The Cordova daily times., 1917-03-27
FRISCO WOMAN REBUILDING
 VERMONT
(By Associated Press)

AhefiCdh sympathy Wltn the clVlllan sufferers from the war has been giv en more concrete expression in this village than in any other part of the devastated country immediately be hind the French fighting lines.
 When Mrs. William Crocker. of San Francisco, chose Vitrimont in which to carry out her idea of reconstruct. ing with her own means one of the villages destroyed by the German troops in their first rush into France she met with much doubt and suspic. ion. The people of Lorraine are prac. tical and hard-headed, and also ob. ject to partake of anything given in the form of charity. It was therefore necessary to make the proposition a purely businesslike one before laying it before the villagers.
 All the men of fighting age are at the front with their regiments. One of the villagers while in the trenches one day received from his wife a let ter, giving details of the plan of re- construction. He immediately re- piled: Don't waste ink on telling me fairy tales. You are ready to swal- low any yarn told you. Just make up your mind, as I have done, that we have lost everything and don't dream that good fairies are going to restore ali to us"
 In order to convince this man and many of his village neighbors serving in the same corps that somebody was really taking interest in them and that they would not merely have to be con tent with the government indemnity of sixty per cent of their losses, Miss Daisy Polk. also a Californian and now administrator of the plan, gave printed plans and details of the scheme to the wives left behind These were forwarded at once to the men at the front, who could be assured only by documentary evidence of this kind of the good fortune to be conferred on them and their dependents.
 Miss Polk, who since the beginning of the war has been occupied in re- lief work of various kinds, was chosen by Mrs. Crocker to administer her benevolent scheme She decided at once to live among the people so as to become better acquainted with them and to learn their needs Every house, without exception, had been either shelled or burnt She, how ever, was able to find one-roomed cottage which could be repaired, and here from her single room Miss Polk directs all the work. She interviews there the architect, the builders, the departmental officials and government functionaries, and only recently re- ceived Ambassador William c. Sharp, who had come to lay the cornerstone of the first new house.
 Of the seventy houses composing the village, thirty-four were shelled and the remaining thirty-six burned. The government itself decided to repair the bombarded houses, which were not so badly damaged as those which had been set afire. The reconstruction of these latter was undertaken by Mrs. Crocker.
 No attempt was made by the auth ors of the scheme to force American ideas down the throats of the conser- vative Lorrainers. Very little change had taken place in the village since the fifteenth century, and the style of architecture was very uniform, usually taking the shape of one or two story cottages, with grange door entrances and attached at the back the granaries and cattle sheds. The only changes insisted on by the pro, motors of the scheme as we'll as by the French government were the introduc. tion of sanitary arrangements which hitherto had been non-existent, the provision of ventilation in the rooms and the separation by an intervening courtyard of the cattle sheds and the human habitations.
 It was with difficulty that the pea sants could be induced to accept some of these changes, but at length reason prevailed and the plans were finally drawn up.
 The new village is to have wider streets and the main road through it is to be planted with trees, while the town hall and school are now to oc cupy prominent and spacious positions in the center of the village instead o being hidden as before the war in mar row lanes without any air space.