Neziah Wright: 
Stamped In History

Anyone who has ever been a stamp collector will instantly recognize the pair shown here: They are the very first two United States postage stamps, and were issued in 1847.

Along the bottom edge of each stamp are the initials R.W.H.&N. The W stands for a man whose mortal remains are spending eternity in Ridgefield, but who probably never lived here — though he had a close attachment to the town.

Neziah Wright was born in 1804 in Grafton, N.H., where his father was a local physician. The family soon moved to Bradford, Vt. 

Little is known about his early life but by the 1820s he was in New York City, working as an engraver. In 1828, he and Freeman Rawdon established an engraving firm that soon grew into Rawdon, Wright, Hatch & Edson, a leading producer of bank notes, bonds, and other finely engraved printing.

On March 3, 1847, a federal act authorized the postmaster general to use postage stamps for the prepayment of postage on letters. Within two weeks Rawdon, Wright, Hatch & Edson had submitted a proposal to design and print those new postage stamps, and they quickly got the contract. 

The result was the 5¢ Benjamin Franklin and 10¢ George Washington issues that went on sale in New York on July 1, 1847. Franklin was the first postmaster general, appointed by the Continental Congress in 1775, and Washington, the first president.

  

Some three million of the five cent stamps were printed and 863,000 ten centers. Back then postal rates were determined both by the weight and the distance that the letters had to travel. Letters going 300 miles or less were 5¢ per half ounce;  over 300 miles were 10¢ per half ounce.  

Wright’s company continued to merge with others, but held majority control when it became the American Bank Note Company in 1858, with Wright as its first treasurer. The company created not only the first stamps, but the first paper money, called “greenbacks,” issued by the federal government in 1862.

 A close inspection of the first greenbacks shows why American Bank Note was considered an expert in producing currency that was difficult to counterfeit. In fact, Neziah Wright had been a co-author of a book,  New Security for Protecting Bank Notes from Alterations & Photographic Counterfeits, published in 1858.

By the 1860s, Wright was considered a leading businessman in New York City. In his 1875 History of Bradford, Vt.,  the Rev. Silas McKeen quaintly describes  Neziah Wright as “a man well-known and highly esteemed in financial and commercial circles, who is said to possess a sufficiency of wealth, acquired by fair and honorable means. The amiable and excellent wife of Mr. N. Wright, deceased some years since, leaving no child but a virtually adopted daughter, Jane [sic], a worthy young lady, who married Mr. Phineas Lowndesbury, of Ridgefield, Ct., a gentleman worthy of such a wife.” (McKeen had some problems with names; the adopted daughter was Jennie, not Jane, and Phineas was Lounsbury, not Lowndesbury.)

      Therein lies the Ridgefield connection. Phineas Lounsbury was born in 1841 on the family’s Ridgefield  farm, The Hickories, in Farmingville.  After the Civil War he was running a shoe factory in New Haven, later in Norwalk, reports Lounsbury historian  Jeremy Main. “Phineas built ties with the New York banking society and sealed them by marrying Jennie Wright, daughter of Neziah Wright, a founder and treasurer of the American Bank Note Co.,” said Main. That wedding occurred in 1867.

Jennie and Phineas lived on Main Street, eventually building Grovelawn, the mansion now used as Ridgefield’s Community Center. When Neziah died in 1879, his will named Phineas Lounsbury as his executor.

Neziah Wright must have liked Phineas Lounsbury and Ridgefield a great deal because both he and his wife — and his sister — are all buried in the Lounsbury section of the Ridgefield Cemetery. His adopted daughter is nearby, with her husband, Phineas. The huge main monument — one of the tallest in Ridgefield — is shared by both the Wrights and Lounsburys.

The company Neziah Wright helped to create in the 1820s is still alive today, called ABCorp, with American Bank Note as a subsidiary. While it still does fine, secure printing, the company has branched out into such fields as “dual-interface (contactless) payment debit and credit cards” and business-to-business distribution services in more than 100 countries. Its headquarters are just down the road, in Stamford, Conn.

Happy New Millennium!

On this first day of 2019, we offer a look back 19 years to when Ridgefield celebrated a rather rare event: A new millennium.

These pictures by Scott Mullin were taken New Millennium’s Eve, Dec. 31, 1999, at the Community Center grounds where a big bash was underway. The all-day festivities included nearly a dozen concerts under several  tents in Veterans Park, food, dancing and, at midnight, fireworks and the ringing of the town’s churches’ bells. Thousands of people participated.

