Books About Ridgefield  

Here is an alphabetical list of more than two dozen, non-fiction books that have been published about Ridgefield, mostly from a historical point of view. 

Many of these titles are available at the Ridgefield Historical Society, including some out-of-print editions. Books on the Common has most in-print titles. Amazon can supply almost all of them. 

For used or reprint editions, check abe.com or amazon.com. Amazon offers many print-on-demand reprints of books that are considered “out of print.” Many of these titles are also available in electronic versions for Kindle, etc. — some older ones free of charge; try Googling the title. Some, like Rockwell’s history, can be read online.

About Ridgefield: 
What We Were - What We Are

A comprehensive, lavishly illustrated report on many facets of Ridgefield, including architecture, neighborhoods, history, landmarks, natural resources, cultural and religious centers, open spaces, cemeteries, and more; produced in 2002 by the Ridgefield Design Council, soft-cover, extensive index.

Account of the Battle of Ridgefield 
and Tryon’s Raid, An

First detailed history of the 1777 battle, published on the 150th  anniversary; by James R. Case, 56 pages, with map;  privately printed, 1927; later reprints were done.

Barbour Collection: Vol. 36
The Barbour Collection of Connecticut Town Records, Volume 36 in a statewide series, reproduces the valuable Barbour index to Ridgefield births, marriages and deaths from 1709 to 1850. 167 pages devoted to Ridgefield. A must for any serious Ridgefield researcher. Also includes Redding vitals.  Published in 2000 by Genealogical Publishing Company. 

Brief Historical Notice 
of the Town of Ridgefield, A

Published by the Village Improvement Society in 1906, this 60-page small-form book contains many photographs of the town, its houses, gardens and points of interest, all taken by Joseph Hartmann.  It includes a brief history of the town and of the society. Out of print, but available.

Farmers Against the Crown
Keith Marshall Jones wrote this comprehensive account of the Battle of Ridgefield during the Revolutionary War, revealing much new information and correcting many old mistakes in previous accounts. “This telling will remain the standard account of the battle for a long, long time,” said Christopher Collier, former Connecticut state historian.162 pages, paperback, extensively illustrated. Published 2002. Out of print.

Farms of Farmingville, The
While Keith Marshall Jones calls this book "a two-century history of 23 Ridgefield, Connecticut farmhouses and the people who gave them life," it is really a history of a good part of the town. He has extensively researched a section on Ridgefield that contains a significant cross-section of the community from the 1700s into the 20th Century, and  gives a picture of what life here was like during that period. Published 2001. Hardcover. 509 pages, indexed. Many maps, house plans, photos. Available at Ridgefield Historical Society.

Five Village Walks
Self-guided tours of Ridgefield village history, with more than 50 pictures from the past, by Jack Sanders. 56 pages, indexed, map. Last updated in 2008. $5 price benefits Ridgefield Historical Society.  

Glimpses of Ridgefield

An unnumbered, album-style book of dozens pictures of Ridgefield from the 1890s by a pioneering woman photographer in Connecticut, Marie H. Kendall. Copies rarely appear on the market. Published in 1900.

Hidden History of Ridgefield
A look at Ridgefield’s often unheralded people, places and things,  a sort of sequel to Ridgefield Chronicles, relating little-known pieces of what make Ridgefield a remarkable place in which to live, work, visit—or write history; by Jack Sanders. 160 pages. Dozens of pictures and maps.  Published in 2015 by The History Press.

Historical Sketch of Ridgefield, An

While small of size and only 48 pages, this well-done paperbound book, published around 1920, contains a history of the town and a description of what it was like a century ago, made all the more remarkable by the fact that it was written by Allen Nevins, who went on to win two Pulitzer Prizes for history writing. Published by The Elms Inn.  Out of print. 

History of Ridgefield
George L. Rockwell's 583-page classic has been long out of print, but copies become available. Particularly strong on 19th and early 20th Century history, and containing many early birth, marriage and death records. The book has many photos taken by Joseph Hartmann. Cloth and leather editions were printed. Also, in the 1980s, a reprinted edition was published. Out of print.

History of Ridgefield, Connecticut, The
In 1878, the Rev. Daniel Teller of the First Congregational Church published this 251-page book, the first comprehensive history of the town. While much of the content is covered in later histories, the engravings of various Ridgefield buildings and scenes, all based on very early photographs, are both wonderful and valuable. Not indexed. Published in cloth and leather versions. Out of print.

