Margaret Hall Whitfield Papers

Margaret (“Peggy”) Rumsey Hall Whitfield was born in Great Barrington, MA on June 23, 1933 to Livingston and Elizabeth Blodgett Hall. Her father practiced private law, was the Roscoe Pound Professor Emeritus and vice dean at Harvard Law School, and served as the head of a number of law studies, commissions, and councils.. Her mother was headmistress of Concord Academy, and in 1964 founded Simon’s Rock College, an experimental liberal arts school designed for high school-age students. She served as its president until 1972.

Margaret (MRHW) was the second oldest of the Hall’s four children, She grew up on a farm in Weston, MA and attended three different grade schools. In 1949, the Hall family moved from Weston to Concord, MA, but she continued to commute to Weston to attend The Cambridge School of Weston. She graduated from high school there in 1951. In 1955 she graduated cum laude in English from Bryn Mawr College. That summer, she was hired as head of the English department at the Sarah Dix Hamlin School in San Francisco. In 1956 she returned to Concord and decided to continue her education at Radcliffe College where she took an AMT in English in 1957. In June of that year, she married a physiologist and Harvard Junior Fellow, Robert Blake Reeves. She then became a candidate for the degree of Doctor of Education in the fields of History, Philosophy, and Comparative Study of Education at Harvard and worked toward this degree from 1957 to 1959. In 1958-1959, she worked as a Teaching Fellow at Harvard.

When her husband accepted jobs at the University of Buffalo and then Cornell, the family moved to upstate New York. They had two children, Adam Andersen Reeves, born September 27, 1960, and Abigail Dolliver Reeves Haupt, born December 29, 1962. MRHW ended her marriage to Reeves in 1964, and subsequently returned to Concord where she raised her children, and cared for her father.

In 1965 she married Thomas Japheth Whitfield III, her children’s pediatrician. Later he would coordinate and advocate for the Children’s Health Program, which sought to provide preventative and sick care at to children in rural Massachusetts who lacked regular access to healthcare. After the marriage, MRHW helped raise Thomas’ two children, Thomas Japheth Whitfield IV (“Todd”) and Rebecca Lindsay Whitfield Goldberg (“Beckett”) while managing a large household. Always good at building and repairing things, she started Round Hill Tackroom Furniture, a company that made custom cabinets and other tack furniture. In 1973 the family moved to Great Barrington, MA to Round Hill Farm. In addition to running Round Hill, she took over management of the family’s 300-acre Great Pine Farm in 1975 and continued managing it until 2010. In order to put their large house to use, MRHW and her husband ran Round Hill Farm Bed & Breakfast from 1984 to 1992. The two of them remained happily married until Thomas’ death in 1996. In 2005 she married Thomas Edward Courant, but the marriage was short-lived. She left the Berkshires and moved to Briones, CA in 2010.

Throughout her life, Margaret was an avid reader and writer. Beginning in 1947, she created “journals” that contained not only journal entries, but also correspondence, poetry, essays, financial information, news clippings, and pamphlets. She also had a deep passion for horses and ponies from an early age. She rode, boarded, and bred these animals, and participated in competitions and foxhunts. Additionally, Margaret was very active in her community. She served on Great Barrington’s Conservation Commission, Planning Board, and Zoning Board; did volunteer work; and supported many charities, causes, and institutions. She served as the director of the Margaret Kendrick Blodgett Foundation for decades.