Shown here at the Community Center that evening are, top, Suanne and JP Laqueur, lower left, eight-year-old Alycia Hudson with her balloon hat, and lower right, Mike Harney and daughter Caitlin, 9, dancing.

The weather was cold but clear, and not many people seemed all that worried about the  , the Millennium Bug, also known as the Y2K problem, which computer experts had warned for years could shut down the power grid and other computer-controlled operations at midnight, when many computer programs supposedly would not be able to recognize the new date.

The shutdowns didn’t happen, and life went on, with the biggest problem being people remembering that there’s a 2 at the beginning of the year, instead of a 1, when writing a check. 

Burying Time

The people are town tax collector Mary Hart Foyt, left, and town clerk Barbara Serfilippi. The date is Dec. 28, 1999. The place is not a cemetery, however, but the front lawn of the Ridgefield Community Center. 

The two are helping bury a time capsule in connection with Festival 2000, the town’s rather extensive celebration of the “new millennium,” and Scott Mullin was there to photograph the event for The Ridgefield Press.

The 124-page commemorative book for Festival 2000 says the capsule was “filled with mementos from our schools, organizations and individuals” and was designed to be exhumed in 50 years.

“And what will Ridgefield be like in 2050?” the book asks. “That’s easy. It will be a charming New England town with gorgeous, tree-lined streets, a bustling core of shops and a vibrant arts community.”

If you are wondering why the capsule looks like a burial vault, it’s because it IS a burial vault. Dan Jowdy of Kane Funeral Home, who donated the vault, explains: “It was a Wilbert ‘air tight, water proof’ burial vault that normally a casket would go into prior to burial.  Most often a vault is required to maintain the integrity of the grave site...Some are not air tight/water proof.  This one is cited by the manufacturer to be.  The only air in the space is the air that was in the box when sealed.”

 Thus, if anyone in 2050 remembers the 2000 time capsule — and where, exactly, it was buried, the contents are likely to be well preserved. However, the exhumers may have a tough time getting to the contents. According to Danny, “The vault is constructed with concrete, reinforced with steel rods and bands.  There is a fiberglass seamless box with in and base and one under the lid.  With the tongue and groove design, the company fills the groove with an epoxy before setting it on the base and then the tongue and groove with the epoxy creates or binds the top piece with the bottom piece.”

Sounds like a jackhammer will be needed.

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.

Phineas C. Lounsbury: 

The Dry Governor

Although he was governor of Connecticut – the first of two Ridgefield brothers to run the state, Phineas Lounsbury is better remembered today as the man who built what’s now the Community Center, a building of several names. Officially titled the Veterans Memorial Community Center,  the place is also today called the Lounsbury Mansion. The governor himself, however, called the place Grovelawn. 

Born  in 1841 on the family farm, The Hickories, in Farmingville, Phineas Chapman Lounsbury attended the Farmingville Schoolhouse and later the Florida Schoolhouse as a boy. 

His parents were devout Methodists. Every Sunday, “we trudged over the three miles from the old homestead to the preaching service at half past ten in the Methodist church [on Main Street], Sunday school at noon, preaching service again at 1:30 in the afternoon, after which we walked back and spent the balance of the day with father in reading, meditation and prayer.”

Lounsbury got his equivalent of a high school education from the Rev. David H. Short’s private school at the corner of Main Street and King Lane and went on to graduate from Wesleyan University. 

As a young man he worked as a clerk in a New York City shoe store, learning the shoe

business. After the Civil War broke out, he enlisted as a volunteer in the 17th Connecticut Infantry in August 1862, but due to a serious illness he was honorably discharged that December.  While he left before his unit did any fighting, he became active after the war in the regiment’s veterans organization, serving as its president for a while. He “delivered a 42-minute oration at the dedication of a monument to the regiment at Gettysburg in 1884,” reports Jeremy Main in a profile of Lounsbury that appeared in The Ridgefield Press.

Lounsbury returned to Ridgefield where he joined his brother, George, in a shoe manufacturing company under the name of Lounsbury Brothers — their father, Nathan, had been both a farmer and a shoemaker, as had a sizable number of Ridgefielders of the mid-19th Century. The factory was at first located in New Haven, but later more conveniently in Norwalk.

