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The Work of Our Hands one of the few schools offering the educational opportunities that they desired for their daughters. As one student of the Academy wrote in 1848: "there are those...who... are not contented to educate their daughters for kitchenmaids alone; nor yet for parlour furniture; but aim to have their minds invigorated and stored with varied and useful knowledge...such is the kind of education our beloved parents have aimed at imparting to us, in sending us to this school." The McAlisters, Phelps's, Nelles's and Biggars were such "beloved parents" and they obviously valued the education not only of their sons, which they definitely fostered, but also of their daughters. Ruth McAlister, for example, in a letter to Eliza in 1848, urged her daughter not to come home from Hamilton for a visit during the school term. "We should be very much pleased to see you but should not wish you to lose any time from your studies as you have so short time to stay." In promoting education equally among their offspring, these parents continued the strong educational spirit in the village for all Mount Pleasant sons and daughters. In the 1840s Richard Tennant, a young shoemaker from Yorkshire, England, built the village's octagonal private residence which became known as "Grey Gables" for himself and his wife Caroline Heaton also from Yorkshire, and their young son William. Not surprisingly the large three-storey house took eight years to construct. Tennant finished the outside with a grey cement made from the water lime concrete brought over as ballast in sailing vessels from Scotland, eventually unloaded at Newport on the Grand. Tennant designed the eight bedroom home to be topped off with a lantern, a sort of observation tower overlooking the eight gables on the third storey. Each gable housed a pie-shaped bedroom. A piazza accessed by about a dozen steps stretched across the front wall. A spiral stairway, which would have inspired the envy of Alvah Townsend, reached from the ground floor up to the third floor. Two fireplaces graced the second floor while the ground floor housed the main kitchen and dining room, wine cellar and maid's room. The Tennant family lived in the grand and unusual house for over a quarter of a century until Richard's death in 1878 at the young age of 53.