The Kingswood School for Boys was one of the predecessors of the present day Kingswood Oxford School in West Hartford. The Oxford School for girls was founded first in 1909 as an alternative education for gifted and ambitious students who preferred to stay locally rather than go to boarding school. In 1916, a group of leading Hartford families sought to establish a school for boys and recruited a graduate of the Kingswood School in England, George Nicholson. The Kingswood School for boys modeled itself after the British School tradition. When the Bissell family moved to Farmington in 1917 they decided to lease the Hartford house to the Kingswood School where they remained for four years. The library became an assembly hall, the drawing room a library, and the carriage house a gymnasium. Both schools thrived immensely over the next several decades and in the late 1960s the Kingswood School’s headmaster proposed joining with the Oxford school to create a co-educational setting. In 1969 they joined together to form the present-day Kingswood Oxford School.