Todd Seminary for Boys

The Todd School for Boys was founded by Reverend Richard K. Todd, who brought from his native Vermont, the New England philosophy of "plain living and high thinking, and in harmony with Puritan traditions". Reverend Todd moved to Woodstock, Illinois, from Vermont in 1847 to be pastor of a newly formed Presbyterian Church. In 1848 he opened a day school in the parsonage, for both boys and girls. This parsonage school continued to 1859, the student population ranged between 6 and 15 students. During this time Reverend Todd also served as the School Superintendent for McHenry County from 1849 to 1855. In 1858 the plans for the Pastorage Institute to form a boarding school. The Pastorage Institute grew in enrollment until, in 1861, the Woodstock University was incorporated by the state legislature. In 1864, the title of the school was again changed, this time to the Woodstock Collegiate Institute. At this time the student body consisted of between 80 and 149 students, mostly from the McHenry County area. went to live with his son who was a professor at the university that would become Stanford University. In June 1892 Noble Hill arranged to purchase the Seminary from Reverend Todd, at a cost of $20,000. The New Yorker described Todd in October 1938: Todd is a preparatory school of considerable antiquity, now run on severely progressive lines. The present headmaster, Roger Hill, a slim white-haired, tweed-bearing man, who looks as if he had been cast for his role by a motion-picture director, has never let the traditional preparatory-school curriculum stand in the way of creative work. All the boys spend as much time as they want in the machine shop, the print shop, the bookbindery, or the school theatre. The Todd School for Boys closed in 1954. ==Campus==

In 1937 the Todd School campus consisted of an area of Woodstock bound by McHenry Avenue, Seminary Avenue, Northampton Street and Mansfield Avenue. From 1912, the school operated a summer camp in Onekama Township, Michigan, called Camp Tosebo. There was also a winter campus on Marathon Key, Florida, that was called Todd Island. With the demolition of Grace Hall in 2010, Rogers Hall is the sole remaining building from the original campus. Rogers Hall, once a classroom building with a 200-seat theater, is now an apartment building. ==Notable alumni==

Robert Wilson Nuclear physicist Robert R. Wilson attended the school in 1922, at the age of eight. One of the Manhattan Project physicists, Wilson was a sculptor, writer and founding director (1967–1978) of Fermilab, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. A professor of physics at Cornell University, he also taught at the University of Chicago and Columbia University and won the National Medal of Science and the Enrico Fermi Award. Orson Welles , fourth from left, with classmates at the Todd School for Boys (1931) Orson Welles entered the Todd Seminary for Boys September 15, 1926, at age 11. At Todd Welles came under the influence of teacher, later headmaster, Roger Hill, who became his mentor and lifelong friend. Hill provided Welles an ad hoc educational environment that proved invaluable to his creative experience, allowing him to concentrate on subjects that interested him. "I was passionate about the theatre—putting on plays was all I ever wanted to do with my life—and Skipper, God bless him, was the only one of my elders who encouraged my theatrical ambitions," Welles recalled. "That's why they call him my mentor, you know." In spring 1927 Welles became a member of the Todd Troupers, a touring company that presented shows in suburban Chicago movie houses and the Goodman Theatre. For three years Welles was director of productions at Todd, producing eight to ten plays a year. These included Molière's The Physician in Spite of Himself, Dr. Faustus, and an innovative Everyman that he staged with platforms and ladders. Welles graduated in 1931 and later collaborated with Hill to write a series of books, ''Everybody's Shakespeare. "Edited for Reading and Arranged for Staging", the plays were shortened to acting versions of a reasonable length and illustrated with numerous line drawings by Welles. In 1934 three plays—Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night—were published separately and in a single volume by The Todd Press and marketed strictly as textbooks for secondary schools. In 1941 a fourth play, Macbeth, was published by Harper & Brothers, which had begun reissuing the series under the title The Mercury Shakespeare. By 1942 over 100,000 copies were sold. Welles refused royalties, which instead went to the Todd school along with generous contributions to the scholarship fund from Welles and his friend Charles Lederer. As a member of the Todd faculty he designed and co-directed a student production of Twelfth Night'' that received first prize in the Chicago Drama Festival competition at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair. In July 1934 he organized the Todd Theatre Festival, a six-week summer festival at the Woodstock Opera House that featured Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLiammóir of Dublin's Gate Theatre. and refers to Clover Hall and "Mrs. Collins"—Annetta Collins, teacher, housemother and director of kitchen services. It was Collins who had recruited Welles for Todd in 1926, after meeting the boy at his father's hotel in Grand Detour, Illinois. A note on a blackboard, in Welles's handwriting, refers to Wallingford Hall. Another notice is signed "Coach Roskie"—Anthony C. Roskie, Todd's longtime athletic director. Joseph Granville Joseph Granville (class of 1941), E. D. Hirsch, Jr. E. D. Hirsch, Jr. (class of 1946), Gahan Wilson Gahan Wilson (class of 1948), Recalling Todd in a 2013 interview, Wilson said, "It was a wonderful school. They encouraged you in whatever direction you wanted to go." Christopher Welles "Todd School was a strong point of connection between my father and me," wrote Christopher Welles Feder, eldest daughter of Orson Welles, who attended Todd from 1947 through the summer of 1949. She was sent to live with Roger and Hortense Hill at the age of nine, when her mother's second marriage (to Charles Lederer) ended. Christopher Welles spent nearly two years with the Hills and had the distinction of being the only girl to attend the Todd School for Boys. At age 11 she was called to join her mother and her third husband in Italy. "The conviction that my true home lay among decent, caring folk in small-town America kept me going during the early bewilderment of Rome," Welles's daughter recalled. ==References==