Jeb and Dan

Many Ridgefielders and former residents who were here for the Bicentennial celebration and the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Ridgefield will remember Jeb and Dan.

The oxen were “members” of the Fifth Connecticut Regiment, the Ridgefield-based group that recreated a military outfit that had existed in the Revolution.

The animals were acquired late in 1974 and appeared in many parades and re-enactments here and in the Northeast. Their main job was to pull the Fifth’s cannon.

Jeb and Dan were cared for by Dave Hebert, who was the Parks and Recreation superintendent in the early and mid-1970s. Hebert lived in a town-owned cottage at Richardson Park on North Salem Road, where the oxen also stayed.

This picture was taken in March 1975 by Perry Ruben. Perry (a woman) lived in Georgetown and did a lot of photography for The Ridgefield Press and Redding Pilot in that era.

She writes on the back of this picture: “Dan and Jeb have changed places and are now steers — young oxen. They have calmed considerably under Mr. Hebert’s steady training, and now stand still on order when the ox-goad is laid on their shoulders. Dan holds his head lower, is bigger and will be the better ox.”

After the hoop-la of the Bicentennial in 1976 and battle anniversary a year later, Jeb and Dan got fewer assignments. And around then Hebert left his Ridgefield post to work elsewhere.

So Jeb and Dan did what many Revolutionary soldiers did after the war: They became farmers. Well, they portrayed farmers, living on the farm of the Stamford Museum and Nature Center, where thousands of visiting children got to see them in an agricultural setting.

The last mention we could find of them occurred in 1982 when they were still part of the museum farm. Since oxen can live for 20 years, we assume they continued to reside there or were moved to a real farm where they grazed peacefully for the rest of their days.

Col. Philip Burr Bradley: 

A Post-Revolutionary Pillar

The commanding presence of  Philip Burr Bradley frightened a young “Peter Parley” two centuries ago. And while Samuel G. Goodrich was far from the only one who cowered in the presence of the prominent Ridgefield leader,  Colonel Bradley was nonetheless a pillar of the community when the community, state and nation needed pillars.

 Bradley, who had commanded the Fifth Connecticut Regiment during the Revolutionary War, was one of two former military officers who led Ridgefield in the early years of the nation. He was a super-conservative Federalist while his neighbor down the street, General Joshua King, was more democratic in his outlook on people and government (and who is profiled elsewhere on Old Ridgefield).

Both owned a lot of property and both commanded respect, but Bradley was often feared as well as respected while King was more warm and friendly to all.

Philip Burr Bradley was born in 1738 in nearby Fairfield to an old and wealthy Connecticut family. Vice President Aaron Burr was a first cousin, and an another cousin was married to Tapping Reeve, founder in 1784 of the Litchfield Law School, one of the first law schools in the nation.

He graduated from Yale in 1758 and a year later, moved to Ridgefield where he soon gained prominence, acquiring properties throughout town, including farms. 

King George III made him a justice of the peace in 1770, a job rather more important then than now and equivalent to being a county judge. While he considered himself a loyal subject of the king well into the 1770s, clashes both political and military between England and the colonies led to his becoming a leader of the revolutionaries.

John Jay signed his commission as a colonel in the Continental Army. He eventually took command of the Fifth Connecticut Regiment — whose members included many Ridgefielders. He saw action at the Battles of Germantown, Monmouth, and Stony Point and was among the troops who wintered at Valley Forge. He also fought under General Benedict Arnold at the Battle of Ridgefield — virtually in front of his homestead on Main Street.

During the war he frequently corresponded with General George Washington about official business. “Washington and Bradley were reported to have been friends,” Smithsonian historian Silvio Bedini reported. A family tradition maintained that Washington visited Bradley at his Ridgefield home, located in what is now Ballard Park. “Bradley descendants for many generations preserved a chair, a china bowl and a pitcher, which were said to have been used by Washington during his visit,” Bedini said.

Whether or not they were friends has not been proven, but “it’s is a matter of record that Bradley had the highest esteem for his commander-in-chief, and that Washington valued Bradley’s services in the war,” Bedini adds.