Images of America: Ridgefield
127 pages of finely reproduced pictures of Ridgefield past, published in 1999. People, houses, businesses, scenes of town life, etc. from 1890s to 1950s, produced by Ridgefield Archives Committee, now the Ridgefield Historical Society. Arcadia Publishing. 

Impact: The Historical Account 
of the Italian Immigrants of Ridgefield, CT:  

Extensive history of Italian community of Ridgefield, with many biographies, photos, and interviews; by Aldo Biagiotti; 345 pages, indexed; privately printed, 1990.

Notable Ridgefielders
An 88-page, tabloid-newspaper-sized collection of brief biographies of more than 400 people who made news in Ridgefield during the 20th Century, published by The Ridgefield Press on its 125th anniversary. Also contains extensive timeline. Illustrated, indexed. Published in 2000. Available from The Ridgefield Press, 16 Bailey Avenue.

Proprietors of Ridgefield, The
Glenna M. Welsh's history tells of the early settlement of the town, with particular focus on those who lived on Main Street. Not indexed. Many illustrations. Published in 1976 in paper and cloth editions, the clothbound version is still available at the Keeler Tavern or from the Ridgefield Historical Society.

Recollections of A Lifetime
This is the two-volume autobiography of Samuel G. Goodrich, who wrote more than 100 books, mostly for young people, under the name of Peter Parley. The first 300 or so pages are devoted to his growing up in Ridgefield in the late 1700s and early 1800s and provide a fascinating and rare look at life in the town two centuries ago. Published in 1856 by Miller, Orton and Mulligan. 1,100+ pages, many illustrations, indexed. Used copies available but often damaged and expensive; available in reprint — some reprint publishers will sell only volume one, containing the Ridgefield information, but no index, which is in volume two (note that an abridged edition was also published in 1800s; this should be avoided by anyone wanting his complete account of Ridgefield). 

Remember the Ladies: 
Notable Women of Ridgefield

Profiles of 14 noteworthy women in Ridgefield’s history; also covers organizations they founded or led; 100 pages, illustrated, published by Ridgefield Historical Society, 2008.

Ridgefield 1900-1950
More than 215 views of what Ridgefield looked like during the first half of the 20th Century. Postcard images of homes, estates, inns, street scenes, stores, churches, and more. Over 20,000 words of accompanying history and lore about the locales pictured, by Jack Sanders. 126 pages, bibliography and index.  Arcadia Publishing, 2003. 

 
Ridgefield at 300
Lavishly illustrated, coffee-table book about the town’s celebration of its 300th birthday in 2008, produced by Ridgefield Magazine.  

Ridgefield Chronicles
Offers glimpses into aspects of Ridgefield’s history including interesting people, the things they accomplished, and the way they lived, as well as the town’s varied geography and place names,  by Jack Sanders. More than 60 pictures. 160 pages.The History Press, 2014.

Ridgefield, Conn. 1708-1908 
Bi-Centennial Celebration

Collection of history, recollections, speeches, and photographs in connection with the town’s 200th birthday celebration. 96 pages, hardbound. Published by the Bi-Centennial Committee, 1908. Out of print.

Ridgefield in Review
Published in 1958, the most modern complete history of the town, with many illustrations, old maps, and military records; written by Smithsonian Institution historian Silvio A. Bedini. 396 pages, indexed. Out of print.

St. Stephen's Church, 
Its History for 250 Years 1725 to 1975
Written by Robert S. Haight, this book tells the story of the church and its place in the community. 220 pages, indexed and illustrated, published 1975. A supplement by Dirk Bollenback, Saint Stephen's Church Reaches the Millennium, 114 pages, indexed and illustrated, covers 1975 to 2000. Sold by the church, 351 Main Street.

We Gather Together… Making the Good News Happen: 1712-2012

This is an extensively illustrated survey history of the First Congregational Church, by its then pastor, the Rev. Charles Hambrick-Stowe. 68 pages. 2011.

Where is Ridgefield Heading?

This 26-page, large format booklet was published in 1950 by the League of Women Voters and suggested possibilities for Ridgefield’s dealing with future growth, including bypasses for the village, and complete reconstruction of commercial blocks in the village.

Wicked Ridgefield
A historical assortment of bad guys and bad times including thievery, bigotry, murders, missing persons, arson, book-banning, and other assorted man-made misery. “This look at the darker side of Ridgefield history points out some heroes, offers some lessons, and provides even a little humor,” says author Jack Sanders in introduction.  160 pages, many pictures, indexed. The History Press, 2016.

