A History - Based on a Chapel Talk delivered by Head of Schools, Susan A. Nelson - September 20, 2004
In the early days of Webb School of California, regular morning reading of the scriptures and Sunday service were carried out in the living room of Thompson and Vivian Webb's home. By 1935 the school had grown too large to squeeze all the boys in the room, and Thompson Webb began to think about building a chapel.
The Webbs loved California's old Spanish missions. Thompson liked their design and the economy of their construction. The missions, like man himself, he mused, were made of the same earth on which they stood. In 1936 Webb revisited the missions, sketching and measuring them. By 1937, he had his plans for the school's chapel, modeled mostly on the San Juan Capistrano Mission.
Webb's next step was to hire a bulldozer to level the ground on the site. The adobe clay gouged from the hillside where the chapel now stands was trucked away and piled elsewhere for the making of bricks. Webb acquired a small cement-mixer and shoveled adobe mud in, mixing it with water and an asphalt compound for weather proofing. He poured his mud into a box with no top and a removable bottom and laid the bricks out to dry in the sun on the tennis court. In one year he made 60,000 bricks, each a foot wide, eighteen inches long, and weighing sixty pounds! Then he trucked them back to the hilltop above what is now the parking lot just outside the chapel. The remaining part of the hill then stood at the height to be reached by the chapel walls.
Before walls could be started, foundations had to be dug – three feet wide all around, three feet deep at the west end, but twelve feet deep at the east end where there was filled earth. In 1938, Thompson Webb dug out the foundation with a pick and shovel and wheelbarrow. There was more adventure in the excavation than might have been expected, though. One day he looked up from his work at the bottom of the twelve foot ditch to see a horse approaching fast and on a low trajectory. The horse teetered for a moment on the edge of the precipice and then somersaulted down at the retreating headmaster. In a fleeting glimpse he recognized the rider as a Webb School student. His horse had gone out of control. The boy fell first and the horse on top of him into the ditch but upside down with all four hooves kicking hysterically. Webb crawled belly down to avoid the flaying hooves and grasped the boy's arm. There was mud at the bottom, and Webb pulled out a frightened but, incredibly, undamaged rider. Oversized western style stirrups had jammed against the walls of the ditch and held the horse about one and a half feet above his prone rider. The ditch was filled with steel rods and concrete to keep out any other flying horses, and incidentally, to provide a firm foundation for the adobe walls of the chapel.
Three years went by before the first brick was lowered from the precipice and laid in place in 1939. Day by day and year by year the walls rose. Thompson Webb had planned to spend a couple of hours each afternoon laying bricks, but the project became a consuming passion, and he spent more and more time at the building site. In those simpler days he served not only as headmaster of Webb School but also as director of admission. He had an intercom telephone line strung from his office to the growing chapel and kept a few folding chairs near his work. When families came to the school office to learn about the school, his secretary would call him on the intercom to report their arrival. "Show them up," he would say, and she would lead them to the path at the bottom of the chapel hill and point the way upward. As they drew near, the headmaster would lay down his trowel, remove his glove, shake hands, and give them seats. Then, replacing his glove, he would take up his trowel and continue putting mortar between bricks while they talked of the young person's qualification for admission to Webb and, ultimately, to college. Before leaving, both the father and mother would have laid a brick.
The mortar was also the same adobe clay of which the bricks and the hill are made, and so the chapel is, in a sense, almost monolithic – a part of the hill on which it stands, but shaped by the hands of man.
Over the years, many others would help put bricks into place. While in college, Webb’s son Howell spent a summer's vacation working by his side. Every teacher and every student in those days laid his brick. Some laid many. Two or three boys appeared on the hill nearly every afternoon. Visitors came, and everyone laid his brick. The current governor of Tennessee, a Bell Buckle classmate of Thompson Webb, came to visit and laid his brick. Two Webb School teachers, Jack Sumner, and Percy Johnson built the mahogany pews in the school shop.
It was wartime, and some materials were hard to come by. An elderly English sculptor name Alec Miller came to live at Webb and carved by hand the doors with their Latin inscriptions and the small portraits of Thompson and Vivian Webb which were placed there after their deaths. Alec Miller was particularly eager to build the great front doors out of seasoned walnut, but walnut was hard to find in those war years. Webb found a man who had a supply of fine walnut but who would not part with it for any amount of money. He happened to mention this to the father of one of his students who had an idea. In those days of the Battle of Britain, Scotland was no longer exporting its most famous product, Scotch whiskey. The student’s father had laid in a case of fine Scotch at the start of war and was willing to contribute it to the cause. The walnut man was willing to trade. Thompson Webb was a teetotaler all his life, but he was amused to think that his chapel doors were purchased with Scotch whiskey.
Webb wanted to floor the chapel with dark red Spanish tiles, just like the old missions. Gladding McBean Ceramic Co. of Los Angeles made just such tile, but they were then busy exclusively with war orders. When Webb talked to them, they showed him a great heap of all kinds of leftovers. They were willing to sell the scraps cheap, so Webb excavated the pile, pulling out Spanish tiles of all shapes and sizes. There were not enough of any one size to cover the chapel floor, but by varying the pattern he was able to complete the job. As a result, you will never see another floor quite like this one.
