Choate Rosemary Hall
Address
333 Christian Street Wallingford , Connecticut 06492 United States
Coordinates	41°27′28″N 72°48′35″W / 41.45766°N 72.80973°W / 41.45766; -72.80973
Information
Other name	Choate
Type	Private, college-preparatory boarding school
Motto	Latin: Fidelitas et Integritas (Fidelity and Integrity)
Established	1890 (134 years ago) (1890)
Founders	Mary Atwater Choate William Gardner Choate
CEEB code	070810
NCES School ID	00233261 [1]
Head of school	Alex Curtis
Teaching staff	121.4 (on an FTE basis)[1]
Grades	9–12
Gender	Co-educational
Enrollment	850 (2017–2018)[1]
Student to teacher ratio	7.0[1]
Campus size	458 acres (185 ha)
Campus type	Suburban
Color(s)	Choate blue, gold, rosemary blue
Athletics conference	Founders League Six Schools League
Mascot	Wild boar
Newspaper	The Choate News
Yearbook	The Brief
Endowment	$396 million (2022)[2]
Affiliations	Eight Schools Association Ten Schools Admissions Organization
Website	www.choate.edu

Choate Rosemary Hall (often known as Choate; /tʃoʊt/^[3]) is a private, co-educational, college-preparatory boarding school in Wallingford, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1890, it took its present name and began a co-educational system with the 1971 merger of The Choate School for boys and Rosemary Hall for girls. It is part of the Eight Schools Association and the Ten Schools Admissions Organization.

History

Early years

The schools that would eventually become Choate Rosemary Hall were begun by members of two prominent New England families, the Choates and Atwaters.^[4]

Rosemary Hall was founded in 1890 by Mary Atwater Choate at Rosemary Farm in Wallingford, her girlhood home and the summer residence of her and her husband, William Gardner Choate. Mary, an alumna of Miss Porter's School, was the great-granddaughter of Caleb Atwater (1741–1832), a Connecticut merchant magnate who supplied the American forces during the Revolutionary War. In 1775 General George Washington visited the Atwater store in Wallingford en route to assuming command of the Continental Army. On that occasion, Washington took tea with Judge Oliver Stanley at the "Red House" (built 1690–1750), now Squire Stanley House on the Choate campus.

In 1878 Mary Atwater Choate had co-founded a vocational organization for Civil War widows, the New York Exchange for Women's Work, a prototype of many such exchanges across the country (it survived until 2003).^[5] In 1889, Mary planned a new institution on the same principle of female self-sufficiency, and she advertised in The New York Times for a headmistress to run a school that would train girls in the "domestic arts." The advertisement was answered by Caroline Ruutz-Rees (1865–1954), a 25-year-old Briton teaching in New Jersey.^[6]

On October 3, 1890, the New Haven Morning News reported: "The opening of Rosemary Hall took place at Wallingford yesterday ... at the beautiful Rosemary Farms, which have been the property of Mrs. Choate's family for five generations. ... Rev. Edward Everett Hale addressed the school girls in his inimitable way, at once attractive and helpful. 'Never forget,' said he, 'that it is a great art to do what you do well. If you limp, limp well, and if you dance, dance well'."

The eight arriving girls occupied the original school building, "old Atwater House" (built 1758), located at the northwest corner of Christian and Elm streets, where the new Atwater House now stands. They also used "Atwater homestead" (built 1774, now known as Homestead), which stands at the center of the present-day campus, on the northeast corner of Christian and Elm streets.

Caroline Ruutz-Rees (pronounced "roots-reece," the first syllable rhyming with "foot"), headmistress of Rosemary Hall until 1938, was a figure of extraordinary personality and influence, a militant feminist and suffragist of national prominence. On the Wallingford golf course, she wore bloomers, which shocked the locals, and on buggy rides to Wallingford station, she carried a pistol.^[7] She quickly changed Rosemary Hall's mission from "domestic arts" to that of a contemporary boys' school.

The Choate School was founded by William and Mary Choate in 1896. William Gardner Choate (1830–1921), Harvard class of 1852, was U.S. District Judge for the Southern Circuit of New York from 1878 to 1881, and afterward a partner of Shipman, Barlow, Laroque, and Choate. He was a national authority on admiralty, railroad, bankruptcy, and corporation law.^[8] Like his younger, more famous brother, he was a prominent club man (Harvard and The Century). That brother was Joseph Hodges Choate, lawyer, a prosecutor of the Tweed Ring, and Ambassador to the Court of St. James's.