Erik Nitsche: 

Self-Effacing, Top-Ten Designer

Most people have never heard of him. Even those who work in his field of graphic design might shrug their shoulders if you posed his name today. Yet millions of people have seen the work

of Erik Nitsche, who has been called progressive and trend-setting by both scholars and critics. In fact, Michael Aron,  a professor at the Parsons School of Design, places him  “on the top-ten list of the best 20th-century designers in the world.”

 Over his 60-year career Nitsche was involved in art direction, book design, typography, illustration, photography, film, signage, exhibits, packaging, industrial and corporate design, and advertising. He created scores of posters, book and record-album covers, ads, postage stamps, and even typefaces. Some of his work, particularly posters, are in the collections of top museums.

“He was among a handful of progressive designers and artists who imbued American graphic design with a modern European sensibility,” said The New York Times.  

 Erik Fredi Nitsche was born in Switzerland in 1908 and studied at the Collège Classique of Lausanne in his home town. He began his career working as a graphic designer for magazines in Switzerland and Germany before moving to the United States in 1934. 

He spent two years in Hollywood, where he was friends with composer Frederic Holländer, actress Marlene Dietrich, and MGM special-effects director Slavko Vorkapich. Two years later, he

moved to New York where expanded his range of work, but continued to do art for the film industry, producing many posters. 

 In New York, he began doing covers and illustrations for such magazines as Harper’s Bazaar, Fortune, Town and Country, Vanity Fair, House and Garden, and Look. He created newspaper advertising campaigns for department stores like Ohrbach’s, Saks Fifth Avenue and

Filene’s, drew subway posters for New York Transit, and designed more than 200 record album covers for Decca, virtually all of them for classical music.

In the late 1950s, he worked for General Dynamics, which was building the Nautilus, the first nuclear submarine.  Nitsche was commissioned to develop “a visual image that would introduce this submarine to the world and at the same time emphasize the company’s peaceful concerns,” The Times said. “The design for the submarine was top secret, so Mr. Nitsche devised a symbolic solution based on the message ‘Atoms for Peace.’ ” Posters from this campaign, published in six European and Asian languages, have become classics among modern posters and are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Smithsonian, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.  

He also did memorable posters for Universal Pictures and 20th Century Fox. One of his best-known was for “All About Eve,” the 1950 film starring Bette Davis and featuring a little-known Marilyn Monroe.

Nitsche moved to Ridgefield in 1954 and lived in a large, turn-of-the-century house on Lounsbury Road in Farmingville, which he renovated in dramatic fashion in collaboration with the acclaimed architect Alexander Kouzmanoff. He later lived on Old Branchville Road. In 1974, he moved to Europe, but eventually returned to this country and was living on Mill Plain Road in Danbury when he died in 1998 at the age of 90.

His former wife, Margaret “Gretl” Nitsche, was a longtime Ridgefielder who worked as a

real estate agent with the Gordon Walsh Agency in town. A native of Germany, she died in 2005 at the age of 94.

Erik Nitsche’s name may be unfamiliar even to some who are knowledgeable about the history of graphic design, probably because he was reluctant to seek publicity. He believed his work should speak for itself. 

In a 1950s essay about Nitsche, designer and author P. K. Thomajan wrote: “Self-effacement, he finds, keeps the blighting shadow of the ego out of one’s work.”

George Lounsbury:

The Plain and Simple

One doesn’t usually find a finely dressed gentleman — much less a state governor — leading a team of field oxen. The man photographed with a whip and a yoke is George E. Lounsbury, 58th governor of Connecticut (1899-1901), and the scene is his farm, The Hickories, in Farmingville, about 1900. 

Governor Lounsbury had lived on the Lounsbury Road farm since he was two years old and, though a Yale graduate and prominent businessman, retained it as his lifelong home. When he died in 1904, The Ridgefield Press observed, “Wealth and public position, when attained, often cause men to ignore those who have contributed to their success. Not so with him. He was fond of the plain, simple, unconventional customs of rural life and always kept himself in close touch with the rural people of the town.” 

In 1964, after the picture had appeared in The Press for a history feature, Katharine Bell Russell of Columbus, Ohio, formerly of Pin Pack Road, wrote the editors: “I was five years old and remember well when that picture was taken, as I was there. My grandmother was the widow of the Rev. John Swinburne Whedon, who died while he was minister of the Methodist Church in Ridgefield, and a year later she married Governor Lounsbury. That was in 1894. We spent all our summers at The Hickories from 1896 to 1915. The oxen were Bill and Star, and the white collie was Snowland.”

