 4 Catherine Steele, Havergal’s fourth principal but a student in 1923, remembered the picnic Ellen Knox was determined to have on this “glorious piece of land” 5 before building began. The picnic took place on October 4, Miss Knox’s birthday: I still have a vivid memory of Miss Knox standing on the hill … All around us as far as we could see were fields. There were trees in our ravine but no other trees on the property! Of course, Avenue Road was still an unpaved mud trail. Off in the distance we could just glimpse a couple of houses through the pine trees on Glenview Avenue. 6 That Miss Knox was a highly disciplined and highly skilled educator and administrator cannot be disputed. That she brought passion and rigour to her position is beyond doubt. What also bears noting, however, is that

The venture was, she concluded, “a perilous undertaking.” However, she had “the imagination to succeed. Taking the only positive aspect of her first visit—the crabapple tree under the staircase window— she turned it into a classroom, letting her girls perch on its branches to study.” 3 During her time at Havergal, Miss Knox painstakingly nurtured the Havergal tree. An exacting yet compassionate educator, she established traditions still observed today, but she was also a woman of vision. After presiding over two decades of expansion to school buildings on properties in the heart of Toronto, she turned her attention north and discovered farmland that would be ideal for a new school. To get Board members to agree, she drew on impressive skills of persuasion and eventually won them to her cause. She convinced the board to purchase the land on which the school now stands. She had longed for “a new school with houses circling round a central day school and all the playing fields we can use” … [O]n 11 May 1923, a

Ellen Knox with Havergal students beside Rutherford House, post 1913.

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