Jeanie Stewart Boyd Hall (1857-1942)
Posted on January 20, 2025 by Jenny ONeill
WOMEN OF WESTPORT POINT
Jeanie Stewart Boyd Hall (1857-1942)
Author, botanist
1787 Main Road (named Synton) and land around it
1871 Main Road (bought for Katherine Stanley Hall when her dad died. It had the library.)
1878 Main Road (from her sister who owned it 30 years.)
West Beach, Horseneck property (on the West end of Horseneck)
Jeanie Hall was born in New York City, summered in Westport Point after 1886 with her husband and children and died in Westport at her beloved home Synton on Eldridge Heights. She is buried in the Westport Point cemetery with her husband and three of her children. She and her husband, Rev. Charles Cuthbert Hall visited Westport Point in 1886, invited by Lucius and Harriet Sheldon, their parishioners in Brooklyn, who had come to Westport Point several years earlier. By 1889 the Halls had built Synton, the fine work being done by local builders and craftsmen, who the Halls praised highly throughout their lives. The Halls made an immense, and even long-term, impression on Westport Point, by their close interactions with, respect for, and good deeds for local people, and as progenitors of so many summer people and long-term residents such as the Gillespie, Preston, Spicer, Utter, and Wicks families.
Charles Cuthbert and Jeanie, who were first cousins, were married in 1877 but did not have children until Katherine was born in 1886. Jeanie was very active in her husband’s pastoral life in Brooklyn, even teaching Sunday School and a sewing class for girls. After 1886, they had 4 children: Katherine, Basil, Eleanor and Theodore – the last three born after they discovered Westport Point. Her children grew up summering in Westport Point and making Westport Point their home at least part of their later years.
When her husband died in 1908 at only 56 years of age, Jeanie rented a house in Cambridge, Ma, on Harvard Street, with her 4 children and 2 servants. She moved to Westport by 1910 with three of her children and a long-term nurse and remained in Westport Point until her death in 1942. Katherine, her eldest, became one of the most beloved ladies for her library and generosity. Basil was a prolific writer and put to paper this amazing families’ lives in Westport (and elsewhere). Her daughter, Eleanor, married a minister, Robert Wicks, who had travelled around the world with the family in 1906-07. Theodore was mentally disabled, but well loved by the family and known in the community as Unk. He lived with Katherine until a few months before his death in 1955 when it was necessary to get professional care for him.
In 1895 Jeanie also started writing about Westport Point in a booklet “Story of Westport Point” where she rambled through the Village and pointed out the inhabitants, their histories, their houses, barns and animals, and their health and idiosyncrasies in a delightful fashion. Her son, Rev. Basil Hall, later wrote about his mother. “The roadsides were in those days gay with wildflowers, which so intrigued my Mother that she took up Botany as an avocation which she pursued joyfully all the rest of her life. Armed with Asa Gray’s Manual she gathered and analyzed and pressed specimens from the countryside for many miles around, compiling as she did so what was to become probably the most comprehensive list of the Flora of this area.” Later she stated: “We have decided to build a summer home, commanding the most brilliant view of its kind I ever saw…We have wanted a home somewhere in this wide world which is really ours, and we do not know of a better place.” “It was Mother’s peculiar genius to select in her letters all that was happiest and best.” “In 1890 Mother added astronomy to botany as a further avocation, identifying planets and starts with the aid of her planisphere.”
Her books on Westport Point botany are now part of the history collection at the Westport Public library.