A Lost Landmark

The black-and-white picture here is a rather remarkable snapshot in several ways: The crowd, the trees and the beauty of a long-lost landmark.

First off, for newer-comers, the scene is Main Street looking west from about where folks sit in front of Tazza and drink coffee. That big, handsome building is the Jesse Lee Methodist Church on the corner of Main and Catoonah Streets. The accompanying color photograph shows what the same corner looks like today.

The occasion is the September 1958 parade that marked the end of Ridgefield’s six-month celebration of its 250th anniversary. That tent at the right with a cross on it was part of a float, possibly done by St. Mary’s School pupils. (Many other pictures of 250th anniversary parades have been posted here.)

Trees dominate the picture, especially that Norway spruce at the right. It was one of two spruces that stood tall in front of the rectory, hidden at right by the boughs. The other, just a bit north, snapped in half when Ridgefield’s village was hit by a twister on July 13, 1950.

The tree at the left would have been near the front of Bedient’s or now, Books on the Common.

Then there’s the church. This picture does a remarkably good job of capturing the beauty of the facade of the building. If you enlarge the picture and look closely, you can see many find details like dentilated moldings, gable carvings, and nice use of clapboards and facings. And, of course, there are the two handsome towers.

Why, many have asked, would a building as beautiful as this, in the very center of the town, be torn down, as happened in 1964?

Several factors contributed to the church’s demise. To the growing congregation of Methodists, the church’s serious lack of parking space became a real problem. The building could not be expanded to handle the increasing needs of the membership. Then, too, the building was old — the earliest parts dated from 1841 — and was probably expensive to maintain.

So the congregation moved a couple blocks south to its present site, building a much bigger church, with support facilities and plenty of parking spaces. 

Couldn’t the building still have been preserved? Probably, but in the early 1960s, Ridgefielders were only beginning to develop a strong preservationist movement that resulted in establishment of historic districts and a commission to oversee them, as well as organizations like the Keeler Tavern Preservation Society, the Ridgefield Preservation Trust, and the Architectural Advisory Committee. 

The church might have been nice for a new, smaller religious congregation, but none was available or wanted the building. It could have been “repurposed” but apparently its age and the fact that it looked so much like a church dissuaded potential buyers. (However, the rectory next door — which looks like a Victorian house — was repurposed, and today serves as offices and shops.) 

If the same opportunity were to occur today, the church would probably have been preserved,

perhaps for use as shops or offices, or maybe even as a historical museum.

The church was replaced by a two-story, flat-roofed building of stores and offices that was aimed at looking colonial, with brick to match the town hall and the Ernest Scott buildings on two other nearby corners, and the firehouse and telephone building up Catoonah Street.

Incidentally, in 1964, the historic Philip Burr Bradley/Biglow/Ballard house farther north on Main Street was also torn down. That was not the choice of the townspeople, however; part of Elizabeth Ballard’s bequest of the land to the town included that the house be razed so the land could become Ballard Park. She also did not want the house to be a burden on a community that had only recently set up the Community Center in the Lounsbury mansion — Ridgefield already owned one big old mansion on Main Street and didn’t need another, she felt.

The Catoonah Street Triangle

As work continues on remodeling the front terrace of the Town Hall, we thought it would be fun to see what the view from there more than a century earlier looked like.

This picture, probably taken around 1900 and looking northwesterly, shows the intersection of Main Street (foreground) and Catoonah Street, running off to the left. The Town Hall would be at the  right, beyond the lens of the camera.

The remarkable feature of this picture is its clear depiction of a triangle that had existed at Main and Catoonah before the age of the automobile. Soon after this shot was taken, a watering trough was erected in the triangle and thereafter, the triangle began to disappear. At some point it was completely removed, along with the trough, apparently to deal with increasing traffic from the proliferating horseless carriages. 

Often in the case of main highways, triangles don’t fit in with officialdom’s idea of an ideal intersection. Main Street once had at least two other triangles that have vanished: At the intersection of Gilbert Street, and at the intersection of Branchville Road (Route 102). It is quite likely that the junction of Main Street and Danbury Road was also once a triangle.

The only Main Street triangles left are at West Lane and at the very southern end, where the road splits into Wilton Roads East and West. And the state has repeatedly tried to do away with the triangle holding the Cass Gilbert Fountain at West Lane.