An indication of the respect Washington had for Bradley occurred during the war when Bradley fell ill in the Hudson Palisades of eastern Bergen County, New Jersey. His wife, Ruth Smith Bradley, traveled to his bedside and spent six weeks nursing him back to health. When it was time for her to return to Ridgefield, General Washington assigned three men to escort her on the journey home.

After the war President Washington named Bradley Connecticut’s first marshal,  which at that time made him the top federal law enforcement official in the state. President John Adams renewed the appointment during his administration. When he resigned the post in 1801, Bradley wrote President Thomas Jefferson that “the state of my health is such at present as prevents me from paying the necessary attention to the duties of the office.”

On the home front, Bradley held positions of importance. He was elected a selectman three times in 1767 to 1769, and served as a Ridgefield representative to the colonial Legislature from 1769 to 1776, when he entered the military. He resumed service as a state representative for all but one

year from 1780 until 1791, a critical period when the new “State of Connecticut” was being organized, and when its young government was dealing with heavy war debts.

In 1788, he was one of the delegates to sign Connecticut’s ratification of the U.S. Constitution. 

Another  sign of his local importance was shown in 1786 after it was discovered that Lt. Ebenezer Olmstead, who had also served under him in the Connecticut Fifth, had misappropriated a large amount of state tax money he had collected on behalf of the town. Olmstead was arrested and Bradley headed a committee to auction off the Olmstead’s Main Street homestead. However, when earned only 120 pounds, far less than what was owed to the state,  Col. Bradley was dispatched to Hartford to see if Ridgefield’s state tax debt could be forgiven. The state was insistent, however; the war had been costly and it badly needed money. The town wound up going into debt to pay off the missing taxes; Ridgefield was so poor and desperate that, in 1792, it voted to sell its set of “books containing the laws of ye United States.”

At a boy Samuel G. Goodrich — “Peter Parley” in many of the more than 100 books he produced in the 19th Century —  knew Bradley. The Colonel would be seen in the Congregational Church, where Goodrich’s father was minister, and he would sometimes visit the Goodrich home on High Ridge.

“He was the leading citizen of the place, in station, wealth, education, and power of intellect,” Goodrich recalled in 1856.  “He was a tall, gaunt, sallow man, a little bent at the period of my recollection….

“I perfectly recollect his appearance at church, and the impression he made upon me. He was bald, and wore a black silk cap, drawn down close over his eyes. These were like jet, not twinkling, but steady and intense, appearing very awful from the dark caverns in which they were set. I hardly dared to look at him, and if perchance his slow but searching gaze fell upon me, I started as if something had wounded me.”

Bradley’s gambrel-roofed house, probably somewhat similar in appearance to the Hauley House at Main and Branchville Road, stood in what is now Ballard Park.  

“This was of ample dimensions, and had a grave, antique air, the effect of which was enhanced by a row of wide-arching elms, lining the street. It stood on a slight elevation, and somewhat withdrawn from the road; the fence in front was high and close; the doors and windows were always shut, even in summer. 

“I know not why, but this place had a sort of awfulness about it: It seemed to have a spirit and a voice, which whispered to the passer-by, ‘Go thy way: This is the abode of one above and beyond thee!’ ”

While Bradley had a “cold” and “distant” air about him, Goodrich said, “He was, I believe, an honorable man. He was a member of the church; he was steady in his worship, and never missed the sacrament. He was a man of education, and held high offices.”

Bradley was “the most distinguished citizen of the place, and naturally enough imagined that such a position carried with it, not the shadow, but the substance of power. He seldom took an open part in the affairs of the town, but when he did, he felt that his word should be law. He deemed even a nod of his head to be imperative; people were bound to consult his very looks, and scenting his trail, should follow in his footsteps. 

“Like most proud men of despotic temper, he sometimes condescended to bring about his ends by puppets and wire pullers. Affecting to disdain all meddling, he really contrived openly or covertly to govern the church and the town. 

“When parties in politics arose, he was of course a federalist; though ostentatiously standing aloof from, the tarnish of caucuses, he still managed to fill most of the offices by his seen or unseen dictation.”

