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Anna Head was among several remarkable Bay Area women
Alta Bates, Julia Morgan and Anna Head are among the remarkable women who lived in the Bay Area during the late 19th and early 20th century. Alta Bates was a nurse who founded a hospital, Julia Morgan an architect who designed Hearst Castle, and Anna Head was a teacher, founded a school.
Anna Head was born in Boston in 1857, the daughter of Judge Edward and Eliza Head. Judge Head moved to Oakland in 1861 where he established a law practice and his wife established a French and English school. When Mrs. Head retired in 1887 she helped her daughter, Anna, start her own school in Berkeley, where no doubt the presence of the University of California was the reason for selecting Berkeley rather than Oakland.
The school, initially located at Dana and Channing streets, moved to its present location between Channing and Haste streets at Bowditch Street, in 1892. Miss Head had this building, called Channing Hall, designed and built expressly for her school. Anna Head’s cousin, architect Soule Edgar Fisher, designed it. Channing Hall is the oldest shingled building standing in Berkeley. Subsequently additions built between 1895 and 1927 and mostly designed by Walter Ratcliff, Jr. resulted in a complex of shingled buildings set around a courtyards and gardens.
The school operated as a day and boarding school for grades one to twelve. Anna Head remained owner and director until 1909 and the school has changed hands only four times since then. In 1964, when the university acquired the school, it was relocated to Oakland and reorganized, merging with a boy’s school, and renamed Head-Royce. A board of directors now operates it.
Among the graduates were the daughter of John Muir; Helen Wills Moody, the British and American singles tennis champion in the 1920s; Helen Jacobs, four times the American singles tennis champion in the 1930s; Margaret Wentworth Owings, artist and conservationist; Miriam Dungan Gross, art critic for the Oakland Tribune; Mary Woods Bennet of Mills College; Marguerite Higgins, a war correspondent killed during the Vietnam War; and Margaret Jennings, photo-journalist for the New York Times.
Although the University acquired the site in 1964, the buildings remain but are now surrounded by university parking lots rather than tennis courts, playing fields and gardens. Within feet of Channing Hall stand university office buildings said to be temporary.
The school buildings, which are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, are significant as the only large, planned ensemble of brown shingles buildings in the Bay Area. It somehow retains a sense of "country" and the gentle and human qualities that shingle building evoke. It is a contrast to a critically changed environment, providing this sometimes harsh and fragmented neighborhood an example of the gentle "building with nature" philosophy which dominated Berkeley’s architecture and way of life at the turn of the century.
Join the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association on August 29th for an "Evening in the Southside." Historians will discuss and then lead a walking tour of this neighborhood. Call 841-2242 for information.
Susan Cerny, author of Berkeley Landmarks, writes this in conjunction with the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association.