William and Mary Choate invited Mark Pitman (1830–1905), their tenant in the aforementioned Red House, to start a boys' school under their sponsorship. Pitman, Bowdoin class of 1859, was 66 years old, a widower, and had been principal of Woolsey School in New Haven, Connecticut, since 1872.^[9] He accepted the Choates' offer, not least perhaps because it would employ his unmarried adult daughters, Leila, Elizabeth, and Helen. Six boys entered the new school in fall term 1896, their average age about ten. Four of the six lived in Red House with the Pitmans, the first of many periods when Red House (now Squire Stanley House) has served as a dormitory for the youngest students.

Pitman taught Latin, English, history, and science; Elizabeth taught art, Helen piano, and Leila was a writing teacher and school nurse. Mary Choate's physician brother, Huntington Atwater, taught crafts and was a school doctor. There was no formal relationship with the Choates' other foundation, Rosemary Hall, a hundred yards to the east on Christian Street, but there were coeducational audiences for plays and recitals, and Mary Choate hosted dances at the Homestead.

In 1897, the boys' school erected Choate House across the street from Red House, the first purpose-built institutional building (and John F. Kennedy's dormitory in 1931-2). It contained recitation rooms, an infirmary, a dining room, and housing for fifteen boys. In 1899 Choate House was the venue for the first "Junior Dance", but a year later, the Rosemary girls would depart for a seventy-one-year absence.

The official history of Choate Rosemary Hall, written by Tom Generous, says that the rift between Caroline Ruutz-Rees and Mary Choate, proponents of two very different sorts of feminism, was public knowledge as early as 1896. In that year, the two women did not share the lectern at Prize Day, and local newspapers published "denials" of a rumor that Ruutz-Rees would leave the school.^[10] But by 1900, the headmistress and her educational style had acquired influential champions among the students' parents, and two of them, residents of Greenwich, Connecticut, joined forces to effect the removal of the school to their town.

Shipping magnate Nathaniel Witherell donated 5 acres (20,000 m²) of land in the Rock Ridge section of Greenwich. Julian Curtiss gathered a group of investors and established a joint-stock corporation funded through the sale of six-percent bonds. Ruutz-Rees was the chief shareholder. The Greenwich residence of Rosemary Hall began in the fall term 1900 when 57 girl students moved into the Main Building, known as "The School", a U-shaped shingled house on Zaccheus Mead Lane.

In Wallingford, Mark Pitman died on December 3, 1905. Until 1908 Sumner Blakemore was titular headmaster, but the school was effectively the domain of the three Pitman sisters. At the 1908 graduation ceremony, the Japanese Consul General watched his countryman Noyobu Masuda give the valedictory address. Then Judge Choate introduced the man who would assume the headmastership in the fall, George St. John, and his wife, Clara Seymour St. John. She was a Bryn Mawr alumna, member of a well-connected Connecticut family, sister of future (1937–1951) Yale president Charles Seymour, and descendant of Yale president (1740–1766) Thomas Clap.

George Clair St. John (1877–1966), Harvard class of 1902 and aged 31 in the fall of 1908, had grown up on a farm in Hoskins Station, Connecticut. He was an ordained Episcopal priest. He had taught at The Hill School in Pennsylvania and Adirondack-Florida School, and was teaching at Hackley School in Tarrytown, N.Y., when Samuel Dutton of Columbia Teachers College recruited him for the headmastership. St. John "knew, long before I read Mr. Dutton's letter, that I wanted some day to have a school of my own. In my thought about it, Dean Briggs was my first text."^[11] This was LeBaron Russell Briggs, dean of men at Harvard when St. John was there and afterward dean of the faculty until 1925. Briggs, St. John wrote, "fathered the whole college", and the St. Johns too would serve in loco parentis.

Their first move to secure parental powers was decisive. In September 1909, as the official history tells it, the St. Johns "signed with the Choates an 'Agreement to Lease and Purchase.' Under its terms, the younger couple rented the school, its property and reputation, for five years at a sum equal to 11 percent of The Choate School's net income per year. ... Less than twenty months later, on May 12, 1911, St. John reported to the trustees that he had purchased the title to the school by acquiring mortgages of roughly $41,000. He resold the title in turn to The Choate School, Incorporated, for $23,000 cash and $38,000 in stock ... For all intents and purposes, The Choate School belonged to George St. John."^[12]

In his first quarter-century as headmaster, St. John created much of Choate as it is regarded today. Of the Georgian brick and stone campus, he had built by 1932 Hill House, West Wing, the Gymnasium, Memorial House, the Chapel, the Library, the Winter Exercise Building, and Archbold Infirmary, which was the largest school infirmary in the country. He grew the enrollment from 35 to 505 boys and the faculty from 5 to 64 masters. In the decade following the First World War (classes of 1918 to 1928), Choate sent 412 of its 618 graduates to Yale, Princeton, and Harvard, according to a table published in The Choate News in fall term 1928.^[13]

