Words by Wynne Chase PZ ’26, photos by Wynne & Ashe West-Lewis PZ ’26

Have you ever looked at the lovable bungalow home nestled into the garden on campus and wondered to yourself “what is your story?” Luckily, over the summer, I read the 61 page document on the inception of Pitzer College’s Grove House as we know it today. I wrote this in order to make that lengthy novel into something comprehensible for the students who frequent and love the Grove House.

The House’s Origins

Built in 1902, the House is now the perfect ode to the Arts and Crafts Architectural Movement that was popular at the time of its construction. Stephen Zetterberg (a 1938 cum laude graduate from our very own Pomona College) and his family were the first owners of the house. He was obviously inspired by his allegiance to the glee club at Pomona, and opened up his home “during the late 50s and 60s [for] casual jam sessions with a circle of amateur musicians.”

[Author’s note: reading this made my heart swell. I am so happy that the Grove House has always been a place of music and gathering.]

The Great Acquisition

Barry Sanders taught “The Arts and Crafts Movement in America” at Pitzer. His students were so compelled by the material that they wanted a house of that style to act as a community center for Pitzer, and found their perfect arts and crafts architecture-style house right down the street. Shockingly, their dream house was scheduled to be demolished by an organization called Pilgrim Place in order to build a hospital, so they had to move rapidly.

Bringing the house to campus would prove to be one of the most difficult parts of this mission. To complete such an outrageously large project they needed the express permission from the entire community. The college’s president at the time, Robert Atwell, gave his approval on the project as long as Pitzer did not use a single cent of their own budget; the class would need to either fundraise or receive enough money in gifts to bring a house on campus.

To encourage donations, the motif of music in this bungalow house returned; they held open houses at Zetterberg’s residence and brought in musicians to exemplify what this house could offer for the students on campus. Though the fundraising seemed impossible, there was a glimmer of hope as people from all across the country began to get involved in the conservation and move of the house.

Together, students and the larger Pitzer community raised over $50,000 for the house. Pilgrim Place sold the property to the enthused students for only a single dollar. The rest of the money went to the process of moving the house to Pitzer and fixing it up to be a college community center. The house was sold at such a cheap price because Pilgrim Place would have had to spend a considerably higher sum of money to remove the house; they agreed to the deal with the caveat that the house-loving team would have to move it themselves.

With a Claremont preservation group and the Thomas Brothers House Movers joining the project, the great move to Pitzer began to feel more attainable, but there remained numerous aspects to iron out. The most direct route, through part of Route 66, was impossible because moving a house down that road would require approval from higher-ups whose permission was fabled to be nearly impossible to garner. Another issue was the telephone/electric wires. To move such a tall house, they would have had to raise the preexisting wire and put in a temporary wire for every single cable. Utility companies charge thousands of dollars for every wire they move and reattach.

Therefore, creativity was a must. There was no simple, logical solution to bring this cherished house to campus. So, this ever-evolving group created an absolutely out-of-the-box idea. In the middle of the night, they were to bring the house, in two parts, down the train tracks during a time when no trains were set to run. The Santa Fe Railway agreed, in exchange for publicity for their support and the promise that the entire project would be canceled if anything was delayed by even a few hours. The last part of the house was small enough to be brought down the road without interrupting any wires.

The house placement on campus was very purposeful with the sun and other buildings in mind; they wanted to ensure that anybody initially entering campus would have the Grove House in their eyeline, and so those sitting on the porch could enjoy classic California sunsets. Unfortunately, the house was placed 70 feet off from where they had initially planned to put it, which caused an uproar with the clocktowers’ namesake, Mrs. Brant, because it encroached on the tower’s land. The house sat in pieces for two years and the project was forced into termination when the cost of rebuilding it in the originally intended location was just too high to imagine paying. The Zetterberg House Committee informed the school that they would have to file an Environmental Impact Report for tearing down the house, which would give the Committee enough time to try to raise money and plead their case at the next Board meeting. The Board agreed to file the report, with the stipulation that the Committee must raise $54,000 to keep the house. Though they could not raise the money in time and had to return to the Board with their heads down, they again bought themselves more time by arguing the cultural significance of the house. 

The house’s final saving grace was one of Sanders’ original students, Sheila Kemper (PZ ‘78), whose family donated $100,000 to the house in 1979.

The house’s dedication was a two-day affair in 1980. In classic Grove House fashion, students sold art outside, offered different foods, and again, music ricocheted throughout the stone and wood of the house. The dedication ended in the house’s Bert Meyers Poetry Room, where his daughter organized readings of Bert Meyers’ poetry. Meyers, once a poetry professor at Pitzer, had reportedly longed for a place where he could drink his coffee, smoke his cigarettes, and “gather images and just dream.” And I would assert that that is a pretty good description of how the Grove House is loved and used today.

My favorite part of the entire story is best described in the original document:

“The only things stolen from the house [during the process] were two brass porch lights that hung on either side of the front door, taken while the house sat in three pieces on campus. The morning after President Ellsworth announced that the Grove House would hold its grand opening shortly after the first of the year, a brown paper bag appeared on the porch of the house. Inside were the two lanterns and a note of apology: “I’m sorry. I thought the house was going to be destroyed. These looked so great in my dorm room. But they clearly belong to the house.”

Even during its humble beginnings, students realized that the Grove House deserves care. When the Grove House planted roots at Pitzer College, it brought Claremont’s past to the modern campus, rooting the school and its students in a deeper history beyond its founding in 1963.