The First Movies

Bioscope Pictures of 1899 Were

Far Cry from Today’s Films

The Ridgefield Press, 1950 — The “new marvels of animated pictures” made their appearance in Ridgefield around the turn of the century. An advertisement in The Press of 1899 so referred to the American Bioscope Company movies augmenting Billy Lester’s new show of  “8 great artists 8.”

Three years later The Press reported that “A large and enthusiastic audience greeted the Edison Projectoscope Company on their second appearance in Ridgefield at the Town Hall Monday evening. The program was opened by piano overture. Mr. Forrest gave a few short stories and parodies on popular songs. His jokes were witty and new, and were well-received by the audience.

Then Mr. Plant, the manager, announced the moving pictures which were thrown on the screen, interspersed with illustrated songs, sung by Mr. Plant, who has a very pleasing voice, and stereopticon pictures of noted men.

“'The first moving picture, our late president’s (McKinley’s) funeral, was very impressive. After a short intermission more moving pictures were shown and nearly all of a laughable nature. The other scenes, those of noted cities and places in our own and in foreign parts, were explained by Mr. Plant. The pianist played selections appropriate to the scenes and accompanied the singers.”

The “large and enthusiastic audience” was evidently large and enthusiastic enough to support a permanent movie theater, for in the next few years several companies came in and out of business.

Town Hall Photoplays, an enterprise run by Julius Ficken and Mr. and Mrs. Arthur J. Ferry, was not as successful as it might have been, for some reason. But the hour long trip to Danbury by horse and buggy, though just right for spooning, was too tedious a drive to make for a mere movie, unless it happened to be “The Birth of A Nation.”

In 1915 The Press reported that “Mr. Ferry announces that he will start a series of excellent comedy and dramatic pictures,” which didn't speak too well of the quality of the previous pictures.

About 1920 at the parish house of St. Stephen’s Church, the pillars were removed and movies were booked by Arthur Carnall, the moving spirit behind many of Ridgefield’s cinematic enterprises. The parish house movies were of the better sort, and although no admission was charged (a hat was passed after the performance for voluntary contributions), there was never a deficit.

However, the trustees of the church objected to showing movies in the parish house, and the entertainment there was stopped.

At about this time the American Legion Post found itself in straitened circumstance and Arthur Carnall thought of showing movies for the benefit of the Legion. The post purchased the machinery the Ferry enterprises had used and began showing photo-plays in the Town Hall on Wednesdays and Saturdays. The Wednesday shows were the better or “cultural” shows and the Saturday shows were more run of the mill,  the theory behind this being that people went to the movies on Saturday night in any case. Interestingly enough, the Wednesday night movies made more money.

When St. Stephen’s gave the Legion their projection machine, the booth at the town hall was enlarged so that Jack Cranston, the operator, and his two machines would fit in. Up until this time slides had been shown during intermission while the reels were rewound.

All of these enterprises had musical accompaniment, furnished at one time or another by Mr. and Mrs. Willis G. Boyce, violin and piano respectively, and by Arthur Ferry, piano. Charles Stannard further enlivened Ridgefield evenings by selling popcorn and peanuts on the steps of the town hall. During this period there was sometimes dancing after the movies, too.

The Legion enterprise was successful, and the veterans enjoyed a steady income from it until the advent of the talkies, which made the machinery obsolete. This soon found its way to some corner

of South America, where talkies were unknown, so all in all, the Legion came out ahead on its movie venture. This proved to Arthur Carnall that Ridgefield would support a movie house that presented good features and did not show any “B” films.

It was not until 1938, however, that Irwin Wheeler, of the New Canaan Playhouse, became interested in opening a branch of the chain owned by Casey and Wheeler in New York (later the Prudential chain) and he and Mr. Carnall picked a site at the rear of the library as a likely spot for a Ridgefield Playhouse. The library was willing to sell the property, though a provision in the deed of the library property required title action in Superior Court before it could be sold.

The next problem faced by Mr. Carnall was the job of selling the public a $40,000 first mortgage bond issue. The library agreed to invest $6,000 of the receipts from the sale of the property and a public announcement was made that if $40,000 was raised, the new theater would be built. At the same time a lengthy prospectus of the plans of the theater company was drawn up and appeals were mailed to one hundred possible investors. In the next year this amount was raised, oversubscribed, and placed in escrow.

Construction would have begun immediately, as plans of the theater had been completed, and printed in the Press, but the contractors estimated that the cost of the building according to the plans would make the total investment too high. The plan for the present building was prepared by John Eberson of New York, architect. John McNeill of Floral Park, Long Island, was contractor. The building was completed and ready for the first performance on March 26, 1940.

Under the present manager, William Johns, the Playhouse is still sticking to the original formula of presenting good single-feature attractions and short subjects, which has proved so successful in the ten years it has been followed in Ridgefield. 

