Early years

The Choate School and Rosemary Hall were both founded by prominent New England families, the Choates and Atwaters.^[4]

Rosemary Hall

Rosemary Hall was founded in 1890 by Mary Atwater Choate at Rosemary Farm in Wallingford, her childhood 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 1878, Mary Atwater Choate 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.^[5] The school opened in 1890. The first eight students occupied the "old" Atwater House.

The Homestead, built 1774. A small door leads to a secret passage behind the chimney that may have been a station on the Underground Railroad.

Caroline Ruutz-Rees would later change Rosemary Hall's mission from "domestic arts" to that one similar of a contemporary boys' school.

The Choate School

The Choate School was also founded by William and Mary Choate in 1896. William Gardner Choate (1830–1921) 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 railroad, bankruptcy, and corporation law.^[6]

William and Mary Choate invited their tenant, Mark Pitman (1830–1905), to start a boys' school under their sponsorship. Pitman had been principal of Woolsey School in New Haven, Connecticut.^[7] He accepted the Choates' offer and employed his daughters, Leila, Elizabeth, and Helen.

Squire Stanley House, built 1690–1750. The Choate School began here in 1896. It is now a fourth and fifth form (sophomore-junior) girls dormitory.

Six boys, with the average age of 10, entered the new school in fall term 1896. Pitman taught Latin, English, history, and science, while Pitman's daughters Elizabeth taught art, Helen piano, and Leila was a writing teacher and school nurse. Mary Choate's brother, Huntington Atwater, taught crafts and was the school doctor.

There was no formal relationship at the time with Rosemary Hall – a hundred yards to the school's east on Christian Street – but there were coeducational audiences for plays and recitals and Mary Choate hosted dances at the Homestead.

The St. John Years

In 1908, George St. John (1877–1966), an Episcopal priest, became head master of Choate. He had taught at The Hill School in Pennsylvania and Adirondack-Florida School, and was teaching at Hackley School in Tarrytown, N.Y., when he was recruited for the headmastership.

The dining hall in Hill House west wing

St. John and his wife, "signed with the Choates an 'Agreement to Lease and Purchase'. Under its terms, the young 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."^[8]

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, 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.^[9]

George St. John belonged to a generation of long-serving headmasters who shaped New England prep schools, 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.^[10]

Choate was succeeded in 1947 by his son, Seymour St. John '31 (1912–2006), and the "St. John dynasty" continued to 1973. The younger St. John oversaw the construction of more buildings, broadened the curriculum, and raised the national profile of the school.

Seymour 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, "[t]he 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."^[11]

JFK, the Muckers, and "Ask not"

John Kennedy '35 writes home on school stationery to say his "studies are going pretty hard" and mentioning LeMoyne Billings '35, his roommate and lifelong closest friend

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 friend Kirk LeMoyne "Lem" Billings, who kept an apartment in the White House during JFK's presidency.^[12]

Kennedy graduated from Choate in 1935. In senior class polling for the yearbook (of which he was business manager), he was voted 'Most Likely to Succeed'.

It has been suggested that the oft-remembered quote from Kennedy's inauguration may have originated from a common refrain from Choate headmaster, George St. John's chapel talks: "The youth who loves his alma mater will always ask not 'What can she do for me?' but 'What can I do for her?'".^[13]

Sexual abuse scandal

In 2017, the school acknowledged a decades-long sex abuse scandal, with multiple victims being subjected to abuse from many different faculty and staff members. A report commissioned by the school documented dozens of students who had suffered abuse, dating from the 1960s through the 2010s; the most incidents were reported to have taken place in the 1980s.^[14][15]

Curriculum

Choate's curriculum includes elective and interdisciplinary courses, from astronomy and architecture to printmaking and post-modernism to digital video and development economics.^[16] 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.

Signature programs

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.^[17]

Specialized programs

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).^[20] 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.^[21]

Paul Mellon Humanities Center, built 1938, designed by Charles Fuller

Use of technology

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.^[25]

Enrollment

Choate enrolls 861 students, has 120.4 full-time equivalent teaching staff, and a student-teacher ratio of 7.0 for the 2023-2024 school year.^[1]

Financial

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.^[26][27]

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.^[28] 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.^[29]

Religious profile

Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim chaplains serve Choate's campus ministry.^[26]

Athletics

Andrew Mellon Library, built 1925

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.^[30] Intramural programs include aerobics, dance, senior weight training, yoga, winter running, rock climbing, fitness and conditioning, and senior volleyball.

In 2007 to 2016, Choate 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 won Founders League championships in boys' and girls' squash, in boys' cross country, golf, softball, and tennis, and in girls' volleyball.^[31]

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.^[32][33][34] 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

In 1893, Rosemary Hall were host to a cricket match with Mrs. Hazen's School of Pelham Manor, N.Y., that has been described by some as "the first interscholastic girls sporting event in American history."^{[36] [37]}

Gertrude Stein and The Lit

In 1935, Gertrude Stein gave a series of talks across the country that included a visit to Choate on January 12 and 13.

In the audience was stenographer, Dudley Fitts, a critic, translator, and longtime teacher of Greek and Latin at Choate. Stein's public speaking style was extemporary, and Fitts made a stenographic transcript. After an exchange of letters, Stein authorized Fitts to oversee publication of her talk in The Choate Literary Magazine.^[38]

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)."^[39]

Stein's two-day stay at Choate was her first self-acknowledged exposure to a private school. In her 1937, Everybody's Autobiography, Stein 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[,] 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."^[40]

Edward Albee and The Lit

In 1944, future playwright, Edward Albee transferred from Valley Forge Military Academy to Choate. Admissions director Frank Wheeler remarked presciently, "I have a feeling he will distinguish himself in literature."^[41]

Incidents from Albee's time at Choate are reworked for his plays.^[42]

The May 1946 Commencement issue of The Lit contained Albee's first published play, 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.^[43]