This picture is from the cover of a 1924 brochure for a celebration of the 100th anniversary of the first Jesse Lee Methodist Episcopal Church building in Ridgefield. That structure is not the one shown here, but a smaller building that stood at the intersection of North Salem Road and North Street — now the Lounsbury section of the Ridgefield Cemetery (No images of that first church exist.

The Methodist church shown here was built in 1841 and expanded somewhat over the years. In the mid-20th Century, it grew too small and the parking too limited so the congregation decided to build a new church a quarter mile to the south. This building was razed in 1964 and replaced by the brick stores-and-offices building there today.

The rectory, however, was not torn down. Visible just beyond the church, but half hidden by the trees, it became a three-story collection of shops and offices at 409 Main Street that is still used today (long called the Hackert and Monti building for post-Methodist owners).

D. Smith Sholes: 

A Man of Many Shirts

Catoonah Street today is a microcosm of Ridgefield, with everything from stores and offices to condos and large, single-family homes, not to mention a church, a post office, a cleaners, a restaurant, and a firehouse. But it once also had a shirt factory.

Yes, Ridgefield in the 19th Century was a center, albeit small, of the shirt-making industry, thanks to a man named D. Smith Sholes and his partner, Edward H. Smith, both leading citizens of the town.

David Smith Sholes was born in Ridgefield in 1830, son of a shoemaker who’d moved here from Vermont. He attended local schools including a private school taught by the Rev. David H. Short on Main Street, where Sholes acquired a love of reading. He later helped found a circulating library in Ridgefield that grew into today’s Ridgefield Library, of which he was once treasurer.

When he was 15, he became a clerk at Henry Smith’s store on Main Street but after a few years went to Bridgeport to learn bookkeeping. 

He returned to Ridgefield and, in partnership with Smith, operated the Ridgefield Shirt Factory, which had been founded in the 1840s by George Hunt. The factory was at first located in the Big Shop, a large building that stood where the First Congregational Church is now. (Moved around 1888 to the center of town, the Big Shop is now the home of Terra Sole and Luc’s restaurants, and other businesses off the Bailey Avenue parking lot.) The shirt factory later moved across the street to a building on what’s now an empty lot, and then to Catoonah Street on the site of the current Ridgefield Fire Department headquarters. 

“Colored shirts were a specialty of the factory, which employed as many as sixty persons at one time,” said historian Silvio Bedini. “The chief market was New York City.”

However, it appears many more Ridgefield Shirt “employees,”  mostly women but including a few men, worked from their homes. Sholes and Smith would provide them with packages of  shirt “components” and the women would sew them together in their spare time. The final product was prepared for sale and packaged at the factory. The New York Times reported in 1860 that there were 1,100 home-working women in the area, sewing for Ridgefield Shirt.

Sholes continued in the shirt-making business until around 1893 when, probably faced with competition from large-scale, mechanized clothing operations in New York City, the factory was closed.

In 1886 Sholes was elected treasurer of the Ridgefield Savings Bank, now Fairfield County Bank; he had been one of its incorporators when it was founded back in 1871. He eventually became the bank’s president.

“It was in the discharge of the duties of this important position that he achieved the most marked success of his life,” said The Ridgefield Press in Sholes’s 1907 obituary. “It was under his administration that the institution has grown from a small beginning to be the depository of nearly a million dollars of the savings of our frugal people, and its affairs have been so wisely managed by him that no person has ever yet lost a dollar by his imprudence or mismanagement.”

This profuse praise appeared in a newspaper whose company president was  D. Smith Sholes.

Possible pro-Sholes press prejudice aside, the man was clearly a respected and popular personality in town. An active Democrat, he was appointed Ridgefield’s postmaster in 1886 by President Grover Cleveland, also a Democrat. When Cleveland left office, so did Sholes, but when Cleveland returned for a second term, so did Sholes.

He was a town assessor, a registrar of voters for 17 years, the probate judge in 1870, a member of the Democratic State Central Committee for two terms,  treasurer of the Ridgefield Water Supply Company, and a clerk of St. Stephen’s Church for a quarter of a century. He also helped found the First National Bank of Ridgefield in 1900 and was its first cashier.

Seven years after he died in 1907, he was remembered on Old Home Day, July 4, 1914, when he was saluted as one of Ridgefield’s “sturdy citizens, whose place it seems impossible to fill …Many can testify to his kindness in hours of trouble.”

Harry Thomas: 

The Village Smithy

Harry Thomas was a taste of the past in modern Ridgefield. As late as 1970, he could be seen at the forge behind his Catoonah Street house, fashioning things of iron. For Mr. Thomas was among the last of a profession that was once common and essential to any community: the blacksmith. 

