A Fond (and Farm) Farewell
June 27, 2025
This time of year – May and June, specifically – is when Keith Estey thinks Wheeler Farm is at its most beautiful. “Everything is green, the leaves are out on the trees, and the weather is nice,” he says. It’s also the season for Commencement, which fills the farm with even more beauty, and plenty of pomp and circumstance. Mr. Estey was there for the ceremony earlier this month, just as he’s been for the last 23 years as the farm’s property manager.
Technically, though, his history with Wheeler’s Seekonk campus stretches back a bit earlier – to 1986. At that time, Mr. Estey was the property manager for Osamequin Farm, which was owned by Davis Jencks and his wife, Anne ’46, P’75, who lived down the street from the farm. Our former director of operations, Gary Esposito P’97, P’00 had recently joined Wheeler, and he invited the Jenks – and therefore Mr. Estey – to take over maintenance of the school’s athletic fields at the farm.
“I saw many changes there over the years, as you can imagine,” Mr. Estey says. “The first thing we focused on was the Columbine Hill House, which was more or less falling down. We put that all back together. We built the maintenance garage, and we tore down an old cow barn in order to build restrooms, the running track [Baker Track & Field], and the field house [Van Norman Field House]. There were only five athletic fields back then, and now we have eight. I’ve been a part of it all. It’s kind of amazing to think back, because a lot of it is just a blur.”
Part of the reason it was such a blur was because until 2002, Mr. Estey had his own farming and landscaping business and was working at multiple properties. But Mr. Esposito encouraged and ultimately convinced him to transition full-time to Wheeler Farm. “I had a young family, and I saw the school as a very stable working environment with so much potential,” he remembers. “I really wanted that to be 100 percent of my focus, and eventually the time was right to make the leap of faith.”
When Mr. Estey took the leap, the farm where he landed didn’t have nearly as many facilities as it does today. As he described it, his job was mostly managing the operations of people, like the families associated with Seekonk’s recreational youth soccer league, who came to use the property.
As the school’s vision for the farm grew, so did the buildings and grounds, with the aforementioned additional athletic fields and the new field house. More recently, the 6th-Grade Farm Program and The Nest – our nature-based early education program – joined Mr. Estey and his small staff at the farm, and with the launch of the Future of the Farm projects, which include an aquatics center, amphitheater, accessible boardwalk, and new complex for The Nest, among other initiatives, Mr. Estey says, “the farm today looks much different than the farm I was introduced to. But in any type of business, you really need to grow to exist, and the farm is definitely growing!”
Mr. Estey, who grew up on his family’s dairy farm in North Attleboro, Massachusetts, knew how much work and love it took to run a farm and care for the land. “We had 72 milk cows, and we helped farm other land around North Attleboro and the neighboring towns. We had a roadside vegetable stand. So, it was in my blood to take care of property and land, and really to try to keep it usable and open,” he says.
That important work has always been a team effort at Wheeler Farm. “From Mary C. Wheeler’s foresight in the late 1800s to acquire that piece of property, with it being so rural yet so so close to Providence, to working side-by-side with Gary Esposito from 1986 until he retired, to the other key people who have been involved, I feel like I’ve had so much support. Whether it was Adam Burke, who started working for me part-time in the 1990s and is now the maintenance supervisor, [former Director of Strategic Communications] Laurie Flynn, who was part of any function that was going on at the farm, former Athletic Director Jon Donahue or the current AD, Sean Kelly, or our most recent heads of school, Bill Prescott, Dan Miller, and then Allison Gaines Pell, everyone had trust in me, and we were all responsible for the growth of the farm together. They were all important in their own way.”
Mr. Estey transitioned to a part-time role at the start of 2025, but at the end of this month, his own important role at Wheeler will end. “It’s very bittersweet to think about the past, but I’m loving things in Florida, where I live now – that helps ease the edges a little bit and makes the transition easier,” he says. “But I’m proud that I was part of so much at the farm. I don’t like to take much credit because there were so many other people who were influential in the history of the farm, but it’s nice to know that I have my own little piece of that timeline through the decades. I have a little section in there somewhere, and I can be proud that the farm definitely improved over that time period.”
