Faculty Portraits

I much enjoyed the Princeton Portrait of Dean Robert Kilburn Root (Sept. 12). Dean Root was one of many Princeton faculty members who established summer homes on Caspian Lake in Greensboro, Vt., at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Occasionally the summer community was dubbed “Deansboro” in recognition of five Princeton deans: Kenneth Condit 1913, Luther P. Eisenhart, Christian Gauss 1900, Robert K. Root, and Samuel Winans 1874. There were many additional faculty members and even a president of Princeton: John Grier Hibben 1882. 

Once as a youth, working under my car, I saw two legs. I crawled out and discovered that they belonged to President Harold W. Dodds *1914, who was asking for directions to Trustee S. Whitney Landon 1917 next door.

John Grier Hibben Scoon ’38, grandson of President Hibben and son of Robert Maxwell Scoon, chairman of the philosophy department, described Dean Root for me as follows: “early English literature ... wrote quite a few books ... prominent scholar in his field ... never married ... his mother lived with him ... .” 

These and many other faculty members and alumni were summarized in a booklet I wrote for the Greetings and Reflections Project of Princeton’s 250th anniversary celebration in 1996: “The Princeton Connection: A Century of Princetonians in Greensboro, Vermont.” Copies are at Seeley Mudd Manuscript Library.