George St. John belonged to the generation of legendary, long-serving headmasters who shaped the New England prep school, chief among whom were Endicott Peabody of Groton School, Frank Boyden of Deerfield Academy, Horace Dutton Taft of Taft School, Frederick Sill of Kent School, Samuel Drury of St. Paul's School, Alfred Stearns of Phillips Academy Andover, Lewis Perry of Phillips Exeter Academy, and George Van Santvoord of Hotchkiss School.^[14]

The Rev. George St. John of Choate was succeeded in 1947 by his son, the Rev. Seymour St. John '31 (1912–2006), and the "St. John dynasty" was continued to 1973. Seymour was Yale class of 1935 and was ordained after graduating from Virginia Theological Seminary in 1942. During his time as head, he built as many buildings as his father had built, greatly broadened the curriculum, raised the national profile of the school, and made it more progressive (Eleanor Roosevelt, Norman Thomas, and William Sloane Coffin were regular speakers) and cosmopolitan (Russian, Near Eastern, and Afro-American studies centers were founded, and Russian, Chinese, and Arabic courses were begun). St. John was a longtime advocate of coeducation and initiated the Choate-Rosemary contacts. At his death, headmaster Edward Shanahan told the New York Times, "The merger demanded an enormous expenditure of resources by Choate because the building of a new campus was to occur within the footprints of its property. Seymour was central to the decision to expand those resources."^[15]

JFK, the Muckers, and "Ask not"

In 1931 John F. Kennedy entered Choate as a third form (9th grade) student, following his older brother Joe Jr., who was a star athlete at the school. Jack Kennedy—sickly, underweight, and nicknamed Rat Face by his schoolfellows—spent his first two years at Choate in his brother's shadow, and compensated for it with rebellious behavior that attracted a coterie. He named his group The Muckers Club, which had thirteen members—Kennedy and twelve disciples. Among these was Kennedy's lifelong inseparable friend Kirk LeMoyne "Lem" Billings, who kept an apartment in the White House during JFK's presidency.^[16]

As Headmaster of Choate, George St. John's chapel talks included a recurring phrase that was widely remembered by Choate alumni. In 2008, school archivist Judy Donald found the phrase in St. John's notebooks, and in 2011 journalist Chris Matthews published the discovery in his biography of JFK. St. John's phrase (borrowed from Harvard dean LeBaron Briggs) was, "The youth who loves his alma mater will always ask not 'What can she do for me?' but 'What can I do for her?'" Speculation that this was the original of JFK's inaugural address "Ask not" goes back at least as far as a 1966 Time magazine article, and several of JFK's Choate contemporaries noticed the echo in 1961.^[17] Kennedy graduated from Choate in 1935. In senior class polling for the yearbook (of which he was business manager), Kennedy was voted Most Likely to Succeed.

Sexual abuse scandal

In 2017, it acknowledged a decades-long sex abuse scandal, with multiple victims being subjected to abuse from faculty members.^[18][19]

Academics

Choate's curriculum includes elective and interdisciplinary courses, from astronomy and architecture to printmaking and post-modernism to digital video and development economics.^[20] There are more than 300 courses in the curriculum, which has requirements in community service and in contemporary global studies. All disciplines except English have honors courses. As of 2017, Choate no longer offers AP (Advanced Placement) courses.

The Choate signature programs include the Advanced Robotics Program, Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies, Arts Concentration, Capstone, Environmental Immersion Program, JFK Program in Government and Public Service, Science Research Program, and the Global Education Program.^[21]

The two-year intensive Science Research Program includes mentored laboratory work during the summer at universities in the United States and abroad. The Capstone Program allows sixth form (senior) students to explore an area of the curriculum in depth. Working under a faculty adviser, students take at least five courses that focus on a curricular theme, culminating in a substantial final project. During the college application process, Choate's College Counseling Office highlights Capstone Project participation in letters of recommendation.

The performing and visual arts are supported by the resources of the Paul Mellon Arts Center. Among extracurricular arts clubs are five a cappella groups; step dance, slam poetry, hip hop, and rap groups; improv, musical theater, and instrumental ensembles of all sizes; photography and film-making clubs; and supporting publications for the arts, fashion, and culture. The Arts Concentration Program provides students with individually tailored instruction and class scheduling.