Harry Marvin Thomas was born here in 1884, a fifth generation descendant of Benjamin Stebbins, who built a house on Main Street in 1714 that became a hospital in the Battle of Ridgefield and stood where Casagmo is now. 

At 16, he began his apprenticeship, and became probably the town’s leading blacksmith through the end of the age of the horse. In a pinch he could shoe and harness a horse in seven minutes. 

Harry Thomas was a man of strength, not just in his arms, but legs – he thought nothing of walking to Norwalk or to Brewster and back, and did it often. 

In 1927, he built the house still standing between the firehouse and post office, and his blacksmith shop out back, also still standing. 

When the automobile took over from the horse, he went to work for Gilbert and Bennett in Georgetown, but on retirement, fired up the forge again for fun and for special projects that still required a blacksmith’s skill. 

In a 1962 interview,  Thomas bemoaned the fact so many of his old friends had died. “They understood me, they knew what I meant,” he said. “People don’t understand each other now. They’re always fighting.”

Thomas died in 1973 at the age of 88.

William J. Cumming: 

First to Go, First to Die

Bill Cumming was the first man from Ridgefield to enlist in World War I and was the first in the conflict. An ambulance driver, he was “a soldier to the end,” said the headline in the Feb. 5, 1918 Ridgefield Press.

Son of James and Margaret Cumming, William James Cumming was born in 1895 in South Salem, N.Y. His parents, natives of Scotland,  moved between 1906 and 1909  to Ridgefield where his father worked as a gardener on local estates.  

Cumming enlisted on April 3, 1917 — three days before Congress declared war on Germany. He died in less than a year, on Jan. 5, 1918, in a hospital in Vitel, France, where he was being treated for “a serious illness” (which may have been the result of an influenza virus that was soon to cause one of the deadliest pandemics in history).

“I do not think we have a member that was thought more of than Private William J. Cumming and a better boy could not be found,” Private W.E. West wrote to the Rev. John M. Deyo, Cumming’s pastor here. “He was the first one in our company to be taken from us…Even in the end he did not give up and died a brave American.” 

In his sermon at the funeral in the Methodist church, Mr. Deyo used St. George and the Dragon as his theme. “For over three years,” he said, “the foulest dragon of all time has gone forth in his slime and devoured the flower of youth on a gigantic scale. Private Cumming answered the call and went forth to give battle to the foul dragon. Private Cumming has now answered his final summons. Though no longer with us, he conveys to us a message: ‘Carry on.’”

Cumming had been a private first class in the 102nd Ambulance Company and is buried in the American Cemetery, Romagne sur Montfacon, Meuse, France. There is also a monument to him

in the family plot at Fairlawn Cemetery on North Salem Road. “Died in the line of duty,” it says.

The Cumming family lived on Catoonah Street in a green-shingled, 19th-Century house just west of today’s post office.  James and Margaret, Bill’s parents, were known as Jim and Ma. Their son, Henry, also served in World War I, and they themselves were very active on the home front, even after the death of Bill. Jim Cumming was Ridgefield director of  the efforts of local farmers to grow food for the war effort. He also served on the school board.

Ma Cumming “was some kind of a little dynamo,” said town historian Dick Venus. “She was a detachment commandant in the local Red Cross and she and her group performed yeoman’s service. When the local Home Guard was organized, Ma presented the platoon with a flag that she had made.”

After the war, she became the first president of the American Legion Auxiliary and spent countless hours selling poppies to benefit the veterans, Venus said.

“One of our fondest memories is of Jim and Ma, sitting side by side, in their rocking chairs, on the front porch, after their duties for the day were completed,” Venus said. “It kind of gave you the feeling that everything would be all right.”

The Cumming homestead became vacant in 2003 after the death of their daughter in law, Helen Cumming, widow of their son, Donald. In December 2016, the house was torn down and today is an empty lot.

Joseph Hartmann: 

Artist and Historian on Glass

Joseph Hartmann may have thought himself an artist, but it’s doubtful he considered himself a historian. Yet, the photographs he took of Ridgefield and its people from the 1890s through the 1930s

are a graphic history of the town in one of its most fascinating periods.

Pictures of rich and poor, young and old, luxurious mansions and dusty workshops, are included in the 6,000 negatives he left behind. Almost all the negatives are on glass plates — he worked most of his years with a large-sized camera in the days before “film” was available. For each photograph, a glass negative had to be inserted into the back of the camera. He stuck with glass well into the 1920s, switching to a plastic negative late in his career.