Today, The Hickories, owned by the Brewster family, is Ridgefield’s only working farm. In 1996, the town bought the development rights to 101 acres of its farmland.

George Edward Lounsbury was one of the town’s most influential citizens. In fact,  his Press obituary reported, “he wielded a greater influence over his fellow townsmen than any other single person.”  

He was born in Pound Ridge, N.Y., in 1838, but his parents moved to Farmingville two years 

later, and it was at the Farmingville Schoolhouse that he received his early education (around 1899, he donated a brand, new schoolhouse to the district; after it closed in 1940, it wassold and moved to North Salem, N.Y., where it served many years as an artist’s studio).

He graduated from Yale  in 1863 and from Berkeley Divinity School three years later. He began his career as an Episcopal priest, serving in a couple of Connecticut congregations, but because of throat problems, left the ministry and entered the family business,  operating shoe factories in Norwalk for the rest of his life. 

An active Republican, he was elected a state senator in 1895 and 1897, and governor from 1899 to 1901. (His brother, Phineas, had been governor 12 years earlier.)  He was a popular candidate; according to an 1899 history, the Republicans swept the state “with a majority which has been exceeded only twice in the history of that party.” 

He had a quiet two years in office. The Hartford Courant put it this way: “In looks, manner and oratory, there was a decided suggestion of the South in George E. Lounsbury...At the state house, he was a useful and ornamental senator, and if no hard problems came his way as governor, he at least performed the routine and ceremonial duties of the office with ease and a becoming dignity.”

After his retirement, he became president of the First National Bank here (an ancestor of the Wells Fargo branch on Main Street). 

“Although he was more than ordinarily successful and acquired wealth, position and prominence, he always retained an interest in the common people, with whom he mingled freely and in whose welfare he was deeply interested, as he often showed in many practical ways, unknown to the general public,” his obituary said. 

Philip K. Saunders: 

'Dr. Panto Fogo'

Off and on for nearly a quarter of the 20th Century, the peripatetic P.K. Saunders lived in Ridgefield, probably where he wrote his critically acclaimed autobiography. But he was always heading off to other parts of the world, often to his native England and sometimes for extended periods, such as when he created one of Jamaica’s top golf clubs.

When he finally departed Ridgefield, the millionaire left behind a neighborhood served by a road bearing his name: Saunders Lane.

One of the more unusual characters in Ridgefield’s past, Philip Keith “P.K.” Saunders was  born in 1899 into an odd, but well-to-do British family. His father was a wealthy physician while his mother was an evangelical Christian who would move the family from town to town in order to find a local church suitable to her current needs. 

When he was only 15, he was sent to a Royal Navy training school and wound up serving in World War One as a British naval cadet and later engineer. During the war the teenage sailor nearly drowned when the dreadnaught he was serving aboard was sunk in the Dardanelles  and he had to swim for hours in the night before being rescued.

When he was 21, his family sent him to Brazil, where he worked as an engineer — one of his major projects was figuring out how to salvage hundreds of tons hides aboard a freighter that had run high and dry on a remote Brazilian beach. The wreck was far from civilization but close to native tribesmen, who would suddenly appear from the jungle to take their own share of the loot — Saunders and his crew put up no opposition, fearing the locals were headhunters.

The region was so remote that a “hotel” he stayed at in a nearby village while working on the freighter was little more than a thatched roof with four open sides. In his autobiography, “Dr. Panto Fogo,” Saunders describes an unusual feature of the hotel.

“The Hotel Mundo ... was infested with water rats from the nearby Carapata River, so instead of having a cat or a dog to keep the rats down, they had a tame anaconda, which was half grown and only 15 feet long,” he wrote. “Most of the time this pet lived in the rafters and you could wake up at night and hear a scuffle and a squeak as the rat went down. 

“At meals, Ninha, as she was called, would come round the tables and beg. She did this most

prettily, weaving her head and opening her mouth for titbits and she could catch better than an Australian cricketer, but the first time I met her it was quite a shock. 

“I had just arrived and was sitting at dinner, eating surprisingly delicious food. The only light was wax candles which flickered as the sea breeze blew through the room and a nice, gentle, big dog put his heavy flat head on my knee. So without looking down, I put my hand down to pat him on the head, only it was Ninha and the pretty little head was hard and stone cold.

“When I fell over backwards, old Captain Keelhauling, who was at the head of the table, lifted his long white beard to the sky and roared with merriment because it was his stock joke for newcomers and it had worked exactly to schedule on me.”

