BOARDING SCHOOL ESTABLISHED AT WANG LANG
The first step necessary to establish the new boarding school was to procure a suitable building. Space at the mission compound did not permit of a new building with room for future expansion. It so happened that the mission had already purchased a piece of land with the intention of opening a second station. A residence had been begun but remained unfinished for lack of funds. It was decided to turn this property over to the school and complete the building with funds provided by the Troy Branch. The locality was known as Wang Lang, a name which attached itself to the school for several years. Concerning this site Dr. House wrote:
“The location of the school is a fine one. It is central, healthy and breezy; on the west bank of the noble river Meinam, which rolls through the great city; opposite to, but a quarter of a mile above, the Royal Palace, where its buildings such as they are cannot but testify to prince, noble and peasant as they pass by in their boats of state or barges what Western Christian nations think of female education. They also testify to the generosity and friendship of the American church people.”
As soon as the building could be made ready Dr. and Mrs. House and Miss Anderson moved to the new location. On May 13, 1874, this first boarding school for girls in Siam was opened with six boarders and one day pupil. The building, originally intended only for a residence, was none too commodious. The basement contained kitchen, dining room and servants’ quarters; the first floor had a suite of three rooms for Dr. and Mrs. House and one common living room; on the second floor was one small sleeping room for Miss Anderson and two large rooms which served as school rooms by day and as dormitories for the girls by night. Within a year a second helper was added in the person of Miss Susie D. Grimstead. By the second year twenty girls had enrolled, living in these two rooms, rather small quarters by American standards but ample according to native custom.
In one regard Mrs. House was disappointed in her expectation. It had been her confident hope to attract to this school daughters of some of the nobles and princes. A few of this class came at first but soon the school was left to the girls of the common class. The value of an education was not yet as highly valued among the higher classes as among the lowly; for the women of the upper grades not only had no need to read but no need to work; while on the other hand the practical nature of the training given in the school did not meet the requirements of their social position. In later years, however, there was a decided change, and with the growing popularity of education nearly half of the pupils in the school were from the noble families.
LEAVING SIAM
It was the lot of Mrs. House to do little more than to inaugurate the new school, for her health rendered a long period of service impossible. But in even initiating the movement she did far more than she realised at the time, for she was investing in the enterprise an accumulation of experience and a wealth of influence among the women of Bangkok such as no one else possessed, and which gave the institution a capital from which it began to draw immediate returns. Such a school could not have been organised by a new leader, however skilled in educational matters, without long years of cultivation of personal relations with the mothers and girls. One can see now that Mrs. House’s return to Siam for another trial of health had a higher wisdom than even she could perceive; for while it seemed a daring of Providence, it was in fact the wisdom of the great Teacher for her to expend the final momentum of her personal prestige and thereby buy up a decade of time or more at the expenditure of her last four years of effort.
The return to Siam in 1872 found the climate less kindly to her. Then came a new development, an attack of asthma which lasted for nearly eight months, so debilitating her as to render it necessary for her to relinquish the cherished work into other hands. In March, 1876, after twenty years of faithful, zealous and labourious work for the Kingdom of God among the women of Siam, she bade farewell to her friends there and returned to America with her husband.
“Need I tell you that I left Siam with a sad, sad heart? At the monthly concert this month my feelings overcame me so that I felt as if I could not attend another till I became more reconciled to the thought that I can never again labour among the heathen. I think many of the Siamese truly regretted our leaving. The dear school girls followed us weeping to the landing, and we could hear their sobs as long as we could see them waving goodbye.
“Had I not felt it a case of life and death, I could not have torn myself away. It was plain duty but it seemed to me a dark providence that I should so soon be obliged to leave this dear school, the result of so much labour and prayer and of so many trials.”