“Phineas built ties with the New York banking society and sealed them by marrying Jenny Wright, daughter of Neziah Wright, a founder and treasurer of the American Bank Note Co.,” said Main. “Phineas joined the board of the Merchants Exchange Bank in New York and became its president in 1885.”

Over the years he also served as chairman of the board of Atlantic National Bank and on the boards of many other businesses, including Ridgefield’s First National Bank.  

He began his political career in 1874 when he was elected a state representative from Ridgefield. His knowledge of financial matters and his oratory skills led him to become a Republican party leader and, in 1887, he was elected governor of the state.

Main said that Lounsbury’s single term in office, from 1887 to 1889, “apparently was a quiet one, distinguished by the passage of ‘The Incorrigible Criminals Act.’ Much like contemporary ‘three strikes’ laws, his law mandated a 25-year sentence for those who committed for the third time a felony that carried a two-year sentence. Lounsbury made clear his harsh view of criminals by saying the prison would serve its purpose by ‘shutting up forever within its walls and behind its bolts and bars, the entire criminal class of the state.’ ”

Lounsbury may not have fought any battles in the Civil War and few in the state capital, but

he was in the middle of one of the fiercest fights in 19th Century Ridgefield’s government. In 1872, a new state law allowed towns to ban liquor sales, and there was a strong support in Ridgefield for outlawing  “licensing”  the sale of booze. Local petitioners  believed ‘‘the sale and use of a beverage of intoxicating liquors is a great curse of any community, productive of much of the crime and misery which affects society.’’

In Sept. 3, 1872, a Town Meeting voted 104 to 49 to ban the sale of intoxicating liquors in Ridgefield.  However, by April 1873, some Ridgefielders were getting thirsty. Twenty-five men turned in a petition to rescind the ‘‘no license’’ vote. 

On April 26, 1873, at probably one of the most ‘‘spirited’’ town meetings in Ridgefield history, voters were asked to rescind the ban on liquor sales. Phineas’s brother, George Lounsbury, later also a governor of Connecticut, moved that the selectmen be allowed to license the sale of ‘‘spirituous and intoxicating liquors, ale and lager beer.’’ 

Up stood Phineas Lounsbury. Unlike George, Phineas was a leader in the temperance efforts. He moved that the vote be taken by paper ballot and that the voting box be kept open for two hours, presumably to allow him to run up and down the village street to gather supporters. When the ballots were counted, 104 favored alcohol sales, and 111 opposed. Ridgefield remained dry.

Battles over prohibition continued for years, with Phineas Lounsbury always among the leaders of the teetotalers. Late in life, Lounsbury owned The Ridgefield Press and told its small staff never to run advertisements for alcohol. One day, he picked up the paper, saw a liquor ad and was so angry, he immediately sold the paper.

Despite their different views on alcohol, the brothers remained close. Speaking at Ridgefield’s Bicentennial celebration in 1908, Phineas called George “one of the best brothers that ever lived — one of God’s noblemen.” George had died four years earlier.

Lounsbury made contributions to the community, including donating in 1882 the land for and part of the building cost of the Center School on Bailey Avenue — he would probably be a bit disappointed that his gift to education is now a municipal parking lot. 

He also donated a fire engine, worth $1,000 (about $30,000 today), to the new fire department formed after the great fire of 1895 that destroyed much of the village (his house was only a few doors from the southern limit of that blaze, and he no doubt was especially sensitive to the need for fire protection).

“He was a generous, if somewhat ostentatious, donor to the Methodist Church,” reported Jeremy Main. “When the plate came around, he held up a $5 note so people could see how much he was giving.” (It was equivalent to more than $140 today).

After the war, Lounsbury bought an old Main Street house, possibly dating from the 1700s, that had held three generations of physicians named Perry (profiled in Who Was Who). He  renovated

the colonial-style building into a snazzy Victorian with mansard roof. However, attending the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, Lounsbury was impressed with the stately design of the Connecticut Building, and decided he’d like a new house of similar design. To make room for the new place, he moved his old house to Governor Street, where it served as a boarding house and then office building until it was torn down in 2014 to make way for the Ridgefield Visiting Nurse Association headquarters.

