“Back of the Loaf” is Back

For generations, Hackley students took meals in the dining hall under a plaque inscribed with the words “Back of the loaf is a snowy flower,/And back of the flour is the mill,/And back of the mill is the wheat and the shower,/And the sun and the Father’s will.” The plaque was removed during the dining hall renovation project, yet the tradition was restored this fall as a newly engraved plaque was installed above the fireplace.

According to Walter Schneller’s history of Hackley, Mrs. Williams, wife of first headmaster Theodore Chickering Williams, had the following verse by Maltbie Davenport Babcock painted on the wall of the Hackley dining hall:

Back of the loaf is a snowy flower,

And back of the flour is the mill,

And back of the mill is the wheat and the shower,

And the sun and the Father’s will.

Babcock was a prominent Baltimore Presbyterian minister, noted for his inspiring sermons, who died in Italy in 1901. At some point, Mr. Schneller notes, the words were transferred to a long board mounted on the dining hall wall, and the phrase was part of the daily experience of Hackley students for 100 years. It was Mrs. Williams, in Hackley’s founding decade, who, according to N. Horton Batchelder, “set the protocol, which meant no haste, and friendliness without disrespect” for the new school, and who established the tradition of community dining.

The verse was commonly found in American missionary collections, and in use at other schools with similar traditions – the same lines were on the wall in the dining hall at Hotchkiss, founded, like Hackley, by a high minded benefactress in the 1890s. Mrs. Hackley and Mrs. Hotchkiss were friends and neighbors; according to Mr. Schneller, Hackley’s first teacher master Seaver Buck’s memoir offered evidence that “Mrs. Hackley had been persuaded to found the school by Maria Hotchkiss, who…was also a resident of the Plaza Hotel” [where Mrs. Hackley lived].

We don’t know exactly how this phrase came to be a tradition at Hackley, yet its ecumenical and optimistic faith is consistent with the founding values of the school, which also emphasizes “Enter here to be and find a friend” and “United, we help one another.”