Local History: S.O. Socialite Built a Life in Rwanda

The Halsey estate faced Montrose Avenue, near what we now know as Halsey Place. It was the home of William Gurden Halsey, a Wall Street bond trader, and Rosamond Howard Halsey, an aristocratic Southerner, whose three children were born and raised in South Orange. The Halsey family had a long history and deep roots in the community; they owned the Halsey lumberyard on 3rd Street, whose sign still remains below the overpass, next to the South Orange Rescue Squad. Yet the eldest of the Halsey children, Rosamond, would make her home and reputation continents away in Rwanda.

"Miss Halsey Betrothed" reads a headline in the Oct. 9, 1941 New York Times. Rosamond Halsey, born in 1912, was then a graduate of Miss Beard's School (now Morristown-Beard) in Orange. She later described her early life as "boarding schools, country clubs and debutante balls." Any dreams she had of college were lost with her father's fortune in the Great Depression. Instead, Halsey became an art student in New York City. (The Times account has Halsey studying at the Art Student's League, while other accounts refer to the Traphagen School of Fashion Design.) She became a fashion illustrator for Manhattan department stores in the early 1930s.

In 1941 Halsey was invited to a showing of films on Africa by the British-born big game hunter and filmmaker Kenneth Carr. The hunter had lived in Africa for nearly three decades, working  as a tattoo artist, a coffee planter and a miner of silver and tungsten. Twenty-four years her senior, the South Orange native fell for Carr. He romanced her with a pin made from a lion's claw laminated in gold. 

Carr and Halsey were married locally, at the home of her grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Neil Hobson Howard. The Rev. Dr. Emory Ross, the general secretary of the Foreign Missions Conference of North America, performed the ceremony.

When the marriage foundered and their finances suffered, the couple moved to Africa in 1949. Rosamond Halsey Carr packed four cotton dresses, her Irish terrier, Sheila, and a "lifetime's supply of cold cream" and set sail in a cargo ship bound for West Africa. They sailed up the Congo river to Stanleyville (now Kisingani), then drove a Ford pickup truck 620 miles to the Congo-Rwanda border, where they managed a farm.

When the marriage failed, Rosamond Carr bought a 270-acre flower plantation called Mugongo in the foothills of the Virunga volcanoes in Rwanda; she lived in an ivy-clad stone cottage where she planted a formal English garden. Kenneth Carr, her former husband, lost everything when Belgium's colonial rule of the Congo ended in 1960. He eventually left the country, along with most Europeans and Americans. Rosamond Carr became one of the rarest of species: a single woman running a business in Africa.

After Rwanda became independent 1962, the dominant Hutu took power, and the minority Tutsi, who had previously ruled, suffered. Tensions mounted, but Carr stayed, befriending Dian Fossey, whose story became the movie "Gorillas in the Mist." Indeed, Carr is a character in the movie played by Julie Harris. 

Rwanda's genocide began in 1994 after President Juvénal Habyarimana was assassinated. In her 1999 autobiography, "Land of a Thousand Hills: My Life in Rwanda," which has been reprinted with an introduction by her niece, Carr describes fleeing on five minutes' notice, arriving soon after in New Jersey. However, after seeing televised images of the tragedy she made a decision to return.

She returned to her farm from New Jersey, and, at age 82, converted a flower-drying shed into an orphanage for 40 children. She called it Imbabazi, meaning "a place where you will receive all the love and care a mother would give." Carr ran the orphanage, which remains active, until her death at age 94 in 2006. She was buried on its ground. 

Even at the end of her life, and during periods of great trauma, friends recalled that Rosamond Halsey Carr was immaculately coiffed and dressed. She never lost her sense of style, born of her years in South Orange and Manhattan. 

Thank you very much to Marie Somers, a reader who alerted me to Rosamond Halsey Carr and her South Orange roots.  It was a thrill to discover this influential and long-lived neighbor!