He was as conservative as they came. “Such a man,” Goodrich said, “could little appreciate the real spirit of democracy, now rising like a spring-tide over Connecticut. Believing in the ‘Good old way,’ he sincerely felt that innovation was synonymous with ruin. Thinking all virtue and all wisdom to be centered in the few, he believed all folly and mischief to be in the many. The passage of power from the former to the latter, he regarded with unaffected horror. The sanctity of the church, the stability of the law, the sacredness of home, life, and property, all seemed to him put at hazard if committed to the rabble, or what to him was equivalent, that dreaded thing—democracy.”

However, Goodrich observed, gradually “the leaven of democracy affected more and more the general mass. Federalism held itself haughtily aloof from the lower classes, while democracy tendered to them the gratifying signals of fraternity. Federalism really and sincerely distrusted the capacity of the people to govern themselves, except through the guidance and authority of the superior classes; democracy believed, or pretended to believe, in the people, and its works were according to its real or seeming faith.”

Though Goodrich’s descriptions seemed to convey a dislike of Bradley, he in fact appreciated

Bradley’s importance in the early years of the nation when strong leadership was needed. “However old-fashioned it may seem,” he said in the 1850s, “I still look back upon those stiff federalists, sitting in their pews like so many judges in Israel — rigid in their principles, hard, but honest, in their opinions — with a certain degree of respect. 

“Perhaps, too, they were not altogether wrong, though the battle has gone against them. If, at the outset of our government, which was launched at the very period when the French Revolution was agitating the world with its turbulent waves, the suffrage had been universal, probably we should have gone to destruction. Federalism, no doubt, locked the wheels of the car of state, and thus stayed and regulated its progress, till the steep was passed, and we were upon the safe and level plain. Theoretically wrong, according to present ideas, federalism was useful and necessary in its day. It is to be regretted that its spirit of patriotism is not imitated by all modern partisans.”

Bradley died in 1821, three years after Connecticut adopted its new Constitution that favored democratic principles over federalism; it extended the right to vote to virtually all white males, not just landowners, disestablished the Congregational Church as the official state church; strengthened the power of the people in running government, and established 21 protected individual rights for all. 

No longer were the “standing order” — the wealthy, male elites like Colonel Bradley — in control of the government.

The Battle of Ridgefield medal honors Benedict Arnold and David Wooster —
and Arnold's horse...

Gail Rogers Glissmann Fields: 

Benedict Arnold’s Artist

Though she was widely recognized for her scenic paintings of Cape Cod, artist Gail Rogers  Fields is perhaps best known in Ridgefield for a very different and rather controversial work of art: A medal honoring America’s most notorious traitor.

A native of New York City, Gail Rogers was born in 1940 and moved to Ridgefield as a child. She graduated from Ridgefield High School in 1958, studied at Parsons School of Design, and married Fred Glissmann of Ridgefield in 1960. 

Active in the local art scene, she was one of 14 people who founded the Ridgefield Guild of Artists in 1974. 

Three years later, Ridgefield was staging a huge celebration of the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Ridgefield, a skirmish at which Generals Benedict Arnold and David Wooster led patriot troops against the British who were passing through town after burning Danbury. During the fight, Arnold is said to have had his horse shot out from under him, near the entrance to what is today Casagmo.

As part of the celebration, the planners decided to issue silver and bronze medals, commemorating the battle. Gail Glissmann was chosen as the artist to design the medal. She depicted the heads of Generals Arnold and Wooster on one side, and Arnold on his mortally wounded horse on the other, under the heading: “Arnold Leads the Patriots.” 

The medal generated some criticism from those who couldn’t imagine Benedict Arnold as a hero, much less honored on a medal, but in general the coin was well-received in Ridgefield. The medal was restruck in 2002 for the 225th anniversary of the battle. Today, these medals are rare and sought-after collectibles.

After divorcing in 1980, Glissmann married Charles Fields in 1991, and moved to Cape Cod where she became inspired by the coastal scenery. According to her family, “In the mid 2000s she befriended the artist Anne Packard who encouraged her to explore her creativity which led her to constantly investigate new methods. She transformed from a strict style of watercolor to a more free form of oil painting with colors, light and texture. A result was a first place prize for her painting Field Flowers at the Cape Cod Art Association Members Show in June of 2007.”