Grovelawn was completed in 1896. It had a staff of 14 people indoors, and 12 for the grounds, which included almost all of today’s Veterans Park block, plus where the Boys and Girls Club is now.  He also had places in upper New York State and in Florida where he’d spend parts of the summer and winter.

Lounsbury died at Grovelawn in 1925 at the age of 81. In his obituary, The Press said: “His career was notable and brilliant. … By his masterly insight into public questions and oratorical powers [he] became a recognized power.”

Lounsbury had no children, and his estate was left to a niece who had little interest in living at Grovelawn. The house sat unused for almost 30 years. As World War II came to an end in 1945, the town voted to buy the property as a memorial to veterans, and created the Ridgefield Veterans Memorial Park. However, it wasn’t until 1953 that the mansion was leased to the Veterans Memorial Community Association, a private non-profit group that would run the building as a place for meetings, classes, social events, youth camps, a rifle range, a nursery school, and even a teen center.

One of the more unusual features of the property is a bell mounted on pedestal. Cast in 1845 in Ohio, the bell had been gathered, perhaps from a schoolhouse,  during a Confederate Army scrap drive, to be turned into weaponry. The scap collection was captured by a Connecticut unit led by Colonel Alexander Warner. Painted on the bell were the words: “This bell is to be melted into a cannon — may it kill a thousand Yankees.” Warner bought the bell from the Army, kept it for a number of years and eventually gave it to Governor Lounsbury.

The bell was rung to mark the signing of the armistice at the end of World War I and again, in September 1945 to mark the end of fighting in World War II.

Cyril Ritchard: 

‘Captain Hook’

Millions knew him, not by his name but by his character. For Cyril Ritchard played Captain Hook alongside Mary Martin when the acclaimed Broadway production of “Peter Pan” was staged live for television March 7, 1955, making TV history with its huge audience and high quality production. 

His face and his voice were famous and he enjoyed telling of the time he was spotted by a rough-looking gang of teenagers who surrounded him. 

“I thought they were going to attack me, but instead they stared and exclaimed: ‘You're

Captain Hook!’ I'm glad the reason for their attention was curiosity, not animosity.”

The witty actor from Australia starred in countless stage and screen productions around the world and over a career that started before World War I and ended in 1977 when he collapsed on stage of a heart attack. 

Born Cyril Trimnell-Ritchard (a name he shortened to fit on marquees) in 1898,  Ritchard was the son of a hotel manager father who wanted him to become a doctor. However, he quit medical school at the age of 19 and took to the stage, making his debut in the chorus of a Sydney musical. Three months later, he was performing the lead.

From there he went on to appear over the next half century in innumerable comedies,

Shakespearean plays, musicals, and even operas.

“I have four notes, two of them good,” he said of his singing abilities. 

Ritchard also made six movies, including “Half A Sixpence” in 1967.

Shakespearean comedy fascinated Ritchard, who often performed at the American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Conn., and worked to raise money for its survival. In an effort typical of both his energy and his versatility, he directed the play and performed two parts (Oberon and Bottom) in a 1967 production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at Stratford.

“It’s really a mental feat,” he said at the time. “The changes would be quite impossible if my mind panicked...But I like the challenge.”

Throughout his career he was known for his smile and his sense of humor. He once told Leonard Lyons of The New York Post That he was unaffected by small audiences in theaters. “Fortunately,” he said, “my sight is bad, so I can’t even see the empty seats.”

“He was a very funny and witty fellow,” said actress Kathleen Eason, a longtime friend and fellow Ridgefielder. “His stories and anecdotes of happenings to him on and off stage were hysterically funny. Once, when he was very young and just starting to be successful, a fan asked for his autograph at a movie premiere. Cyril brightened right up and with his pencil poised, began laboriously to write: ‘Best wishes and good luck, Cyril Ritchard’ The irate fan said: ‘Come on, hurry up, don’t write a book. Here comes Greta Garbo!’ ”

He maintained that he developed his abilities at comedy as a child. “As I was taken to my room to be spanked by my father, I had to think of something to make him laugh,” he said. “If I could, it was a pretty weak spanking.”

He bought his Danbury Road home, which he called “Lone Rock,” in 1960, and “absolutely loved Ridgefield and that little house,” Eason said. “He couldn’t wait to get out of New York and to his Shangri-La, as he called it.”

