William H. Casey: 

Civic Businessman

For half of the 20th Century, Bill Casey was a leader in  the business, civic and social life of  Ridgefield. A soft-spoken man who often wore a smile, Casey founded a company that still bears his name and is still led by his family 70 years later.

Born in Manhattan in 1917,  William Henry Casey grew up on Long Island and graduated from Lehigh University, where he was president of the Class of 1939. The same year he graduated, he married Valerie Dyer, a New York City native who was raised in Montreal, Canada. They were wed at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Casey worked for several oil companies before deciding to start his own business. In 1947 they moved to Ridgefield, living at first in the Bluebird Apartments on West Lane.

He began a fuel oil business in 1949  (just three years after native sons Frank and Fred Montanari started the town’s other still-thriving family-owned oil business, Montanari Fuel).

Four years later the Casey family moved to an 18th Century Main Street homestead that has

served as their house but also their office for nearly 70 years. Over those years Casey Fuel has expanded with the acquisition of the heating oil businesses of Ridgefield Supply, Outpost Supply and Venus Oil, added a propane service, and rebranded itself as Casey Energy. The company was led by his son, Michael, starting in 1976, and today is in the hands of grandson, Shane.

 In 1961, Bill Casey opened a real estate end of the business and was long active in the realty community, serving in 1967 as president of the Ridgefield Board of Realtors. In the early 1960s,  Casey also owned an Esso gasoline station and paint store on Danbury Road, now the quarters of Marty Motors.

 Casey was always active in the civic and community life of Ridgefield. A longtime member of the Board of Finance, he also served on the Board of Tax Review.  In 1971 he tossed his hat in the ring for the job of first selectman, but then bowed out in favor of Joseph J. McLinden, who won the job.

He was chairman of the Republican Town Committee, and worked on dozens of campaigns over the years. He served as a director of the Community Center and a trustee of Danbury Hospital. 

And he held the distinction of being the longest, continuous, still-resident member of the Ridgefield Lions Club. Casey joined the club on Nov. 1, 1948, and had served as the club president a few years later. All presidents had a special project to accomplish and his in the early 1950s was something that seemed more out of the inner city than suburbs: Building showers on the front lawn of the Community Center for the town’s children. 

“This was before air conditioning and since there was no place to swim then, we put in 10 showers,” he told a 1996 gathering honoring his 50th anniversary with the Lions. “The kids were there on all the hot summer days.” 

Soon after he and other Lions helped Francis D. Martin create Great Pond’s swimming beach — today’s Martin Park.

An avid golfer, Casey was one of the longest-term members of the Silver Spring Country

Club. There, he was a founder of the infamous Poison Ivy League, a group of local golfers that included such prominent businessmen and attorneys as Judge John E. Dowling, Alex Santini, Judge Joseph H. Donnelly, Edward Hyde, and Judge Reed F. Shields.

He was also interested in his family’s Irish roots — both his and Valerie’s ancestors came from Ireland. In 1997, 18 members of the Casey clan — representing four generations —  traveled together to Ireland for a 10-day trip that included visits to many ancestral sites of both the Casey and Dyer families.  

Bill Casey died in 2002 at his home on Main Street at the age of 84. He left behind one of a handful of Ridgefield businesses that have involved multiple generations of a family and that survive and thrive today. Others besides Montanari Fuel include Ridgefield Supply, Ridgefield Hardware, Neumann Real Estate, and Ancona’s Wines and Liquors.

Seth Low Pierrepont

Seth Low Pierrepont: 

The Man of the Park and Pond 

Seth Low Pierrepont gave much to Ridgefield during his lifetime and even more in his death. One of the town’s wealthiest citizens, he was also among the most generous, and the 314-acre Pierrepont State Park in north-central Ridgefield, part of his large estate, was his bequest. 

Mr. Pierrepont was born in 1884 in Brooklyn, N.Y., a nephew of New York mayor and Columbia University president Seth Low.  He was a Columbia graduate who was in the diplomatic service in Portugal, Italy, France, and Chile before becoming chief of the Latin-American Division of the U.S. State Department from 1911 until 1913. 

Mr. Pierrepont was on domestic duty in the Navy during World War I and, in 1921 and 1922, was assistant secretary general of the Washington Conference on Arms Limitations.

He retired from the diplomatic service in 1913 and came to Ridgefield that year, building Twixthills, his home on Barlow Mountain. He acquired various parcels of farmland, sometimes complete with houses which he provided for his employees, and assembled an estate of more than 600 acres. The property was so extensive that he hired his own private “police force” to patrol it. The house still stands off Old Barlow Mountain Road.

He quickly became active in local government, and represented Ridgefield in the General Assembly from 1921 to 1927, and there, helped create the Connecticut State Police Department. During World War II, he was chairman of the Connecticut Salvage Committee, which collected scrap for the war effort. 

In town, Mr. Pierrepont served on the Board of Finance from its establishment in 1921 until 1951, was a president of the Ridgefield Library, chaired the Ridgefield celebration of the Connecticut Tercentenary in 1936, was first president of the Silver Spring Country Club, and was a leader at St. Stephen’s Church.