Fields’ work can be found in public and private collections in the U.S. as well as in Belgium and Russia, and in the permanent collection of the United States Coast Guard in Washington, D.C. She died in 2016 at the age of 75. 

Capt. David Olmstead: 

The Tale of the Red Petticoat

Capt. David Olmsted was a leading citizen in the last third of the 18th Century. He was a Revolutionary War hero, longtime state representative, and friend of the makers and shakers of Ridgefield. His father was descended from the founders of the town and his mother was the daughter of Col. David Goodrich, who fought in Queen Anne’s War. His wife was the daughter of the town’s second minister, whose nephew helped write the United States Constitution.

But if David Olmsted is remembered at all today, it for a few angry words he allegedly shouted at his wife after the Battle of Ridgefield.

David Olmsted was born in Ridgefield in 1748, a son of Deacon Nathan Olmsted and Millicent Goodrich Olmsted. He grew up in Ridgefield and, in 1769, married Abigail Ingersoll, daughter of the Rev. Jonathan Ingersoll, minister of the First Congregational Church and a cousin of Jared Ingersoll, who worked on and signed the Constitution. He was 20, she 18. The couple had eight children.

Unlike his father-in-law, who opposed the Continental Congress in 1775, David Olmsted was all for the cause of the revolution. As a captain in the continental army, he led companies of volunteers at West Point, in the defense of Greenwich, and at the alarm at Fairfield. But he is most important locally for his participation in the Battle of Ridgefield on April 27, 1777.

In his book, “Farmers Against the Crown,” Keith Jones describes major players at the battle scene and observes: “Nearby was Captain David Olmsted, whose little one-and-a-half story ‘saltbox’

home still stands in the south end of town along (what else) Olmstead Lane. Olmsted...was one of the first Ridgefield men to commit to the Patriot cause, having led a company to Washington’s army in early ’76. The commander-in-chief must have made a forceful impression on the 27-year-old captain, for on this very day one year earlier (April 27, 1776), he named a newly born son George Washington Olmsted! In addition to defending his home and four young children, Captain Olmstead had scores to settle with the Redcoats — cousin Roger fell in action in 1775, and cousin David was killed Jan. 4, 1777, in Washington’s victory at Princeton.”

But it was after the battle and presumably after the British left town when the story of the Red Petticoat finds its origin.

Smithsonian historian Silvio A. Bedini was the first person to recount the tale in print. In his 1958 history of the town, “Ridgefield in Review,” Bedini wrote: “The Red Petticoat story exists in

several versions in the local lore of the Battle of Ridgefield, which has been handed down by word of mouth from generation to generation. One account told of Mrs. David Olmsted, who lived in either the original Olmsted homestead … on Olmsted Lane, or  in the Olmsted house [just to the south]. Captain David Olmsted, the owner of the homestead, fought at the barricade and took shelter in the woods when the British advanced through the town.

“His wife remained at home with her children, anxiously awaiting word of her husband and of the progress of the conflict. When the detachment of British troops came marching along Olmstead Lane to the camp site [on Wilton Road West], she feared that her home would suffer the fate of others that had been burned by the British during the day. Looking about for some means of saving it, she thought of posing as a Tory. Having no other suitable symbol at her disposal, she removed her red petticoat and waved it from the house as the British soldiers came marching off West Lane Road and along the lane. The British, thinking it was a Tory house, left it unharmed.

“When her husband arrived home at last during the night or on the following day, Mrs. Olmsted proudly recounted the incident, pleased with her presence of mind. Not so her husband. Livid with rage, Captain Olmstead thundered: ‘Woman, if I had seen you, I would have shot you dead!’ Far better it would have been to have this home destroyed than to have his wife suspected of being a Tory.”

 Could the story be true and could Olmsted have really uttered such strong and offensive words to his wife? Possibly; he would probably have been exhausted and perhaps discouraged from the encounter with the British, and may have blurted out his frustration in the unkind words. If he said it, did he mean it? Probably not. It is quite likely that Abigail Olmsted was a strong, highly intelligent woman who would not have put up with a husband who said he would kill her. Since she and David went on to have four more children and remained together for the rest of her life, it seems likely that he would have apologized for his outburst — if it happened at all.