Around 1932 he moved to  South Africa, where he became an engineering draftsman for a company manufacturing explosives for the Johannesburg and Kimberley mines. As an engineer Saunders was assigned the task of cutting the costly power losses due to faulty, leaking valves used to supply air and water in the underground mines. While working in the mines at Witwatersrand, he invented a specialized valve for controlling air flow.

 The “diaphragm valve” traced its origins back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, who used a similar device to control the water and temperature of the hot baths.  Saunders had studied classical history and archaeology as a hobby, and knew of the ancient valve. His first modern diaphragm valve made him a millionaire.

Many patents were filed in his name for this valve, and he founded Saunders Valve Company in London to market his work. Saunders diaphragm valves are still used today, particularly in sophisticated medical equipment.

 By 1943 Saunders was in New York City, working for the U.S. Navy, installing anti-submarine devices on merchant vessels.

He continued to make the United States his home base, probably because he was irked by the climbing taxes in his native England. His autobiography is sprinkled with rants about the “socialists” who were taking his money. At one point he describes his savings account as  “devalued, inflated, exchange-controlled, and eventually tax-confiscated by a democracy in search of Utopia.”

Over the years he held many patents for inventions, usually related to valves and often designed to be labor-saving. He has been frequently quoted for his observation: “Laziness is the mother of nine inventions out of ten.”

By 1948 Saunders had discovered Ridgefield and moved to a house on lower Main Street.  At the time he was president of the Saunders Valve Company of America. 

In 1949 he bought the Starr estate, whose house is at the corner of Farmingville and Lounsbury Roads and whose land includes the site of today’s Farmingville School.  Almost immediately, he began plans for the 14-lot Saunders Lane subdivision, which he called Quaker Ridge. Houses began being built there in 1950. Oddly enough, one of the builders in the 1960s was William Saunders of Brookfield, no relation to P.K. 

 In 1960 Saunders wrote his light-hearted autobiography, whose full title is “Dr. Panto Fogo:  The Uninhibited Memoirs of A Twentieth Century Adventurer — His Inventions and His Escapades

on Four Continents and the High Seas.” The book is full of colorful tales of his experiences in South and North America, Africa and Europe, from his boyhood until just after World War II (he had planned a second volume to continue the post-war story). It was published by Prentice-Hall and he promoted it by observing, “The common belief is that all inventors are crazy, and I concur. Because if you are sane when you start off with an invention, the chances are you will be madder than a March hare by the time you are through — I was, as you will see.”

The book was praised by reviewers, including The New York Times and The Saturday Review, a literary magazine that said “Mr. Saunders is incapable of writing a dull paragraph,”

Dr. Panto Fogo is Anglo-Portuguese for “Dr. Pants-on-Fire,” a nickname friends gave Saunders after a rail trip through rural Brazil. He had ignored the friends’ warnings to keep his train compartment window closed and, as he napped,  his trousers caught fire from a spark thrown out by the ancient wood-fired steam engine.

While in Ridgefield, he continued to travel widely and, in 1950, to establish the Upton Country Club on the island of Jamaica. He maintained a home for himself and his daughter on Saunders Lane until 1974 by which time he was living in Manteo, N.C. He died there in 1997 at the age of 98.

 In an odd coincidence, the critic who reviewed Saunders’s book in 1960  for The Saturday Review was Quentin Reynolds, a journalist who had been a noted war correspondent in World War II. Reynolds later became even more famous for his libel suit against conservative syndicated columnist Westbrook Pegler — a Ridgefield resident — who had called him “yellow” and an “absentee war correspondent.”  Represented by the well-known attorney Louis Nizer, Reynolds wound up winning $175,001 (more than $1.6 million in 2018 dollars) in the case — at the time it was the largest libel judgment ever handed down. The lawsuit later inspired a Broadway play, “A Case of Libel,” and two TV movies.

Varian Fry: 

A Man of Courage

When he lived in Ridgefield, Varian Fry rarely talked about war, much less his part in it. He was more likely to chat about his irises or perhaps the state of classics instruction at Ridgefield High School, where he did some teaching. 

However, by the late 1990s, 20 years after his death, Mr. Fry was being recognized around the world as one of the unsung heroes of World War II. A non-Jew, Mr. Fry is credited with saving the lives of some 2,000 Jewish artists, writers and scholars wanted by the Nazis.  

As a volunteer agent for the World Rescue Committee, this scholarly intellectual spent 14 months in Marseilles in 1940 and 1941, sneaking out countless Jews and others wanted by the Nazis—among them painter Marc Chagall, sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, painter-poet Max Ernst, and writer Hannah Arendt.  

