Our Town

An article in today’s Greenwich Time describes Belle Haven as “home to not one but two billionaires and some of the town’s priciest real estate.” It is true that this private waterfront community has long been an exclusive enclave. Around the turn of the last century, wealthy industrialists were transforming Greenwich potato farms into expensive summer estates. This is the era in which Belle Haven has its origins.

But there is a little sliver of Belle Haven history that few people today know anything about, including, I would imagine, the millionaires and billionaires who now live there.

Last night, as I was leaving a meeting of the Community Development Advisory Committee (CDAC), I encountered my friend, Easy Kelsey, with a group outside Town Hall. Easy runs Kelsey Farm, a venerable Greenwich riding institution on Lake Avenue that her mother, known as Sis, started many years ago.

“Easy and I were classmates at Greenwich Academy,” I said to Jan Dubois, Chairman of the Greenwich Housing Authority, who had also been at the CDAC meeting and was walking with me as we continued on to the parking lot after greeting Easy. As I spoke these words, I remembered that Easy and I had not only been classmates at Greenwich Academy, but had also attended Mrs. Teal’s Classes together in Belle Haven.

While I was telling Jan last night about Mrs. Teal’s Classes, I realized that the history of this little school has been lost. No one even knows that it ever existed. This morning, seeing Belle Haven mentioned in the paper, I remembered this thought from last night and decided to do a brief blog posting in order to revive this history.

From 1948 until 1954 when I entered Greenwich Academy in 7th grade, I attended a very unusual school. Known as Mrs. Teal’s Classes, it was located in John and Isabelle Teal’s large Victorian house at the corner of Mayo Avenue and Otter Rock Drive in Belle Haven. Isabelle Teal, an imposing woman, had started the accredited private elementary school many years earlier when her children were young and home schooled. I would guess that would have been sometime in the 1930′s. She closed her school and retired in 1954, at the end of my 6th grade year.

Mrs. Teal’s Classes was,in a sense, an old-fashioned one-room schoolhouse. The students from all 6 grades, which amounted to only a handful of boys and girls, were taught in one room of the house. Mrs. Teal, who was the school’s only teacher, had turned this room into a classroom with a large blackboard, bookshelves and school desks. I remember the room as having pale green walls and a wooden parquet floor.

Each grade had only 1 or 2 students. As I recall there were never more than 5 in any one grade, and all study was highly individualized. Mrs. Teal, who had a large desk of her own in one corner of the classroom, would take students into the living room for private tutorials. This spacious living room was also the setting for school plays and joint music classes in which all the students participated. Mrs. Teal would pound the keys of her grand piano with great exuberance while we sang. In June 1953, we all sat on the floor in Mrs. Teal’s living room and watched coverage of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation on the television.

Recess was on the back lawn, or on the wrap-around porch if it was raining. School let out at lunch time. There was no homework. Some, but not all, the students in Mrs. Teal’s Classes lived in Belle Haven. Some, but not all, were very rich.