A son of a physician, Josef Hartmann was born in 1867 in a German village not far from Munich, a great artistic center. He studied photography in Italy and was accomplished at his art when he came to the United States with his father in 1888.

Around 1890, he set up a studio in the top floor of the Bedient building at Main Street and Bailey Avenue — it burned down in the great fire of 1895, but he moved into its replacement soon afterwards. Over the years that followed, he took thousands of portraits in that studio. He also photographed weddings, civic and social groups, babies, musicians, insides and outsides of houses, cars, gardens, pets, and even bodies in caskets. 

“His work, characterized by the use of natural light and perfection of pose and detail, clearly

shows the influence of the Munich painting school,” said a 1981 article in Antiques Weekly.

His later work was influenced by Frederic Remington and Frederick Dielman, noted American artists who lived in Ridgefield and were friends of Hartmann. 

“His photographs … are marked by richness and depth of tone, marvelous resolution and perfection of composition,” the article said. 

In 1898, Hartmann married Amalie L. Diedrich (1867-1943), who had been working as a German teacher for the children of the Rufus King family on King Lane. They had three children,

including Elsa Hartmann, who became a longtime teacher at Ridgefield High School.

Hartmann was a longtime member of the choir of St. Stephen’s Church. 

Hartmann, who lived  on Catoonah Street just west of the post office, retired in 1938 due to

declining health, and died in 1942.

For many years after his death, his glass negatives sat in boxes in an unheated barn next to the Hartmann homestead on Catoonah Street, two doors west of the post office (next to the Cumming house that’s about to be torn down). 

In 1950, daughter Elsa donated the collection to The Ridgefield Press, hoping that they would

be cared for and that their images would be published in the newspaper.

“I personally carried the boxes of plates out of the barn cellar and took them by car, first to a garage at my house, then to The Press office,” recalled Press publisher Karl S. Nash in 1990. He did

not point out that the boxes were exceedingly heavy since they were packed tightly with big, glass plates.

For more than a decade, the boxes of negatives remained stored in the newsroom of The Press. Many were turned into prints that appeared in The Ridgefield Press, especially in the long-running

“Old Ridgefield” series that attempted to get many identified. The Press was assisted by The Hartmann Society, formed in the early 1980s by Barbara Wardenburg and others to both preserve and identify the pictures.

The Press in 1990 donated the collection to the Keeler Tavern Museum, which with the help of

the Hartmann Society and others, set about not only getting modern negatives and prints made from each plate, but also figuring out the people and places depicted. Committees of oldtimers worked for years to identify as many pictures as possible.

The museum still holds the collection today.

Many of Hartmann’s pictures were used in the 1999 book, “Images of America: Ridgefield,” produced by the Ridgefield Archives Committee, a sort of successor of the Hartmann Society that has melded into the Ridgefield Historical Society. The book is still in print today.

Jeremy Wilmot: 

A Sense of Past and Place

Few people have served Ridgefield in more ways for more years than Jeremy Wilmot. A member of five town government agencies over her half century as a Ridgefielder, she was best known as a champion of historic preservation at a time when Ridgefield was losing some of its ancient  buildings and identity.

“By appearance or association, Ridgefield's architecture and local histories provide us with a sense of past and place,” Wilmot wrote in 1981. “Our landmarks root all of us to Ridgefield, no matter whether newcomer or native.”

Jeremy Griffiths Wilmot was born in New Jersey in 1929. Her family moved to Connecticut and she graduated from Greenwich High School in 1947, attended the Colorado School of Mines, and later finished her college education at Western Connecticut State University.

She moved to Ridgefield in 1955 and, along with raising a family, began her involvement with the community by joining the League of Women Voters and by penning letters to The Ridgefield Press on wide variety of issues.

As a member of the town’s first Charter Revision Commission in 1963, she got to know the inner workings of Ridgefield government. She later served on the Historic District Commission and on the Zoning Board of Appeals. In 1989, she was elected to the Planning and Zoning Commission, but in the 1990s, left to be elected a member of the Board of Selectmen.

Her most tangible legacy to the town was in historic preservation. In the 1970s, she was a founder of the Ridgefield Preservation Trust, an organization that eventually grew into the Ridgefield Historical Society. Calling herself a “field director and foot soldier,” she collaborated with fellow trust founder Madeline Corbin in researching and writing the voluminous Ridgefield Historic

Architectural Resources Survey, cataloguing the construction techniques, architectural style, and significant social history of some 600 of the town’s buildings.