It was at the church in 1915 that he figured in the resolution of a scandal: Cyrus A. Cornen Jr., the church’s treasurer, had pocketed some $13,000 — equivalent of more than $300,000 today — that was slated to pay contractors on the new St. Stephen’s Church. Pierrepont took over as parish treasurer and raised the money, probably much of his own, to cover the loss.  

Mr. Pierrepont also built what is today called Pierrepont Pond or Pierrepont Lake. He said in a letter to The Ridgefield Press in April 1938 that the lake was created from “an old impassable swamp” in which woods were cleared in 1936 and 1937 by “quite a number of men.” A. Bacchiochi and Sons built the dam, and it took about six months for the pond to fill up. Water went over the spillway for the first time on March 30, 1938.

“We are calling it Lake Naraneka after one of the Indian chiefs who signed the deed to the town of Ridgefield,” Pierrepont said. He never liked its being called Pierrepont.

In 1955, he reported that some years earlier, when he was having a small pond built near his home up on Old Barlow Mountain Road, the gardener came across a spoon-shaped piece of cedar, bearing marks of all the Indian signers of the deed, and probably used by them to drink spring water. This may have been Pierrepont’s inspiration for the name.

Mr. Pierrepont died in 1956 and is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.  He had hoped what’s now Twixt Hills subdivision would be added to the park after his death, but his widow, Nathalie Chauncey Pierrepont, sold the land to developer Jerry Tuccio instead. 

Joseph Dunworth: 

Theater and the Elderly 

A half century ago, Joe Dunworth was as well known in Ridgefield as any non-native was. Today, while few people in town may recognize his name, many benefit from two of the causes he championed: local theater and tax relief for the elderly.

Dunworth, who served in several capacities as a volunteer town official, was among the first to propose that Ridgefield help its elderly by providing a flat-out tax cut. His idea was eventually adopted and has provided millions of dollars in tax breaks for over-65 Ridgefielders.

He was also among the three people who founded what is today the Ridgefield Theater Barn, the first successful theatrical group in town.

Joseph Michael Dunworth, born in 1923 in New York City, had an early interest in the sea.

He was valedictorian of his class at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, N.Y., and soon joined the U.S. Navy, serving at the end of World War II and during the Korean War. He remained in the Naval Reserve until 1967, retiring  as a commander. 

After working for McGraw-Hill and the Burnham Corporation, and earning a master’s degree at Columbia, he formed his own company in 1975. Panatech Engineering sold furnaces and other home heating equipment for such companies as Thermo Pride Industries.

He and his wife, Flo, moved to Ridgefield in 1956, buying a West Lane home that had once housed workers on Frederic E. Lewis’s estate, Upagenstit.

By the early 1960s he began to become active in the community. He eventually served on the Big Three town agencies:  the Board of Education for six years — including time as chairman, the Board of Selectmen for four years, and another eight years on the Board of Finance. He ran unsuccessfully for first selectman in 1969. 

For all those offices, Dunworth was a Democrat, but frequently he openly supported Republicans, finally switching parties in 1989. “My enrollment in the Republican Party approximately one year ago was about 40 years overdue,” Dunworth said in 1990 as he was running for state representative (he lost to Democrat Barbara Ireland, the incumbent).

In 1965, Dunworth, along with Evelyn Foley and Patricia DiMuzio,  formed the Ridgefield Workshop for the Performing Arts for not only staging shows but also “fostering and developing creative talent.”  Its first production, one-act performances of “Sorry, Wrong Number,” and the second act from “Auntie Mame,” took place that November. He went on to direct many subsequent

productions including “Bye-Bye Birdie,” “South Pacific,” and “The Pajama Game.” The  workshop grew into today’s Ridgefield Theater Barn, which  has its own venue on Halpin Lane.

He was also active at St. Mary’s Parish, where he was a director of the Catholic Youth Organization.

After the 1990 election, he retired from public life. He moved  to Danbury in 2002 and died there in 2011 at the age of 88.

In 1972, when he was a selectman, Dunworth became perhaps the first local official to actively fight for significant tax relief for the elderly. In July that year he proposed and actually wrote the draft of a proposed state bill that would allow towns to provide tax breaks to homeowners 65 or older.

“Many elderly citizens are finding it difficult and, in some cases impossible, to pay their real property taxes,” he said.  “Many of the elderly are living lives of quiet desperation. Many of them have lived, worked and paid taxes to the community for 40 to 50 years.

“I believe that towns should honor their golden-age citizens, most of whom have ceased benefiting from their tax dollars, and provide them with certain real property tax concessions, thereby endowing them with some dignity and security in their old age.”

Under Dunworth’s proposal, a town could cut a senior citizen’s tax bill in half at age 70 and eliminate property taxes altogether at 75.

That plan did not go over well, probably because of the large amount of money that under-70 taxpayers might have to make up. But a couple years later, Ridgefield adopted Dunworth’s basic concept, creating a set tax cut for those 65 or older.

When the full program began in 1977, senior taxpayers got a $450 annual reduction in their taxes. That $450 was roughly equivalent to $1,850 in today’s dollars. While the dollar amount of the tax break has gradually increased over the years to $1,048 today, thanks to inflation that’s effectively $800 less than what the town granted in 1977.

Joe Dunworth would not be pleased.