The Senior Project Program provides on- or off-campus internships in academic research, visual art, and the performing arts. Other specialized programs include American Studies, creative writing, economics, FBLA, mathematics, philosophy, psychology, religion, debate, and the Fed Challenge. The 2011–12 academic year saw the introduction of an Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies Program (AMES).^[22] Choate's Office of Global Studies supports study-abroad and other international initiatives. One-third of Choate students participate in programs in China, France, Japan, Spain, and Jordan.^[23]

The Kohler Environmental Center, designed by Robert A.M. Stern Architects, opened in 2012 and is located on a 268-acre site in the northeast quadrant of the campus. It has been described as "the first teaching, research and residential environmental center in U.S. secondary education."^[24] It can house up to 20 students and two faculty members and supports the curricular Environmental Immersion Program.

In February 2015 the school opened the Lanphier Center for Mathematics and Computer Science, a $17 million, 35,000-square foot campus hub for information technology, applied mathematics, and robotics. The center, designed by architect César Pelli's firm Pelli Clarke Pelli, contains laboratories, classrooms, a lecture hall, and common spaces. It composes a U-shaped courtyard centering on a giant weeping beech tree, and is linked by a footbridge spanning Science Center Pond to the Icahn Center for Science.^[25]

Choate's Fed Challenge team was the 2009 national champion and has won the New England District Championship in 12 of the past 13 years.^[when?] In the 2012 American Mathematics Competitions (AMC) 12-A, Choate's team finished first in the nation, with the highest combined score of all 2631 participating schools.^{[26][Note 1]}

The Choate chamber orchestra performed at the White House in December 2009 and the school's symphony orchestra toured Europe in 2010 and 2011, giving concerts in ten countries. The festival and chamber choruses performed at St. Patrick's Day mass at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome in 2011.^[27] The Maiyeros, an a cappella group, performed at Westminster Abbey in 2008. Choate orchestras and choral groups toured East Asia in 2000, 2005, 2007, and 2014. The June 2014 tour comprised concerts in Seoul, Hong Kong, and Macau, at the Great Wall at Ju Yong Guan, and in ensemble with the Concert Band of Beijing Children's Palace. Choate orchestras have also performed at Lincoln Center in New York, Carnegie Hall, and the Guggenheim Museum. The school's student-operated radio station, WWEB, was FCC-licensed and founded in 1969.^[28]

In 2012 Choate became the first among its peer preparatory schools to require that all faculty and students own an iPad. The fall term that year saw the beginning of full integration of the tablet's capabilities into the syllabus. Choate's director of academic technology discussed Choate's iPad program in an August 2012 article in US News.^[29]

Statistical profile

Choate enrolls 846 students, has 120.4 full-time equivalent teaching staff, and a student-teacher ratio of 7.0 for the 2015-2016 school year.^[1]

Financial aid totaling more than $10 million was awarded to 32 percent of the student body, the average award being $38,000 for boarders and $26,000 for day students.^[30][31]

In the fiscal year ending June 2014 Choate's endowment was $356.7 million. Among member institutions of the Eight Schools Association Choate led in gifts from parents, with $2.1 million. Total gifts received in that fiscal year were $28.9 million.^[32] In November 2006 the school inaugurated a capital campaign with a target of $200 million and by the campaign's close in 2011 gifts and pledges of $220 million had been secured.^[33]

Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim chaplains serve Choate's campus ministry. Services include Christian fellowship, Protestant evening services, Roman Catholic Mass, Buddhist meditation, Hillel, Spiritual Alternatives, Reflections Program, and other student worship groups.^[30]

Extracurricular activities

Athletics

Choate competes in sports against schools from all over New England and adjacent states. Teams are fielded at the levels of varsity, junior varsity, and thirds sections. There are 32 different sports and 81 teams in interscholastic competition.^[34] Intramural programs include aerobics, dance, senior weight training, yoga, winter running, rock climbing, fitness and conditioning, and senior volleyball.

From 2007 to 2016 Choate has won New England championships in football, boys' and girls' ice hockey, girls' soccer, boys' golf, boys' crew, and in girls' swimming, volleyball, and water polo. In that same period, Choate has won Founders League championships in boys' and girls' squash, in boys' cross country, golf, softball, and tennis, and in girls' volleyball.^[35]

The athletic directors of Choate and the other members of the Eight Schools Association compose the Eight Schools Athletic Council, which organizes sports events and tournaments among ESA schools.^[36][37][38] Choate is also a member of the New England Preparatory School Athletic Council (NEPSAC) and the Founders League, which comprises private schools located mainly in Connecticut.