Ritchard frequently entertained guests from New York at Lone Rock. One Sunday in the summer of 1965, he bused up the entire cast and crew from “The Roar of the Greasepaint — The Smell of the Crowd,” in which he played one of his best-known roles. He had planned to serve them beefsteak and kidney pies, but changed his mind. “I remembered about Americans and kidneys, and substituted the beef Wellington,” he said, adding that Americans are likely to find kidneys appealing

only when they denote the shape of swimming pools.

He was often seen about town with his poodle, Trim (a trimmed version of his trimmed name). “He got to know a great many people in the town,” Mrs. Eason said. “He always raised his hat, helped old ladies across the road, and stopped to talk to people.”

Ritchard contributed to many local organizations including the Ridgefield Workshop for the Performing Arts. He read the Declaration of Independence at a 1976 Bicentennial ceremony at the Community Center. “I was shocked when they asked me to do this,” he told the crowd. “I'm not an American. I'm a citizen of Australia. And I love the British. So there!”

Despite his age — he had turned 79 a couple weeks before his death — and warnings from his doctor, Ritchard maintained a work schedule that would tire a much younger man. In 1974, when he was hospitalized after collapsing at work in California, he admitted that “the doctor here says in the future I should be a little less enthusiastic in my work. I had been under pressure for six weeks. I was directing (“Sugar”), but nine other people thought they were, and kept screaming.”

A few months later the 76-year-old appeared in three concerts of “La Perichole” in Miami and a short time after that, gave 22 performances of 11 different programs during a 2½ week Theatre Guild at Sea cruise in the Caribbean.

“I never worked so hard in my life,” he admitted afterward.

A devout Catholic who attended  Mass almost daily, he was a benefactor of St. Mary's Parish.

His funeral in 1977 was at St. Mary’s, with the Mass celebrated by longtime friend and TV celebrity, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen.

Cyril Ritchard is buried at St. Mary’s Cemetery next to his beloved wife, actress Madge Elliott, who had died five years before he moved to Ridgefield — he loved the town so much he had had her remains moved here from New York.

Under his name, Cyril Trimnell-Ritchard, on the gravestone, it says, “Captain Hook.”

John W. Smith: 

The Orchid Man

The many estates that were established around the turn of the 20th Century brought   hundreds of workers to Ridgefield — maids, cooks, butlers, chauffeurs, farmers,  groundskeepers, gardeners, and others. Many found Ridgefield to their liking, wound up settling here and became strong participants in the community.

One of those was Jack Smith, an estate superintendent who was among the best gardeners and also among the most active contributors to his town. His orchids won many national awards and Smith himself was involved in several national horticultural organizations.

A native of England, John W. Smith was born in 1883 in Harrogate. He came to this country in 1910 to work as a gardener at Upagenstit, the West Lane estate of Frederic E. Lewis. After a stint aboard a destroyer in the U.S. Navy during World War I, he returned to Upagenstit and became its superintendent.

It was at the Lewis estate that Smith developed an interest in orchids. Mr. and Mrs. Lewis’s vast greenhouses provided plenty of space for experimenting with a variety of species, and his specialty became the cymbidium. 

Town Historian Richard E. Venus said the Upagenstit greenhouses “would match the conservatory in New York’s Botanical Gardens.” He reported that “it was said that John W. Smith…was the one who discovered the secret of growing orchids in this country. Jack isolated the orchid

plants in a corner of the greenhouse where the humidity was high. Then, instead of just applying water directly to the plants, he sprayed the water into the air around the plants and let them soak it up….That fine greenhouse produced some of the most beautiful orchids ever grown.”

Smith’s orchids won many awards at the National Flower Show in New York. He was especially known for a variety called Cymbidium Lewis. 

As Smith’s reputation became national, he was asked to judge flower shows all over the United States. He was named to the Hortus Committee of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, helping supervise the planting of flower beds on the fair’s grounds. 

He was president of the Ridgefield Horticultural Society, then a sizable and active organization, as well as a member of the New York Horticultural Society and the National Orchid Society.

When the Lewis estate was sold to Ely Culbertson (profiled in Who Was Who), Smith moved his orchids to Pinchbeck’s Nurseries for a while until he built a special greenhouse at his Barry Avenue home to house them. 

He became superintendent for the estate of Wadsworth R. Lewis, Frederic’s son, on Great Hill Road (later the home of Henry and Clare Boothe Luce).

