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Choosing the name Dunnabeck

In 1956 I bought a derelict camp in rural Pennsylvania, located on top of Mount Summit, the highest mountain in Pennsylvania. A wonderful stream, overhung by laurel and wild azalea, ran the length of the property. It reminded me of the stream in the English Lake District above Rydal Water where I has played as a child. The stream was called Dunnabeck. The word is ancient: beck (from Old Norse bekkr) means stream and dunn (probably Celtic) means grayish brown -- the color of the rocks in the stream. Eventually, I built a teaching cabin that overhung the stream; it was equipped with a deck, where students could sit and read. And of course, every one of the 27 summers we spent there, our young campers played in the stream, building dams, catching crayfish, and making waterwheels out of the laurel leaves.

Choosing the name Kildonan

Kurt Goldman, my co-founder said to me, “And what will you call it?” I knew I never wanted to call it after myself, as many school founders have done. I told him, “I would like to call it Kildonan.” For me, the association was that of my beloved dyslexic uncle, with whom I had spent some happy months in what was then southern Rhodesia. Because of his dyslexia, he had flunked out of Osborne, the British naval academy. After a brief venture in Canada, he had emigrated to Rhodesia in the late twenties and carved a magnificent farm out of the bush. By the time I got there, after finishing college in 1948, he had about eight thousand acres, a thousand head of cattle, acres of tobacco, and even better, some lovely horses.

RMS Kildonan Castle, which brought Diana King's Dyslexic uncle from Scotland to South Africa.

The farm was named after the ship on which he had emigrated -- The Kildonan Castle. If you go to Scotland, you can still find the castle. Quite incidentally, it was one of the few places in Scotland where gold was found. And, even better, if you look on a large-scale map of Zimbabwe, you can even find Kildonan there.