Carson Valley School

There may be no more delightful complex in the region than Kelsey's orphanage for girls, which was intended to equal Philadelphia's Girard College. Where Thomas Ustick Walter paid homage to ancient history and hierarchical culture in his great Greek temple central building for Girard College ( PH127), Kelsey looked to the fairytales and Mother Goose nursery rhymes for child-centered images. He avoided a central building altogether, creating instead a series of small houselike residences for separate ages with classrooms integral to the complex. Gray schist buildings are accented with splendid tile roofs in brilliant hues of red, orange, golds, greens, and blues and ornamented with sculptural plaques that place the buildings in the developmental sequence of the children, from a stork-accented building for infants on.