“I stayed because the refugees needed me,” he later wrote. “But it took courage, and courage is a quality that I hadn’t previously been sure I possessed.” 

His exploits—and his lack of support from the U.S. government, which helped to get him expelled from France—are detailed in his 1945 book, “Surrender on Demand,” reissued in 1997. His story has been told in major exhibits at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington (1993-94) and The Jewish Museum in New York City (1997-98).

France awarded him the Legion of Honor in 1960, and in 1996, Israel posthumously gave him the “Righteous Among the Nations” award, presented to gentiles who helped to save Jews; he was the first American ever so honored. At the ceremony, U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher apologized for Mr. Fry’s treatment by the U.S. government during the war. 

In 2000, both a biography (A Quiet American: The Secret War of Varian Fry) and a movie—a Showtime film starring William Hurt as Fry and produced by Barbra Streisand—were done about his rescue work, and he was being heralded through exhibits on three continents. 

Mr. Fry, who worked as a writer and editor, lived on Olmstead Lane and later in Farmingville from 1956 until shortly before his death in Easton in 1967.

Peter Cornen: 

Oil in Them Thar Hills?

Oil wells on our ridges? If Peter Cornen had had his way more than a century ago, Ridgefield might have become a town dotted with derricks pumping black gold.

One of Ridgefield’s few millionaires in the 1800s, Cornen knew oil. He had made a fortune wildcatting in the western Pennsylvania oil fields where he and his Ridgefield partner, Henry I.

Beers, drilled one of the first hugely successful wells.

And he was certain Ridgefield was a gold mine of oil.

Peter P. Cornen was a storybook example of an adventurous, 19th Century, self-made man. Born in 1815 in New York City to a working-class family, Cornen attended city schools and started his career as a shipbuilder. By the 1840s he owned a Manhattan ship chandlery, a store that sold nautical items for vessels large and small, and had married Lydia Beers, a farmer’s daughter from Ridgefield. 

As a teenager in the 1840s, Lydia’s brother, Henry, went to work for Cornen. When the Gold Rush erupted in 1848, Cornen, then 33, decided that a life of adventure in and around the gold fields sounded more exciting — and profitable — than being a merchant in Manhattan. He sailed for California to make his fortune,  according to The Ridgefield Press, “round the Horn to San Francisco.” 

But it wasn’t gold that brought him success among the 49ers. For three years he “engaged in mercantile pursuits, his energy, perseverance and keen business foresight adding greatly to his accumulations, so that he ranked with the moneyed men of those days,” The Press  said. 

Soon after Cornen got established in California, he sent a message to Henry Beers, who was running his New York store, telling him to sell the business and urging he come to California. Beers did just that and he, too, made out well in retailing and real estate.

However, by the late 1850s, both men were back East, operating real estate and investment companies in New York. (Cornen sold Cornelius Vanderbilt much of the land on which Grand Central Terminal was built.) In the early 1860s, word was arriving of  new “gold,” this one liquid, in the hills of northwestern Pennsylvania. Back then, oil was in growing demand for producing lamp and stove fuels, lubricants and such (the first modern internal combustion engine was yet to be made). 

Cornen and Beers got together in 1862 and decided to give oil a try, becoming among the first wildcatters in America.

They spent time exploring the area around Oil City, Pa., and finally bought the Smith farm on the Cherry Run, about a mile north of Rouseville. “It was a common saying around Oil City at that time that ‘Those crazy Yankees will never get oil because they are going away from Oil Creek,’” said a local newspaper’s historian in 1922. The “Yankees” proved the locals wrong and drilled what some have called the first really successful well in the Pennsylvania fields. And they called it “Yankee.”

     In his 1893 book, “Sketches in Crude-Oil,” John P. McLaurin aid Yankee flowed “like Mount Vesuvius spilling lava.”  Later other wells on the farm, bearing such names as Auburn, Gromiger, Cattaraugus, Aazin, and Fry, added to the output. Cornen and Beers had paid $3,500 for the 50-acre farm (that had some years earlier been sold for “a yoke of oxen”); by the mid-1860s, they had turned down an offer of $4 million ($64 million in today’s dollars) for the property.

     Cornen eventually returned to New York business world and was prominent in financial circles. He “made and lost several fortunes,” a Press feature said in 1887. The Panic of 1873   “swallowed a great share of his large fortune,” The Press later said. “Thereafter he engaged in enterprises on a smaller scale, including real estate here and there, but remained a wealthy man all his life. “Those who know him well say that in spite of reverses, he is still able to draw his check for half a million dollars, and as he is a man of quiet tastes, this sum will probably be sufficient to keep the wolf from his door as long as he lives,” The Press said in 1887.