Adding some doubt to the veracity of the whole story is the fact that his homestead did, in fact,  suffer fairly substantial damage from the British. Property owners who suffered losses due to enemy action in the Revolution could seek compensation from the Connecticut government, and many did. According to research done by Keith Jones, “a reimbursement request exceeding £54 appears under Captain Olmsted’s name on the summary of damages submitted by town selectmen to the General Assembly.” £54 was a good deal of money back then.

Both town historian Dick Venus and battle historian Keith Jones said the house standing today at 91 Olmstead Lane is likely the Captain David Olmsted place. It was so marked with a sign during the town’s celebration of the Bicentennial in 1776, and Silvio Bedini said he thought of the three old Olmsted houses on the road, #91 was most likely the one owned by David. 

While the legend has no basis in historical records, it did inspire a 1969 book for youngsters. In “The Red Petticoat,” by Joan Palmer of South Salem, a girl named Eliza Bouton waves a red petticoat out the window while her father and grandfather are off fighting the British on Main Street. However, she did so not to save her house, but to protect a young, wounded patriot, carrying a desperately needed message for General Washington, who had collapsed on her home’s doorstep. Needless to say, no one talked of shooting her for her petticoat trickery.

Toward the end of the war, Olmsted was promoted to lieutenant colonel — but local history and perhaps his local contemporaries continued to call him Captain Olmsted. After the war he became active in the government, serving as a member of the Board of Selectmen and holding other offices. From 1781 until 1798, he was often elected one of Ridgefield’s representatives to the state Legislature — helping Connecticut and Ridgefield to recovery during the post-war years. He often served in the legislature alongside Col. Philip Burr Bradley or Lt. Joshua King, two veterans of the Revolution and leading Ridgefield citizens.

However, around the beginning of the 19th Century, Olmsted did what many New England

farmers were doing: He went west. Good land was becoming scarce here and western New York promised new possibilities. He and Abigail and their family moved to Onondaga County, N.Y., , becoming one of the first settlers of the area around Jamesville, now part of the town of DeWitt. There, he was known as Colonel Olmsted. By 1806, he owned a tavern, which a local history reported was “popularly considered the best hostelry west of Utica.” (This was a community that knew about spirits; Jamesville area was settled between 1790 and 1800 and, in 1798, one Matthew Dumfrie was already building a distillery, malt house and brewery there, producing the first beer and whiskey made in Onondaga County — a territory that includes Syracuse.)

Abigail died in 1805. Olmsted subsequently married Abiah Keeler, a native of Norwalk who, like others, had headed west. They had no children.

Olmsted died in 1815 at the age of 66. He is buried alongside Abigail in the Walnut Grove Cemetery, Jamesville, Onondaga County, N.Y.

George M. Olcott: 

The Man from Casagmo

George Olcott left Ridgefield with a strange legacy: A stone wall, a barn and a name, plus the destruction of a treasured historical building.

Olcott came to Ridgefield in 1892, buying the ancient Stebbins farm at the north end of Main Street. The house, built in 1727, had stood in the midst of the Battle of Ridgefield in April 1777 and served as a hospital for the wounded. “For many generations tourists came to see the bullet-scarred walls and the bloodstained floors of the west room, which were reminders of the conflict which took place around it,” historian Silvio Bedini wrote.

However, Olcott tore down the house, saving only the front door, and replaced it with an Italianate mansion. He called the place Casagmo, a word created from his initials, GMO, and “casa,” the Italian word for house.

And 75 years later,  a wrecking ball laid waste to Casagmo.

George Mann Olcott was born in 1835, in Brooklyn, N.Y. His father, Charles Mann Olcott, was a

founder of Olcott & McKesson, a drug firm that, after Charles’s death, became McKesson & Robbins, a name that lasted into the 1960s for a company that is today the McKesson Corporation, a pharmaceutical distributor and health care systems conglomerate that had $122 billion in sales in 2012.

    Young George attended Columbia College Grammar School. “However,” wrote his daughter, Mary, in a family history, “a youthful delight in caricature terminated his school life, for the headmaster … failed to appreciate a portrait of himself done by the young Mr. Olcott, and a caning was ordered. The boy’s father gave him his choice, either to undergo the caning or leave school. George M. Olcott left school and entered the world of business, where he achieved notable success.”