Smith was involved in the political and civic side of Ridgefield life. In 1947 and 1949, he ran for first selectman on the Republican ticket, but lost to his friend, Harry E. Hull, a Democrat. He did win a seat on the Board of Selectmen from 1949 to 1951. 

He was a member of the School Building Committee that built the 1939 addition to the old high school on East Ridge — an addition that included the auditorium that is now the Ridgefield Playhouse. He was an original member of the Park Commission, now the Parks and Recreation Commission, serving for 16 years. 

When the town bought the Ridgefield Community Center just after World War II, Smith spearheaded the drive for public support and he personally supervised the remodeling of the Lounsbury house. He later became president of the Community Center.

He was also active in the Rotary Club, the Masons, and the First Congregational Church where, at the alleys in the church’s clubhouse, he enjoyed bowling with the locals.

He died in 1959 at the age of 75.

The Perrys: 

Three Generations of Physicians

  For more than a century, the name Perry stood for health in Ridgefield as three generations of physicians bearing that name treated countless ailing residents.

The founder of the clan was Dr. David Perry. Born in 1747, he graduated from Yale in 1772, and came to Ridgefield soon after to practice medicine. He almost immediately became active in St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, which was struggling to rebuild after the Revolution when the Episcopal church in town had suspended operations. 

Perry became so involved that he became a deacon in 1789 and took over leadership of the parish. A year later, he was ordained a minister. While rector here, he also served churches in North Salem and Ridgebury as their minister.

However, it wasn’t long before Perry began irritating the church fathers. “The relationship between the parish and Dr. Perry was beset from the start by frictions,” said Robert Haight in his history of St. Stephen’s. “His medical practice caused him to neglect his duties to the church and the annual convention of the clergy. He also made unreasonable financial demands.”

For instance, he wanted the parish to purchase for him a quarter interest in a local grist mill as compensation for providing half-time service as their minister for four years. A fourth share of a major grist mill was a lot more than the 30 pounds a year the parish could pay.

By 1795 the church and Perry reached the point where both sides decided to end his service as rector. Perry continued to belong to the church until 1809 when he decided to become a Baptist. He probably practiced medicine until his death in 1822.

Among his six children, two became physicians. Dr. Samuel Perry moved to the South where he died in 1821, aged 38. Dr. Nehemiah Perry, however, took over his father’s practice

Aside from being a physician, Nehemiah was said to be a skilled chemist and spent much time experimenting with compound medicines, dyes, and spices, all of which were produced at his Glenburg Mills and Chemicals Works in Georgetown. (Glenburg was an early name for Georgetown; Perry wanted the village to bear that name instead of Georgetown.)
“Certainly many of the doctor’s wares brought happiness to the housewife and efficacious remedy,” wrote historian George L. Rockwell. 

Bottles that held Dr. Perry’s patent medicines and embossed with his name are still occasionally being dug up from old dumps around town. One of the most famous of his concoctions was “Demulcent Compound for Coughs and Colds.”

Wilbur F. Thompson, a Georgetown historian, said, “The famous remedies so well known in the late 1800's were made here — composition powders for colds; magnesia powders for indigestion; the No. 9, a pain killer; demulcent compounds for coughs; and many others. Spices were ground and all kinds of extracts were made and sold. The country stores all kept the Perry remedies, spices and extracts.”

Dr. Perry died in 1866 and was succeeded in practice by son Nehemiah Jr. while another son, Samuel, operated the mill.

Dr. David Perry, the father,  may have lived in a house that stood across from St. Stephen’s in front of today’s Community Center. It is certain that his son, Nehemiah Sr., was living and practicing there by 1850, and that grandson, Nehemiah Jr., was living there.

However, after Nehemiah Sr. died in 1866, Nehemiah Jr. decided he could not live in a house that held so many memories of family, and he moved south on Main Street and practiced from a house just north of Rockwell Road. The property extended eastward to where Perry Lane, later named for him, has its northern terminus.

When Nehemiah Perry Jr. retired in 1893, it brought to an end 121 years of medical service to Ridgefield by three generations of one family! He died in 1908.

The old Perry homestead that was in front of the Community Center was acquired by Gov.