Drawn by his wife’s roots in the town, Cornen had come to Ridgefield in 1854 and built a Spanish-style house on the corner of Danbury and Farmingville Roads. He eventually amassed hundreds of acres surrounding it and was much praised for planting scores of maples along Danbury Road, which became informally known as Cornen Avenue.  

Peter’s son, Cyrus A. Cornen Sr., lived there, describing it in 1911 as “a house large enough for a moderate-sized hotel, with 11 feet 6 inches ceilings on the first floor with 11 windows, each of which can be made a door if you wish it; with cultivated sugar maples of some 45 years’ growth on either side of a wide highway for over three quarters of a mile and … a cultivated sugar maple orchard of some 250 trees of the same growth.” The estate included “a trout stream running through

this 300-acre property where my two sons from the banks of this same property last season caught six trout that weighed seven pounds and seven ounces.”

Because of a great fear of fire,  Peter Cornen had lined the insides of the walls of his house with brick for better protection. The house eventually became part the Outpost Nurseries property in the 1930’s and, having fallen into disuse, was torn down about 1942.  (Karl S. Nash, publisher of the Ridgefield Press, said the house-wreckers had no idea that the walls were brick-filled when they started dismantling the building, a project that consequently took much longer than expected.)  

In 1976, the Ridgefield Savings Bank – which Cornen had helped establish – purchased the site of this house and some years later, built its headquarters there. 

In 1887, The New York Times carried a story reporting that “Ridgefield, the home of Gov. Lounsbury and a favorite summer resort for wealthy New-Yorkers, is agitated over discoveries and statements made by Peter P. Cornen, a wealthy citizen, who has had years of experience in the Pennsylvania oil fields and who, after months of prospecting, is led to believe that the little town is situated over an oil field of considerable magnitude.”

The Times said that Cornen was “so positive that oil can be had in Ridgefield by simply boring in the earth for it that he is willing and even anxious to be one of a company to erect the necessary machinery and sink a well. A score or more of the wealthiest citizens are deeply interested….”

Cornen based his views on what today would be some pretty weird science. The Press said he cited  “the volcanic formation of the country, and then he notes the abundance of oil producing trees and plants. Butternut, hickory and walnut trees fill the forest, and their fruit, as we all know, abounds in oil. As no traces of oil have ever been found in raindrops, it is plain that the oils of the walnut, the butternut and the hickory nut are drawn from the soil, and if there is oil in the soil, it can probably be gotten out.”

But what probably really sparked his interest in prospecting was his friend, Aaron W. Lee, who had a big farm in Farmingville.  “Two years ago,” The Press said, “Aaron Lee dug a well near his barn to supply water for his stock. Water was found at the depth of about eight or ten feet, but the cattle would not drink it. It had an oily appearance and a disagreeable smell. Mr. Cornen says the well diggers encountered a small pocket of natural gas, and that where there is gas, there is oil.”

Cornen proposed organizing a joint stock company, the Ridgefield Oil and Gas Heating and Lighting Company, to do the drilling, requiring a shaft some 2,000 feet deep.

Cornen, the Press added, “very truly says that no man can look at the earth and tell what lies beneath, but from what he knows about Ridgefield and the country for ten miles around, he is satisfied that oil can be found there in paying quantities.”

A Cornen fan, Press Editor E.C. Bross added, “There are those who fear that the discovery of oil will forever ruin Ridgefield as a fashionable summer resort, but the operators have made a solemn promise to locate the wells at such a distance from the fashionable center that the clothing of the summer resident shall not be soiled nor her delicate nostrils be in the least offended.”

Articles of incorporation were approved at a meeting Nov. 20, 1887. The committee of backers read like a who’s who of Ridgefield businessmen and included L. H. Bailey, owner of the Bailey Inn and developer of Bailey Avenue; Hiram K. Scott, who owned the predecessor of Bissell’s Pharmacy and was town clerk and probate judge; D. Smith Sholes, wealthy Main Street merchant; Isaac Osborne, who operated what’s now Ridgefield Supply; and Aaron Lee, Farmingville farmer and first selectman. 

However, by March 1888, The Press was reporting that “a New York paper this week prints the localities where natural gas is found, but makes no mention of Ridgefield.”   And after that, mention of the oil drilling scheme dried up in the newspaper and by March 1891, Cornen had suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. Two years later he was dead.

