The New Training Headquarters for French-Latin Europe
By W. A. Spicer
W. A. SPICER
Our brethren in Europe have exchanged the old Basel printing-office property—now used as a sanitarium and food factory—for property in the country, at Gland, on Lake Geneva, between Lausanne and Geneva. This course was decided upon, if practicable, at the summer meeting of the Latin Union Conference; and Elder Conradi, Professor Wilkinson, Elder Tieche, president of the French-Swiss Conference, and others looked over a beautiful country estate, a portion of which, with its buildings, was in the market, and whose owner desired to exchange for city property.
THE GARDEN HOUSE
Now Elder Conradi writes from Gland, November 14:—
THE MANSION
We secured the place, October 20. The next day Brother S. Jasperson [the school manager] moved in, and has had seven or eight students busy about the place. Tomorrow the school begins. Brother John Vuilleumier [teacher] has taken lodgings with the farmer adjoining. We secured about three thousand francs' [six hundred dollars] worth of furniture with the place, and purchased some furnishings and appliances from the owner besides. At our committee meeting yesterday we decided to go ahead immediately with an addition, erecting a building to the left of the “mansion,” giving us a suite of treatment rooms and further rooms for patients, besides business and medical offices. As for food factory, bakery, and laundry, we decided to remodel the barn. It will need no change in the framework nor roof. We will put up cement walls, and divide the interior, giving us a building forty-three by eighty-eight feet, two stories.
In the garden house we shall make but one change, in the basement, so as to secure a good school-room and meeting room. When all is done, we shall have rooms for forty patients, twenty pupils, three dwellings for families, a large food factory and laundry, and besides this a most beautiful place for industrial school work for the French-Latin field.
By the same mail Dr. P. A. DeForest writes from Basel:—
I send you two photographs of the school and sanitarium building at Gland. The property consists of ninety-two acres, over half of which is covered with a beautiful oak forest. We hope to create there an ideal sanitarium, where we can invite the weary and heavy laden for physical and spiritual rest. We will do our best to meet the ideal that the spirit of prophecy has held up in the medical missionary work, so that the institution may not only have a beautiful situation with a splendid view, so far as scenery is concerned,—perhaps as magnificent as can be found in the world, considered from all points of view,—but that it may exert a still more powerful influence in favor of the truth in the new field to which we are moving. We hope to be able to care for about forty or fifty patients next summer, about double the number we would be able to take in at Basel. The school is occupying both buildings at present, but in the spring the white building will be used exclusively for patients, as well as a portion of the other one. This is a great undertaking for us,—like the work in Washington is for you,—but we have the exceeding great and precious promises from a God who has great power and infinite love.
Thus at last the great French-Latin field, with its hundred millions, is to have a training center in French-speaking territory. Besides being in the midst of a city, the Basel institution was in reality in a German-speaking country. The “mansion” on the Gland estate was for a time the home of Voltaire, the great French infidel.