When Thompson Webb visited San Juan Capistrano for ideas in design, he was disturbed to note that the original mission church was a roofless ruin, destroyed in the earthquake of 1812. He didn't want to see his chapel shaken down and so he hit upon a plan to strengthen these walls against earthquake damage. He built double adobe walls with a hollow space in between and inserted steel rods that rise from the reinforcements in the foundations until they reach each of the beams in the roof overhead. A brick dam closes the empty space on either side of each of these clusters of rods forming a hidden column of steel. Whenever the walls rose to a sufficient height, concrete was poured down the opening within the steel, making a reinforced concrete column. Three times, as the walls rose, a horizontal bonding beam of reinforced concrete was similarly buried in the hollow space in a channel walled by adobe brick. The overhead beams, each weighing tons, and the roof above them is supported by two structures – one the double brick wall, the other the framework of reinforced concrete. In addition, to prevent loss of loosened bricks, Webb placed a sturdy grade of chicken wire across both of the double walls, as well as the space in between, and embedded it in the wet mortar over every third course of bricks. Thus he had a masonry wall with a great deal of tensile strength. There are three horizontal bonding beams: one at the height of the tops of the doors, one at the tops of the windows and the third immediately under the beams. In theory, the chapel was earthquake-proof. But would it work? It took the Claremont earthquake of 1990 with its epicenter in Upland to answer that question. Half the chimneys in Claremont went down in whole or in part. The Blue Moon Restaurant on First Street dumped its brick facade on the sidewalk. But there was no structural damage to Webb’s chapel. The arches outside did suffer some damage, but they are the exception that proves the rule. The arches have no double walls, no steel reinforcements and no chicken wire.
And so, the chapel was built – a testimony to the dedication and vision of one man. Thompson Webb felt that his students came to the school not only to shape their minds, but also to shape their spirits He wanted them to ask of themselves, "What kind of a man or woman am I to be?" Dr. Raymond Alf, long-time Webb teacher and founder of the Alf Museum, said it well. "In the vast stretches of geological time, your whole life is but a moment… The important question is, ’What shall you do with your moment in time?’
Thompson Webb knew one thing he wanted to do with his moment. "I have no desire to make this chapel into a church,” he said. “I cannot be concerned with what church you belong to or what particular faith you follow…Above all things, I want this school to develop young people of character, those who will stand up for the right."
Thompson Webb had another reason for building this chapel. It was to be an expression of his love and admiration for his wife. When the chapel was finally completed, Thompson Webb and his four sons set a stone in the wall. Its inscription reads, "This chapel is dedicated to the glory of God and is named by its builder in honor of his wife.” Below these words there is carved a short passage from the Book of Proverbs. "Her children rise up and call her blessed, her husband also praiseth her. Many daughters have done virtuously but thou excelleth them all."
Married in 1915, The Webbs celebrated their golden wedding in this chapel in 1965. Vivian Webb wore the gown in which she was married. They came up the hill in a 1915 Chevrolet just like the one they drove on their honeymoon. Vivian Webb died in 1971 and within a year, Thompson's body was laid in the earth beside hers. At that time, the Webb brothers set another stone into the wall. It bears the names and dates of both Thompson and Vivian Webb and four words in Latin: SI MONUMENTUM CONQUIRIS, CIRCUMSPICE. The Latin sentence was borrowed from a similar inscription in London. When the great fire of London in 1666 destroyed half the city and nearly all its ancient churches, including the Gothic St. Paul's Cathedral, England's greatest architect, Sir Christopher Wren, was on hand to restore the damage. His most famous achievement was the rebuilding of St. Paul's, not in the Gothic style but in a new and original design of his own. Later, when Sir Christopher died, everyone expected him to be buried in Westminster Abbey with a huge marble statue on his grave. But Sir Christopher Wren was not buried in Westminster Abbey. Instead he was laid to rest in St. Paul's Cathedral. The only indication of this fact is a very simple stone which reads, "Sir Christopher Wren 1632-1723" and then the same four Latin words, which can be translated, "If you want to find his monument, just look around you." The Webbs' sons borrowed those words because they seemed to apply as a memorial to the builder and to his beloved wife, and to the two schools which grew in this ground side by side and which bear their names.
Today, the Webb community gathers in the chapel regularly for contemplation of the highest virtues of character – honesty, dependability, strength to one’s duty, courage to uphold the right and to fight for it. It is also used for our special ceremonies, such as Vivian Webb School’s Signing-In of new students, Webb School of California’s Baccalaureate, Vivian Webb School’s Candlelight Ceremony, and for alumni gatherings. The Vivian Webb Chapel is a cornerstone of Webb culture, providing a place where past, present and future come together to remind us of the things we hold most dear and to give us the strength to seek them.