At age 16,  Olcott became a clerk in a wholesale drug firm. By 21, he was a partner in a drug and chemical importing company, soon called Dodge and Olcott, of which he eventually became president in 1904. His products were not all pharmaceuticals; a big portion of his business was the ingredients in perfumes and food flavorings. He retired when he went blind at the age of 78.

Dodge and Olcott continued in business until 1952, when the Fritzsche Brothers purchased the firm, eventually calling it Fritzche, Dodge & Olcott. In 1980, it was acquired by chemical giant, BASF, which 10 years later, sold it to Givaudan, an international flavor and fragrance company.

Olcott became involved in the local social and business life of the town, serving as president of the library association. He was a founder and second president of the First National Bank and Trust Company of Ridgefield (which through many mergers is now Wells Fargo). He also maintained a residence in New York City, and was on the boards of a half dozen banks and other institutions there.

A popular tale involving Olcott was related by Ridgefield Press publisher Karl Nash in 1975. “On

one occasion Mr. Olcott tangled with Samuel S. Denton, the coal and wood merchant who later owned much Ridgefield real estate [and is profiled in Who Was Who]. Denton had acquired the Paddock house, which stood just south of St. Stephen’s Church, and he started moving it up Main Street to a planned site north of Mr. Olcott’s property.

“When the house wouldn’t go between Mr. Olcott’s stone wall and the high bank on the other side of the street (now the Coffey homestead), Denton asked Olcott’s permission to remove a section of his wall temporarily to let the house pass through. Olcott refused.

“The house sat in the middle of the street for a time while Denton scratched his head for a solution. At length he decided to saw the house in half and move it in two sections instead of one. Mr. Olcott watched in amusement.”

Denton never put the two pieces together. Half of the Paddock house still stands, just north of the Casagmo northern boundary on Main Street. The other half, which was moved down around the corner onto Danbury Road, was later torn down to make way for a newer house, just opposite

Girolametti Court. And Olcott’s wall still stands today along the Main Street border of the Casagmo condominium complex.

After George Olcott died in 1917, daughter Mary lived at Casagmo until her death in 1962 at the age of 97 — a poet and genealogist, she was rather a grand dame in Ridgefield society.
According to the newsletter published for Casagmo residents, George Olcott was originally buried in Ridgefield, but his remains were eventually moved to a Brooklyn cemetery after Mary Olcott had a disagreement with the owners of the Ridgefield cemetery in which he was interred. 

As for the door to the historic Stebbins house, George Olcott had stuck it in the cellar of the

Casagmo mansion, where it sat for years. After the death of Mary Olcott, Ridgefield native

Robert A. Lee got to worrying about the future of the relic. He knew it was in the cellar and he doubted that Miss Olcott’s heirs would care about it. So Lee loaded it onto his car one day and took it to his family’s 18th Century homestead in Farmingville. There the door remained for several years until Lee finally decided to give it to the Ridgefield Library and Historical Association. Around 40 years ago, as it was moving its focus away from the historical side of its original mission, the library donated the door to the Keeler Tavern Museum, where it is today — on display for all to see, especially appropriate as the town is about to mark the 240th anniversary of the Battle of Ridgefield.

Mary Olcott’s heirs sold the property in the mid-1960s to Jerry Tuccio, the homebuilder, who

received the rezoning for the town’s first large-scale apartment development. However, Tuccio decided to stick to single-family homebuilding, and sold the rezoned land to David L. Paul, a New York attorney and apartment builder, who razed the mansion in 1968 after years of neglect and vandalism had taken their toll. Paul built 320 apartments. While virtually all evidence of the Casagmo estate was destroyed, Paul retained one major feature: The barn. He and his architect, Lee Harris Pomeroy, restored and remodeled the building into Casagmo’s community center.

Paul later also built Fox Hill on Danbury Road. There, at the recommendation of the Planning and Zoning Commission, he included condominiums. When these turned out to be quite popular, he converted Casagmo’s rentals to condos.

Many Casagmo roads bear names connected with the families that lived there, such as Stebbins Close, Olcott Way, Quincy Close, and Lawson Lane — the last two ancestors of the Olcotts.