01/09/2025
Captain Thomas Mayo, a mariner born in the small coastal town of Alna, Maine around 1818 started sailing to New York as a young man. He must have discovered Greenwich along his way because on Christmas day 1842 he married Mary H. Mead of Greenwich. Just after the Civil War Captain Mayo would be appointed the inaugural president of the Greenwich and Rye Steamboat Company, which was organized by “Boss” Tweed to run between New York City to Greenwich. Mayo would do well at the helm of the steamboat line, and he would live in a house valued at $30,000 by the start of the 1870s. Investing his earnings in ventures such as the Greenwich Gas and Electric Light Co. and the Greenwich Water Co. in the 1880s, Captain Mayo earned enough to hire the New York architects Arne Dehli and G. Howard Chamberlain, scholars of authentic European architecture, to build a new estate next to his father-in-law’s farm house at Belle Haven. Mayo’s Tudor Revival manse “As You Like It” was completed at the end of 1886, but on March 29, 1887 he died having only enjoyed his new home for three months. After Mayo’s death, his beautiful Tudor home was sold to William R.H. Martin, a New York haberdasher and real estate investor, under whose ownership As You Like It was expanded and improved. Martin would most notably enlarge the estate’s gardens, adding new walls, arbors, and a tea house. After the Great Depression and during World War II As You Like It went up for sale. Cash-strapped Greenwich would not produce a buyer, and the estate was sold at a significant loss to developers who, in 1945, razed the Tudor manse, subdivided the property and erected four modest homes. Today, eight homes occupy the site of Captain Mayo’s estate.