In addition the Playhouse has presented art exhibitions from the start and many prominent local artists have there shown their work to the community. Some Ridgefield artists who have exhibited at the Playhouse in the past few years include Herb Olsen, with his own and his students paintings; Elizabeth O'Brien, with her “table-toppers”; J. Clark Work, the portrait  painter; Photographer Richard Marks; Mrs. Wognar, with her embossed pictures and boxes; Mrs. Nicholas Lefore, the landscape artist.

Other exhibitors have been Mrs. Elizabeth Schleussner, with her California desert scenes; Photographer Alexander Alland of North Salem; landscape artist Bernice Webster; watercolorist Hazel Tobias, director of art at Danbury Teachers College; watercolorist Thomas De’Stasio, of the Walt Disney advertising department; Jeanne Melin, of New Canaan, whose specialty is painting horses; Ralph Jaeger, watercolorist of Armonk; photographer Janet Arem, of Croton Falls; and Mrs. Charles E. Wegmann, who has exhibited her own and her students’ work in oil painting.

During World War II the Playhouse held food fairs and several bond rallies. At one rally, September 1943, $524,013 worth of bonds were sold in little over an hour. The auction by which the bonds were sold was broadcast over NBC, with Francis D. Martin serving as auctioneer. Volunteered services and articles auctioned off included a speech by Walter Hampden, nylon stockings, a pig, a calf, and cartoons by Wood Cowan and Paul Webb.

Stephen Zvonkovic, the chief projection operator, is the only remaining member of the original staff of ten years ago. Except for his two years in the Army he has been with the Playhouse since its beginning. Adolpho Casagrande, custodian, has been on the staff for nine years without missing a day. Other members of the staff are Mr. and Mrs. Allen W. H. Sterry, Lois Sterry, Mrs. Marion B. Redman, H. E. Todd, John A. Hayes, David Clapp, Harold T. Scott, and Jack Yelinek.

[Note: This article, written by Karl S. Nash, appeared in The Ridgefield Press’s Jubilee Edition, a special 100-plus page tabloid publication marking the newspaper’s 75th anniversary in 1950]

Thaddeus Crane: 

The Spectacular Exit

If you were to go house hunting in Ridgefield during the first third of the 20th Century, chances were good that you would call on Thaddeus Crane. But he gained a fair bit of notoriety for

something quite different from selling homes and insurance: Mr. Crane may have had the most spectacular death of any Ridgefielder in the 20th Century.

In May 1928, for reasons unknown,  Crane drove at high speed onto a railroad crossing in Wilton where a northbound train, “whistle shrieking,” smashed into his Hudson sedan and hurled it into the air. The car exploded, crashed into the second locomotive, bounced through the air into the baggage car, and flipped off into a trackside signal box, which also exploded. 

Witnesses risked their lives to drag him from the burning car, but Crane died within minutes. 

Typical of fatal automobile accidents of the era, The Ridgefield Press devoted more than 20 column inches to details of the crash, but only two inches to his life. 

Thaddeus Bailey Crane was born in 1862 in nearby Somers, N.Y., a great grandson of Colonel Thaddeus Crane of North Salem, who commanded the 4th regiment of the Westchester County Militia during the Revolution. (Col. Crane, then a major, was shot through the hip at the Battle of Ridgefield in 1777, survived and later became a representative to the New York State General Assembly and was a member of the New York State Constitutional Convention in 1788 that ratified the Constitution.)

After schooling at an academy in Norwalk, Crane became a farmer and, in 1891, married Mary Lent Brown. In 1896 the couple moved to Ridgefield where they had a farm off South Olmstead Lane, and raised two daughters and a son. 

In 1909, a year after his wife died, Crane opened a real estate office, which was located  just north of where Planet Pizza (formerly Roma) is in the large Tudor-style building on Main Street. By

1920 he was one of only three real estate agents in a town that now has a hundred active Realtors; the other two were M. Estelle Benjamin and William R. Keeler.

Crane was well known in the community, serving on the school board in the 1900s and 1910s. He was a founding member of the Promoter’s Club, a predecessor of the Ridgefield Chamber of Commerce, and belonged to the Jerusalem Lodge of Masons. Active in St. Stephen’s Church, he was a member of the vestry when the parish built its new stone church in 1915.

How did Crane manage to enter a railroad crossing whose warning lights were flashing and where the train was both visible and loudly sounding its whistle?

There was a good deal of talk that Crane, in a hurry, decided to try to beat the train to the crossing. As Town Historian Dick Venus put it, “Thad one time ran a race with a locomotive in Wilton and came off second best.”

The Press provided plenty of analysis at the time. The crash occurred on what is now Route

33 near Route 7. A bridge now brings 33 over the tracks; back then, the road crossed the tracks.  “Mr. Crane was driving a Hudson super-six sedan,” the account said. “The machine was going across the railroad tracks at a fairly good clip when it was struck.