Historic cricket match

The cricket match that Rosemary Hall hosted in Wallingford in 1893 against Mrs. Hazen's School of Pelham Manor, N.Y., has been described as "the first interscholastic girls sporting event in American history."^[39] (Girls intramural sports had, of course, existed, but the Rosemary cricket match is the earliest discoverable extramural item.) The dating to 1893 occurs in the official history of Choate, published in 1997. Other discussions of the event give an inferential date of 1895 or earlier, referencing newspaper articles in 1896 that imply a well-established rivalry. An 1898 wire story titled "Women and Cricket" said that the Rosemary–Hazen series was four years old. Whatever the date of the first match, journalistic treatment of the novelty was "over-publicized and mildly sensationalized", according to a standard history of American cricket published in 1998. "Bareheaded and wearing sweaters and short skirts", reported The New York Times, "daughters of some of the most prominent men in the country defied the cold, wintry wind." The Baltimore Morning Herald under the headline "Girls Play Cricket" noted that "the Pelham girls' skirts were some two or three inches longer than those of their opponents." In November 1896 the Yale Medical Journal carried a notice that Yale Med student Frederick Hulseberg had been "engaged to coach the Rosemary Hall cricket team this fall", thereby becoming the first coach of women's cricket in America.^[40]

Stengel and the Braves

During World War II, baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, under orders from the Office of Defense Transportation, told major league team owners to find spring training venues close to home. In Boston, the Red Sox chose Tufts University and the Braves at first considered Phillips Academy (Andover). But a sports editor at The Boston Globe was a Choate alumnus, and he persuaded the Braves to look at Choate's Winter Exercise Building (now the Johnson Athletic Center), one of the largest glass-roofed, cage-netted rooms in the country, and easily able to accommodate a baseball infield. The Braves moved into Choate dormitories on March 21, 1943 and again in March 1944.

Their roster included Warren Spahn, Johnny Sain ("Spahn and Sain and pray for rain"), and manager Casey Stengel. The journalistic opportunity afforded by Stengel in a prep school setting was not lost, and a famous wire-service photo shows him dressed in mortarboard and gown "lecturing" his players. His nickname "The Perfessor" first appears at this time, as does a fine example of Stengelese: asked to comment on Choate's facilities, he said, "Excellent workouts in that there cage you just saw, which is a honey in all my years to the present time, if I may be permitted to drop into the vernacular."^[41]

Publications

Gertrude Stein and The Lit

In 1935 Gertrude Stein gave a series of talks in the United States that included, on January 12 and 13, a visit to Choate. Fortunately for literary posterity, her audience included both a stenographer and Dudley Fitts, critic, translator, and longtime teacher of Greek and Latin at Choate. Stein's public speaking style was extemporary, and Fitts recognized the permanent value of a stenographic transcript. After an exchange of letters, Stein authorized Fitts to oversee publication of her talk in The Choate Literary Magazine. On February 5, he sent her the page proofs, saying, "I had to restore a great deal of the lecture from memory. I hope I didn't spoil anything. Sorry to have missed entirely what you said about the noun." (Fitts's typescript and the Fitts-Stein correspondence are now at Yale.)^[42]

Stein's essay appeared in the February 1935 issue of The Lit with the title "How Writing Is Written." It has many times since been anthologized and given academic treatment, with the Choate text unaltered. It "occupies a unique place in Stein's corpus as a social text that carries the marks of its particular occasion ... direct address to her audience (around sixty boys, as well as faculty and some former students)."^[43] Stein's two-day stay at Choate was her first exposure to a private school, if we can believe her statement in Everybody's Autobiography (published 1937). She wrote, "It was the first time I had ever seen such a school. When I was brought up in East Oakland we all went to public school ... The boys from twelve to sixteen listened really listened [sic] to everything I had to say ... I had been much struck by the Choate school literary magazine which did have extraordinary good writing in it."^[44]

Edward Albee and The Lit

In 1944 Edward Albee transferred from Valley Forge Military Academy to Choate, with admissions director Frank Wheeler making a prescient note, "I have a feeling he will distinguish himself in literature."^[45] His brilliance was quickly recognized and mentored by such teachers as John Joseph, Charles Rice, and Sandy Lehmann. He was made managing editor of The Lit and for two years a large part of its content, in all genres, was supplied by him. Incidents from Albee's time at Choate are reworked for his plays, including the famous "bergin and water" speech in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and the "walking crow" speech in Tiny Alice, which reproduces almost verbatim English teacher Lehmann's criticism of a sonnet Albee wrote for The Lit.^[46] The May 1946 Commencement issue of The Lit contained Albee's first published play, a long one-acter called Schism. Another play written at Choate, Each In His Own Way, went unpublished and forgotten until 1996, when a classmate preparing for their 50th reunion found it in a scrapbook.^[47]

Notable alumni