Phineas Lounsbury, who did quite a bit of gussying up, turning what had probably been a plain colonial into an ornate Empire-style Victorian. In his 1878 book, “The History of Ridgefield, Conn.,” the Rev. Daniel W. Teller observes, “Mr. P.C. Lounsbury, having purchased the property best known as the ‘Dr. Perry Place,’ has made many marked and modern improvements about the house and grounds — improvements which are still going on and which, when completed, will make his residence second to none in the town.” Teller was so impressed with the house that an engraving of it was prominently placed near the beginning of his book.
Gov. Lounsbury lived there till the 1890s when he decided to build a bigger, more majestic home — today’s Community Center or Lounsbury House — and moved his old house to Governor Street where it became a boarding house, called The House of Friends, for many years.

Judge Joseph H. Donnelly (1906-1992) eventually acquired the building. The business district in the 1950s was expanding and Donnelly — who owned the adjacent land that’s now a shopping center belonging to his family — decided to convert the place to offices. 

Over the years, most of the “many marked and modern improvements” that made the place “second to none in the town” were lost as the building was reworked several times to accommodate the needs of commercial offices and modern building and fire codes. So despite its long life of housing leading people in Ridgefield’s history, little fuss was made about its being torn down in 2015 to make way for a new Ridgefield Visiting Nurse Association headquarters.

Herschel Brickell: 

Ill-fated Editor & Critic

When he was a child, Henry Herschel Brickell was an omnivorous reader, consuming one or two volumes a day during his summer vacations. He was, he said later, “unwittingly preparing myself for the book reviewer’s life in New York.” 

The Mississippi native was born in 1889,  graduated from the University of Mississippi, and fought in the Mexican war in 1916 with the National Guard. He was a newspaper reporter and editor in the South, and came to New York in 1919 to work for The New York Post as a news editor, then book review editor. 

He later became general manager of Henry Holt & Company, where among the writers he worked with was poet Robert Frost — with whom he later taught at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Over his long career, he worked with and encouraged a number of young writers, including Eudora Welty. 

In the 1930s, he wrote book reviews for The New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, and the Saturday Review of Literature. One of the books he favorably reviewed was Margaret Mitchell’s classic, “Gone with the Wind,” published in 1936. 

Herschel Brickell was so taken with Mitchell’s book that he traveled south to meet with the author that summer, and they became friends, corresponding for some years. In one letter to Brickell, Mitchell mentioned the difficulty she had in writing about the aftermath of the Civil War. “War can be made interesting, and peace, a muddled peace, is hard to handle,” she wrote. “I suppose it’s because war has some design to it and reconstruction hasn’t.” 

Mitchell visited Brickell in Connecticut at least once, which may have sparked the once-popular local rumor that a portion of  “Gone with the Wind” was written in Ridgefield.

In 1941, Brickell became editor of the annual O. Henry Memorial Short Story Prize anthologies. 

An assignment in Spain in the 30s left him with a love of things Spanish, and he became a senior cultural relations assistant to U.S. Ambassador Spruille Braden, and later was chief of the State Department’s Division of Cultural Cooperation for Latin America. 

He continued to write and edit here until one June day in 1952, at the age of 63, something went wrong. He and his wife, Norma, had recently returned from a South American tour of several months and were hard at work together on preparing the 1952 O. Henry anthology. Norma wondered where her husband had gone, went to the garage, found the door closed, the car running and his body inside. He left no message.

“Hard work and a tendency to despondency were the reasons suggested by police and physicians to account for Mr. Brickell’s death,” The Ridgefield Press said.

Although he traveled widely and associated with many of the finest writers of 20th Century America, Herschel Brickell still found time to write a regular column for The Ridgefield Press — often posted from overseas. They were written in hand and in one undated submission from the 1940s,  soon after Ridgefield voted to buy the Lounsbury estate and turn the mansion into a community center, Brickell offered “a message from beyond”: 

“Again, the shades are going to rest in the Elysian Fields, but they will be back soon. A message has been received from Benjamin Franklin in the meantime, expressing his delight in the fine work done on Lounsbury manor, the kind of community effort Benjamin likes. Also, he sees in it the hope of the eventual realization of his dream for the manor, now looking like a still, white elephant. He insists it can be made into the finest community house in this part of Connecticut, or New England, for that matter, and he asked me to say that the dream should not be forgotten. If enough people come to believe in it, it will, of course, come true, and there would be rejoicing in the Elysian Fields if it did, not to mention Ridgefield and the surrounding territory.”

The Elysian Fields were the final resting place of the souls of the heroic and virtuous.