The 1,500-page document was adopted as an official part of the town’s Plan of Conservation and Development, and is still used regularly by the town planning staff to make owners aware of their properties’ history.

“It wasn’t one of those programs that just died,” Wilmot said in a 1980 interview with The New York Times. “Instead it sensitized our people to the history of their houses.”

Her work in “sensitizing” people to Ridgefield’s history didn’t end there. She worked on setting up an early oral history program for the Keeler Tavern Preservation Society,  and organized a Catoonah Street Festival to celebrate that neighborhood’s varied mix of architectural styles; in the process, she helped produce a booklet describing the street’s history and buildings.

Her research and passion for preservation were involved in the efforts to save the Weir Farm as a national park and to renovate the old Ridgefield High School auditorium into today’s Ridgefield Playhouse.

Wilmot was also active in the Democratic Party, serving on the Democratic Town Committee and attending state conventions, often as a delegate and frequently challenging the party establishment on behalf of the liberal or peace wing of the party. She was also involved in the Ridgefield Women’s Political Caucus, a 1970s organization whose legal actions against the town led to the expansion of the Ridgefield Boys Club into the Ridgefield Boys and Girls Club.

For a time she made her skills available professionally as a “house detective,” researching for property owners the architecture and history of their homes. She also led workshops on how to research a property's past.

“When she wasn’t doing her research or running for office, she was in her flower garden,” said daughter, Jessica Wilmot. “This also was a love of hers, so much so that she took a job with the Parks and Recreation Commission solely to care for Ballard Park.” (Jessica, longtime owner of The Ancient Mariner, was one of her six children; another was the late Tony Wilmot, popular RHS baseball coach and restaurateur, who is also profiled here.)

Over her years in Ridgefield, she and her former husband, Clifford, owned several old homes, including one overlooking Lake Mamanasco at the end of Pond Road. She later moved to a large old house on Main Street near the fountain, and then to a historic house on upper Wilton Road West.

In the late 1990s she relocated to Lakeville for a decade or so, before returning to Ridgefield for her final years. She died in 2010 at the age of 80. 

B.E. Sperry:
The End of An Era

A prominent Ridgefield businessman for a half century, B.E. “Bert” Sperry died amid much family sadness. His business also ended with a bang.

In the fall of 1946, Sperry drove to Michigan to visit his brother, Frank, who had been hospitalized with burns suffered when a relative’s house burned down. Frank had been staying at the relative’s house after a fire had destroyed the trailer he himself had been living in with his brother, former Ridgefielder Fleet Sperry — Fleet was burned to death in that blaze.
On the day before Halloween, Bert Sperry suffered a heart attack at a Ohio hotel and died. 

Born in 1871 in Michigan, Bert Eugene Sperry came to Ridgefield in 1892 and worked at the Adams and Keeler livery stable. Five years later, he opened his own stable in a huge building on Catoonah Street that had been Whitlock’s livery stable. He had as many as 75 horses at one point.   

Sperry handled in an effective way the arrival of the automobile and the departure of the horse.

“When automobiles began to provide better local transportation,” his Press obituary said, “Mr. Sperry turned to taxicabs.” 

He continued in the taxi business until World War II and also sold coal and wood. 

Sperry was active in the Lions Club and other local groups. 

Sperry’s livery stable was a huge edifice that stood opposite the Ridgefield firehouse. It was built to hold not only horses that could be rented or boarded, but carriages that could be rented with horses for use like an Avis car or U-Haul truck today. Upper floors held large amounts of hay to feed the horses and provide bedding.

When the horses left, the three-story barn, built probably in the 1870s, became obsolete and for some years had been poorly maintained. It was showing its age and perhaps lack of maintenance in the winter of 1947-48, when a couple of big snowstorms in late December and early January had piled huge amounts of snow on the roof. 

The building began creaking and sagging. Fire Marshal Horace A. Walker condemned the structure (there was no building inspector back then) and ordered the Harry Dodson family, who had an apartment in the rear section, to get out and take anything of value with them. 

At 4 o’clock on the morning of Jan. 17, 1948 — 12 hours after the Dodsons had moved out —  the building collapsed in a thunderous roar of splitting timbers and breaking glass that woke up people throughout the village. 

It was a dramatic end of an era.