“The Wilton-Ridgefield road had been oiled recently and it had rained slightly before the accident happened. Whether Mr. Crane felt he could not bring the automobile to a stop in time to avoid the train and thus put on more speed in an effort to pass the crossing before the train will probably never be known. The danger signal was in working order and was still red after the accident.  The engineer blew the whistle of the train a considerable distance from the crossing and blew it continously when he saw the automobile.”

The train used electric engines; the Danbury line had been electrified three years earlier and

remained electrified until 1961. The engineer, Andy Dougherty, said that “he saw the crossing and apparently slackened speed. He blew the whistle for a second as an additional warning, although still thinking the car was about to stop. When he saw the automobile continuing, he threw on reverse. The train came to a halt some 200 yards north of the crossing.”

In the end, The Press concluded, “Why the accident happened cannot be understood by the authorities unless Mr. Crane, just before reaching the crossing, was unable to stop his automobile because of the wet road.”

Two years after his death, Mr. Crane’s business was sold to Arthur J. Carnall, and operated under the name, A.J. Carnall Inc. for decades.  In 1999, Ridgefield Bank, now Fairfield County Bank, bought A.J. Carnall Inc., and 10 years later renamed it Fairfield County Bank Insurance Services. It’s still headquartered in the “Carnall Building” at the corner of Main and Catoonah Streets.

Arthur J. Carnall: 

A Shropshire Lad

Arthur J. Carnall was a boy of nine, fresh off the boat from England, when he arrived in Ridgefield in 1904. He made the town his home for the next 67 years and helped change the face and function of the community in many ways. 

A native of Shropshire, England, Arthur James Carnall was born in 1895. His family sailed to Boston and immediately came to Ridgefield; they chose the town on the recommendation of William Harrison Bradley of Ridgefield, who was then serving with the American consulate in England and lived across the road from the Carnalls. 

He graduated from the old Center School on Bailey Avenue and attended a preparatory school in Virginia. (His sister, Marjorie Agnes Carnall, married John W. “Jack” Smith, the well-known Ridgefield orchid grower and estate superintendent, who was also born in England and who is also profiled in Who Was Who). 

During World War I, Arthur Carnall served in the U.S. Navy.

In 1922, he joined the real estate and insurance business of Thaddeus Crane, located about where Dr. George Amatuzzi’s office is on Main Street. Crane (who will be profiled in a future “Who Was Who”) died in a spectacular car-vs.-train accident in 1928 and two years later, Carnall took over the business, renaming it A.J. Carnall Inc. It became Ridgefield’s largest insurance business and, in 1965, moved into the second floor of a new office building at the corner of Main and Catoonah Streets — what became popularly known as “the Carnall Building.”

Throughout his life here, Carnall was involved in efforts to improve the community.  “Mr. Carnall’s love of Ridgefield and devotion to its welfare marked his public life,” The Ridgefield Press said when he died. 

One of his first big projects was amassing 270 acres in the late 1920s to create the Silver Spring Country Club, which opened in 1932. Throughout his life he was an active member of the club and at his death in 1972, was its treasurer and a governor. He was, needless to say, an ardent golfer, but was also a good one, winning a number of tournaments in the region over the years.

In the late 1930s, he almost single-handedly conducted a bond-selling drive that, in 1940, created Ridgefield’s first movie theater, the Ridgefield Playhouse, on the site of today’s Prospector Theater. Before then, Ridgefielders had to travel to one of three theaters in Danbury to see a movie. The Playhouse was also used for various stage productions.

A few years later his enthusiasm and salesmanship resulted in the town’s buying the Lounsbury block, now Veterans Park, along with its mansion, now the Community Center. He also helped organize the Community Center operations.

He also dabbled in development – the “car” of Marcardon Avenue is he, partners with Francis D. Martin and Joseph H. Donnelly (Martin, then also a boy, was one of the first people Carnell met when he came to Ridgefield in 1904, and they became lifelong friends.

For 15 years starting in 1941, Carnall was the town tax collector. He was a founder of the Lions Club and of the Danbury and Ridgefield Boards of Realtors, belonged to the Ridgefield Grange and Danbury Elks, was on the Wadsworth R. Lewis Fund advisory committee, and volunteered on countless boards and committees — including serving on the Ration Board during World War II.

He and and Agnes Kelly were married in 1930 and lived on Gilbert Street for their entire   life together. Both took pride in their beautiful gardens. He was 76 years old when he died at his winter home in Florida in 1972. She died in 1996 at the age of 92 in Florida where she had moved after her husband’s death.

In 1999, Ridgefield Bank, now Fairfield County Bank, bought A.J. Carnall Inc., and 10 years later renamed it Fairfield County Bank Insurance Services. It still operates out of the “Carnall Building.” Carnall, incidentally, had held several offices in the old Ridgefield Savings Bank, predecessor of Fairfield County Bank, starting as an incorporator in 1941 and ending as vice president at the time of his death.