Quarry Hill Creative Center - Creation of Quarry Hill

Creation of Quarry Hill

At Quarry Hill, the Fiskes' intention was to create an artists’ and writers’ retreat, a gathering place for creative and freethinking people. They had two children, Isabella (also called Ladybelle) and William. During the 1950s and early 1960s, the family traveled to keep their children out of the strict public schools of the day, which the Fiskes regarded as "Dark Satanic Mills That Grind Men's Souls to Dust," in the words of William Blake. They did so on the advice of A.S. Neill of Summerhill School in England. The Fiskes were opposed to spanking or corporal punishment of children, indeed, punishment of any kind; and most schools of the time used corporal punishment.

William later earned two Masters' Degrees, in computer science and in history, from the University of Vermont. At the time of his death on July 18, 2008, he was in the process of seeking a Ph. D in computer science. Isabella became a writer and children's rights activist. In the 1960s, Isabella became friends with many well-known underground cartoonists, including R. Crumb, Trina Robbins, Kim Deitch, and Spain Rodriguez. Isabella and Art Spiegelman, later author of Maus, had met in 1966, through a group of Spiegelman's fellow-students at the State University of New York at Binghamton, and through Trina Robbins, who would later celebrate Barbara Hall Fiske's cartooning in her book "The Great Women Cartoonists." Spiegelman and Isabella, or Ladybelle, became a couple in Binghamton, NY., in early 1968, while he was experiencing a nervous breakdown which he has frequently mentioned; and were spending a long weekend together in Trina Robbins' apartment on E.4th St. in Manhattan the day Anja Spiegelman committed suicide, May 21, 1968. In 1970, when Spiegelman went to San Francisco, he and Isabella broke up for several years, then resumed their relationship, which, however became platonic by consent of all concerned when Françoise Mouly,whom Isabella considered both brilliant and a friend, came on the scene in 1976.

In 1978 Spiegelman, Mouly, and a number of Quarry Hill residents created Top-Drawer Rubber Stamp Company, a pictorial rubber stamp company featuring art by R. Crumb, Spiegelman, and other cartoonists and artists, including Barbara Fiske. This art rubber stamp company provided employment for many Quarry Hill residents, one of whom at the time was Laurence Mouly (now Larreché), Françoise Mouly's sister.Mouly and Spiegelman continued to visit Quarry Hill into the 1990s, and brought their children, Nadja Spiegelman and Dashiell Spiegelman. The cartoonists were fond of Barbara Hall Fiske and regretted that she had given up her cartooning work in the 1940s.

In the mid-1960s, Barbara opened a storefront, The Gallery Gwen, in New York's East Village. There Barbara showed her paintings, along with those of others, and Irving began to give public talks on Tantra, Zen, Sufism, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, and atheism, among many other things. He soon spoke to many standing-room-only audiences. In time he would also speak in colleges and churches on the East Coast, such as Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont and in many other locations.

He spoke out in favor of people finding their own creative path in life, enjoying themselves, being free of guilt and shame, and children's rights. He wrote letters for young men who were conscientious objectors to the Vietnam War. He was called "The Forest Wizard," and in Florida, where he had a cabin on a lake, "The Socrates of the Ocala National Forest." Irving was a controversial figure. In the 1970s, when his cabin in the Ocala Forest was burnt by arsonists, and the authorities did not give him a permit to rebuild, he launched a legal and media battle, claiming that the authorities were prejudiced against the young people he brought there as his friends, most of whom had long hair. He eventually got the permit and rebuilt the cabin.