GREENFIELD – Elizabeth Orton Jones had recently published one of America’s most lasting children’s works when a Nashua industrialist approached her with a very special assignment.

Up on a mountaintop beneath the cover of trees and amidst the chatter of children, the man asked the Mason-based author/illustrator to paint a fairy tale of sorts for a unique audience.

The year was 1952, and the industrialist, Harry Gregg, had just built a center atop Crotched Mountain for severely disabled children to learn how to function in the outside world. The dorms, he said, needed something to make them seem less like a hospital and more like a home for the children living there.

So Jones, whose American retelling of the Brothers Grimm’s “Little Red Riding Hood” would land on countless bookshelves over the coming decades, packed up her paints, her brushes and a healthy dose of imagination and headed up the mountain with friend and fellow author/illustrator Nora Unwin.

Over the coming year, the two would paint a series of elaborate murals for boys and girls, and in the process, make a connection that would last a lifetime.

Crotched Mountain

Jones’ seasonal murals still hang prominently in the halls of Crotched Mountain Rehabilitation Center. (Photo: David Lazar)

Albert Ouelette arrived at Crotched Mt. at age 6 in a wheelchair. He left 6 months later able to walk on crutches. (Photo: David Lazar)

E.O. Jones painting murals. Jones began painting fairy tale murals for the girls’ dorm at Crotched Mt. in 1952 at the request of founder Harry Gregg. (Photo courtesy of Albert Ouelette).

“How Far Is It to Bethlehem?” includes images ahead of its time, including this merry chain of patients acting in the Christmas pageant.

To listen to friends and followers, life and work for Jones, even into her 90s, was seldom about more than creating a world for children of all backgrounds and abilities to be precisely what they were: children.

“As they were working, I remember they would chat with us,” says Albert Ouellette of Concord. Ouellette was 6 when he checked into Crotched Mountain in 1953 with cerebral palsy that confined him to a wheelchair. He left six months later, able to walk with crutches and braces. “They were like aunts to us. They were very warm and nice. They had an audience of kids, who were fascinated in what they were doing. We would watch the development of the fairy tales they painted by seeing the outlines going up on the wall, and then the colors.”

Today those colors and seasonal images of children at play seem to leap off the wall just as they did a half-century ago, lining a well-traveled corridor at Crotched Mountain and never failing to elicit smiles from students passing by.

Less colorful but perhaps equally poignant, however, is a tiny brown book Jones authored about her experience at Crotched Mountain and staging its first ever Christmas pageant in 1953.

“How Far Is It to Bethlehem?” never earned Jones the recognition or royalties that “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Prayer for a Child,” or even “Twig” (which later became her nickname) would receive. But, it remains one of her most cherished works – a portrait of how the wonder of the season is able to touch children, regardless of their physical state, and how they, in turn, are able to touch us.

“Sometimes, in real life,” she wrote, “we find this dimension, feel the miracle, and kneel in the place. Sometimes the very ‘least of these my brethren’ can give us the sign, point out to us the Star above.”

In simple, but striking brown-and-white images, Jones gave readers a pageant of snow and angels and mangers and miracles. She offered wheelchairs and braces and crutches and nurses carrying the youngest and most vulnerable.

It was a set of images that few if any children’s authors of that time were willing to portray. In an age when handicapped children were seen as something to be tucked away from society’s view, Jones was adamant that they be brought out in the open – that there was a beauty and innocence and joy just as with any other child. Throughout the book, portraits abound of wheelchairs in the snow against a mountain backdrop, of glittered tin foil stars and the typical nervousness and unexpected laughter that accompany any grammar school production.

Ouellette attended that first Christmas pageant in 1953, an experience he still describes as ‘larger than life,’ not only for its dramatic scenery but for the center’s and its ability to help create a normalized existence for children with disabilities. Once an Easter Seals poster child, Ouellette went on to become a dorm counselor at Crotched Mountain before receiving a master’s degree from Northeastern University and launching a career to help people with disabilities enter and adjust to the workplace.

“It was part of our growth as a society, and how society was willing to provide opportunities for people with disabilities,” says Ouellette, now 62 and semi-retired.

It was also part and parcel of Jones’ seeming fearlessness to push boundaries and ruffle feathers to make every child she encountered feel special.

“She was sort of a kid herself,” says Michelle Scott, a longtime friend and fellow churchgoer. “She valued her own childhood, and really enjoyed being a part of children’s lives. She went with the initial idea of decorating those walls, because they were kind of plain…but I think once she was there, her heart just went out to (the kids).”

“How Far Is It to Bethlehem?” may have been ahead of its time when published, but it was hardly the first time Jones had courted controversy. Jones’ illustrations of children of all races and nationalities playing together in Rachel Field’s 1944 book “Prayer for a Child” required her fierce advocacy to survive the editor’s knife at a time when the world was at war. Jones ultimately won the Caldecott Medal that year, the award given to the children’s book illustrator with the most striking images. Images of black children and white children together in subsequent books and even the image of a bottle of wine in Little Red Riding Hood’s basket barely escaped censorship – though the latter was changed in future editions to grape juice.

“She had a connection with all children,” says Mason resident Charles Moser, who met Jones as a teen actor in the 1970s at Andy’s Summer Playhouse, where she often wrote scripts and designed costumes.  “She just loved working with children and children loved working with her. She could let things touch her in ways that others may have been too fenced off to do.”

Friends say Jones never lost that touch, performing regular children’s readings at public libraries almost up until her passing in 2005 at the age of 95. Today, her touch can still be felt throughout the area, from the mothers and daughters that line up each day for one-of-a-kind lunches at Pickity Place (the rustic and hidden crimson cottage in Mason that inspired her retelling of  “Little Red Riding Hood”), to the kaleidoscopically-colored children’s furniture she hand-painted that lines the ‘Twig’ room at the Mason Public Library.

Crotched Mountain, meantime, has grown from the small hospital for neurological disorders that greeted Albert Ouellette in 1953 to one of the nation’s largest rehabilitation facilities. Today, the center where Jones brought her paints and palette assists more than 2,000 children and adults each year with all disabilities, and provides housing, education, and medical care.

“Every child in the world has a hill, with a top to it,” Jones said as she closed her 1945 Caldecott Award acceptance speech. “Every child – black, white, rich, poor, handicapped, unhandicapped. And singing is what the top of each hill is for. Singing, drawing, thinking, dreaming, sitting in silence…saying a prayer. I should like every child in the world to know that he has a hill, that that hill is his no matter what happens, his and his only, forever.”

Up on a mountaintop, beneath the cover of trees and the softness of snowfall, hundreds of children have found their hill. This month, they will stage their own pageant with singing and drawing and dreaming and laughing, and they may even know how far it is to Bethlehem.

Special thanks to the Crotched Mountain Foundation and Richard Mori of Mori Books in Milford (www.moribooks.com) for their generosity and assistance with this story.