The Ethel Walker School Interactive Museum

Community Standards
The Ethel Walker School Interactive Museum, Simsbury
November 2024

Connecticut museum visit #537.

Long time readers know of my fascination with Connecticut’s boarding school scene. (This is currently even more fascinating to me as my 8th grader is getting looks from some because of the soccer thing.) Their history, their secrecy, their legacy, and their cost.

Many of them also have on-campus museums and art galleries. There are two such schools in Simsbury – The Westminster School and Ethel Walker. Both are private (and beautiful) campuses, so imagine my glee when I read about Ethel Walker’s new museum and the article concluded thusly:

The Ethel Walker School Interactive Museum is open to community members who wish to visit. Students, faculty, staff, and administrators are free to enter the museum during regular library hours. Other community members can schedule a tour by emailing archivist Kim Thacker at…

Fantastic! I dashed off an email to Ms. Thacker:

Ms. Thacker,

Greetings! My name is Steve Wood and I write ctmq.org – a widely read, wholly non-commercial 18-year (and counting) journey around Connecticut. I visit/do and write about everything in CT, including its museums, of which there are around 7 or 800. I’ve been to well over 500.

Which means I’d love to visit the Ethel Walker Museum at some point in the near future…

I went on and even wished her a Happy Thanksgiving. Her anxiously awaited reply came:

Hi Steve,

Thank you so much for your email. While I would love to be able to offer the public the chance to visit our school museum and art galleries, we are a closed campus and only allow school community members (alumnae, students, families of students, etc.) access to these sites. I can absolutely direct you to our virtual museum, though. You can read about the museum in this article (see link), and scroll down to the bottom of the article to access the virtual tour…

And that was when I learned that by “community members,” Ethel Walker means “Ethel Walker community members.” Sigh.

Alas, the Ethel Walker School Interactive Museum transcends private boarding school community walls and is available to the hoi polloi. And for that, I thank them, as now I can still visit their precious little museum.

Note: I fully understand the impetus behind closed campuses for all-girls schools and, well, any schools these days. The article Ms. Thacker referenced is here which links to the virtual museum and from which much of my “visit’s” information comes from.

Founded in 1911 in Lakewood, New Jersey, The Ethel Walker School’s first student body consisted of just 10 girls. The School quickly outgrew its first home and was moved in 1917 to its present site on the former Phelps-Dodge estate in Simsbury. They added a middle school in 1991 (which has its own virtual museum).

Ethel Walker was a Bryn Mawr graduate (of course she was) whose vision of a changing world for women inspired her to create a school where young women would receive a rigorous preparation for college and create the foundation for lifelong learning and intellectual curiosity. That’s cool. Can’t argue with that.

Time to check out their history museum, located in the Bell Library… not that that matters to us at this point. It’s not like any of us know where their Bell Library is. In person, visitors are encouraged to interact and touch the artifacts – hence the name of the museum. Do they recognize the irony of it being “interactive” only to the “community?”

No. No they don’t:

Because most museums do not encourage touching the artifacts on display, museums in general are not known as friendly spaces to anyone who has vision impairments. I want our museum to be fully accessible — at least as much as the physical space and safety and practicality will allow — to everyone. That is why anyone who visits will be able to touch items in the museum as well as be conducted through the space via audio tour. No one should feel as if displays of their history are inaccessible to them.

The physical museum is very small. The technology of the online version is really cool. Some of the museum’s contents include artifacts found in a woodland dump site on Walker’s grounds. These items relate to the School’s early history and include ink bottles, fountain pen nibs, jewelry, a pocket watch, a ceramic toothbrush, bottles of hand and face cream, porcelain and stoneware dishes, and much more.

If you are lucky enough to be part of the Walker Community, there are yearbooks to peruse, a typewriter to tap on, alumnae-authored books to read, a mid-18th century grandfather clock to admire, paper dolls to dress, and plenty more to see and touch. Two of Thacker’s favorite items are a pair of Heywood-Wakefield desks, manufactured in 1917, which was when the school came to Simsbury. Walker’s donated these desks to the Avon Historical Society in 1976 for the opening of the Pinegrove (sic) Schoolhouse. In 2023, Avon Historical Society President Terri Wilson, who was a Spanish teacher at Walker’s in 1983 and is a proud Dial, re-donated these desks to Walker’s. Although she was not involved in the historical society in the ’70s, Wilson recognized the desks as having come from Walker’s because students carved “Suns” and “Dials” into the tops.

(Suns and Dials are the traditional “spirit groups” at the school.)

If you go through the online tour, you’ll see lots of explanation for the artifacts they have there. Old photos, paper dolls, pennants, furniture, art, and all sorts of Walker’s-related paraphernalia. One of the coolest things is a piece of wall from the 1616 Tudor mansion that was built in England by Baron Gervase Clyfton. Two centuries later, Walter Phelps Dodge fell in love with it while visiting England. He purchased the house and had it shipped, beam by beam and stone by stone, to Simsbury, where it was rebuilt by a Boston architectural firm, on the hill across Bushy Hill Road.

In 1919, the family of Emily Cluett, who had died the previous winter from the influenza, donated a large sum of money to Walker’s, which allowed Ethel Walker to purchase the Dodge home. The school already owned two other Dodge family homes. The Emily Cluett House was the senior dorm until it was deemed uninhabitable in the mid-1960s. The new Cluett Dormitory was built, and students began living in it in 1967. In 1969, the more than 350-year-old house on the hill was demolished.

I just learned Ethel Walker was like 4’10”, was nicknamed Diddle, was born in England, and of course loved riding horses. And oh, hey, Mary Trump and Sigourney Weaver are Walker’s grads. And there’s a great story about another Walker’s grad:

A step further into the room, and still looking at the recess on the north wall at eye level, you’ll see items relating to Rosie the Riveter. Look down, and you’ll see a small piano bench with more items on it. Rosalind Palmer graduated from Walker’s in 1942. Unlike most of her friends who went directly to college, Rosalind decided to do as many women across the country were doing, and enter into the workforce while “The Boys” were away, fighting in the second World War. Rosalind took work in a Connecticut airplane manufacturing facility and became a riveter. A journalist interviewed her, and the story spread across the nation of the country’s “Rosies,” who were helping “The Boys” win the war. When word of the article reached songwriters Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb, the men wrote the hit song, “Rosie the Riveter.” After the song became a hit, Norman Rockwell had another Connecticut gal sit for a portrait that became famous. Soon after, the iconic image that we recognize today as the “We Can Do It” Rosie the Riveter, was created. But it all started with Walker’s own riveter, Rosalind Palmer!

As it turns out, there is some controversy as to who truly inspired the song and the “Rosie” icon. Our local girl is but one of four candidates. (And our local girl, being a Walker girl, went on to marry a very successful businessman and was a rather famous philanthropist in her own right. Not quite the image Rosie the Riveter portrays but hey, good for her.

That’s it. The online virtual tour is good but also sort of weird in that it seems to be talking to children and not high school students, let alone alumni. There are some interesting artifacts in the collection and while the world of New England boarding schools eludes me, I’m glad they are kind enough to – sort of – share their unique histories with us all.

The Ethel Walker School Interactive Museum
CTMQ’s Museum Visits