“My wife and I started this school in 1942 for a variety of reasons,” Kenton recalled in an early Green Hedges Bulletin. “We had heard of neighboring schools with classes of forty to sixty pupils, and we wanted both to do what little we could to relieve this crowded condition and to provide for our own children classes small enough to allow for some individual attention.

“We also wanted to give our children an enriched curriculum and encourage an appreciation of the best in literature, music and pictorial art. Most of all, we wanted to develop in our children and in the others, the love of God and neighbor, a strong sense of justice and devotion to freedom, and a generous patriotism.”

“Children leaving our school should have the courage to act according to their own conscience, and to meet the strange, the foreign, the new with eager and joyful interest,” he said.

By 1955, the Kilmer family had grown to eight children and the School to sixty students; it was bursting at the seams. A property found in the historic neighborhood of Windover Heights in Vienna, Virginia proved an ideal solution. Both the Kilmer family and Green Hedges School moved from Arlington to Vienna that year, and the School expanded to eight grades.

Fifty years later, with Green Hedges expanded and established in Vienna, Frances expressed her guiding sentiments. “One of our operating principles, perhaps the main one, may be called the enjoyment of learning,” she said. “Living next door to the school, as we do, we have had the pleasure each morning of seeing the children running, skipping or dancing on their way into the school buildings. Many of them are early each day; they’re in no hurry, just happy and eager. It is our endeavor to encourage and develop this spirit in each student so that he or she will approach the tasks and problems of life with the same eagerness.”