Part Two - Chapter One

Hazel was the president of Cyrus College. It sounded impressive that way, but given that her institution had no more than fourteen faculty counting herself, it meant less than it might have elsewhere.

Her authority, in fact, was less as president of the post-secondary educational establishment than it was in her second but more significant role as chief librarian of St. Fiacre's Residential Library.

St. Fiacre's was an imposing neo-Gothic quasi-Tudor melange of a pile modeled in part on the English manor house of its benefactor, Victoria Woodhull Martin. Mrs. Martin had an earlier career as the first woman to run for President of the United States in 1871, but later had come to London, continued her career as a public speaker and spiritualist medium, and ended up marrying a banker (her sister managed to marry a Lord, but the Lord was nearly broke while John Biddulph Martin had, as noted, a bank).

After Mr. Martin's death, Mrs. Martin nee Claflin aka "The Woodhull" retired to the countryside above Tewkesbury Abbey in the west of England, but never ceased to think about the Ohio countryside that gave her birth. She had wanted to do some good for young women like she had been, without family support or financial prospects, but whose talents and energy fitted them for finer things. Victoria's daughter Zula was sent back to New York and on to Ohio in hopes of establishing something grand in the town of her birth, but Homer, Ohio had sent Zula May Woodhull packing.

So she went a little ways south, came to Upper Sharon, and found township trustees and local leaders a bit more malleable, so it was that a rough replica of Mother's manor house was built in central Ohio, overlooking Auter Creek. Mrs. Martin and her daughter had visited St. Deiniol's in Wales the year before, a library established by former Prime Minister Gladstone before his death, and was inspired to do something similar, but in her former home country.

St. Fiacre's was a library designed for research and endowed for perpetuity, with a later development, the college, attached on less grandiose outward lines, but with the same burning passion to help mold young lives. In the case of Cyrus College, its roots were in horticulture, a plan to create a school for young women to learn to work the land in ways that cared for the earth and gave career prospects to the students; the humble ranks of simple structures looked more like an overgrown Civilian Conservation Corps camp than a college campus, but as the last bequest of Victoria Claflin Woodhull Martin, the hope was that the program would reach out to underprivileged women and men in the rural Midwest. Zula May had purchased a defunct college with an 1859 "Old Main," the administration building, and gone on to erect a large greenhouse and other housing and classroom structures, in a rough hewn timber-heavy style. There the young students, especially the women (Mrs. Martin had considered making it women only, as the establishment in Bredon's Norton had been back in England) would learn a trade, and there would be means by which the families and humanity involved could be bettered through attention to genetics, husbandry, and nurserymanship, skills that those learning there could take home with profit to their hometowns around the state.

Cyrus College was down closer to Auter Creek, and indeed many of the overgrown cabins, or "lodges" that made up campus had been flooded repeatedly since the founding back in the 1920s; they were built up on short stilts, which kept the damage from the waters to a minimum inside the structures. Old Main, the original Halcyon Christian College, was on an island of raised earth just back from the two rows of lodges running along the creek, built back in 1859 and on the inside, looking every year of it.

St. Fiacre's sat atop the bluff above, looking north across the deep valley of the creek to the protruding ridge end on which Upper Sharon was arranged. Hazel's office in St. Fiacre's gave her a near panoramic view of Upper Sharon, from Cunningham Hall and the Memorial Church in lower town, and the tiers of homes rising to the conical Native American mound crowing upper town, fifteen feet tall and surrounded by two hundred some year old gravestones.

At the edge of her window, from where she sat, down in the lower right, the dark red walls and rusting green roof of the Wyandot Mill sat down hunched into the waters of Auter Creek. The state had once again asked Cyrus College if they would take on the care of the Wyandot Mill as a "management partner" for interpretation and education: Hazel had replied with a "no" that was less abrupt and more open to some possibilities than her last few, but she knew their budget and personnel only had so much stretch left after a weekend of unauthorized parties like the one now past.