If exploratory drilling ever took place, it was undoubtedly unsuccessful. But it’s also possible that people concerned about the effects of having oil fields in Ridgefield — which had been promoting its clean, quiet, and unpolluted hills as a refuge from the dirty, noisy, and noxious city — may have quietly gained an upper hand and quashed the project. 

Perhaps, too, folks decided that Cornen was a bit too odd to trust. He was, after all, “a man of marked eccentricities,” said his nationally published obituary. “Whether upon stock exchange or in the legislature, he appeared in clothes which had seen years of service. When he had millions invested in railroads, he preferred to walk rather than ride in the cars, and frequently tramped nine miles from Ridgefield to Danbury.”

On other fronts, Cornen was an active participant in the Ridgefield community. A Democrat, he served as a state senator in 1867 and in 1871 he was elected to the House of Representatives. That fall he was elected first selectman and served one term. 

Cornen was one of the original directors of the Ridgefield and New York Railroad Company, which had proposed and started building a rail line from Titicus into Westchester County to meet the main line at Port Chester. That plan was abandoned after the Danbury and Norwalk Rail Road built the branch line into town in 1870. 

A more successful venture was his participation in the founding in 1871 of the Ridgefield Savings Bank, which today has grown into the large Fairfield County Bank.

He was also a member of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church and the Odd Fellows Lodge. 

Cornen died in 1893 at the age of 79 and is buried in Ridgefield Cemetery in a gated family

plot over which looms perhaps the tallest gravestone in town.

At his death The Press said: “Mr. Cornen, in business, through often indulging in transactions involving millions, was governed by none but the most honorable motives. His judgment was considered sound and his opinion once given was seldom erroneous.” The obituary never mentioned the oil scheme that was big news only six years earlier.

Perhaps “an oil field of considerable magnitude” does exist beneath Ridgefield, but it’s pretty certain it will remain there, untapped.

Fred Jones: 

Dog Detective

One day in the 1950s, Fred Jones’s telephone rang. He picked up the receiver and a very angry woman’s voice began demanding that he do something about the two peacocks fighting in her yard.

“Madam,” he replied patiently, “I am not the peacock warden. I am the dog warden.”

Though born in Canada in 1908, Fred B. Jones spent most of his life in Ridgefield. He was one of the town’s last old-time farmers,  caretaker of the working farm at the Brewster family estate, The Hickories, on Lounsbury Road for nearly 60 years. 

But he was also Ridgefield’s dog warden in the 1950s and 60s, and an expert lapidary. 

In 1960, The New York World Telegram and Sun called Jones “the best darned dog warden in Connecticut” and described how he tracked down the owners of a lost collie by contacting authorities in Long Island, Michigan and Florida, and mailing more than two dozen letters. 

The paper also told how one day, a Ridgebury recluse died while walking home from Danbury and his two dogs refused to let police or the medical examiner approach the body.   Jones talked to the snarling dogs, then walked into the dead man’s cabin. The dogs followed him and he locked them inside, telling authorities he had just employed some simple dog psychology.  (Jones and veterinarian Dr. Jordan Dann tried for six weeks to tame the dead man’s pets, but were unsuccessful and the dogs had to be put down.)

Perhaps it was more of that psychology — or just a good knowledge of the breed — that Jones employed when a wealthy guest at the Stonehenge Inn reported his two valuable beagles had run off. “Solving this case was child’s play for Fred Jones,” the New York newspaper said. “He knew beagles, so he went off into the Farmingville swamp and found the two dogs chasing rabbits.”

He also found a famous dog.  Morgan, a basset hound that had wandered away from its

owner, TV and movie producer Dick Gordon, was well known to television viewers in the 1950s, appearing regularly on the Garry Moore Show and in several sitcoms.  (In 1973, the Altman Department Store Christmas catalogue in New York featured a “Huggable Morgan” stuffed animal complete with a squeaker nose.)

Roaming and usually unlicensed dogs were a serious problem in the mid-20th Century, when there were still farms with livestock that could be attacked. Jones was tough about licensing dogs, so much so in 1954 that he conducted door-to-door surveys of the town to make sure dogs were licensed. 

In 1959, when roaming packs of dogs were attacking livestock and wildlife, he pointed out, under state law, that the town has to pay for chickens, sheep and rabbits that had been killed by stray dogs.

In 1961, the town was having problems with dog packs killing deer, which back then were relatively few in number to start with. Jones warned the public in February of that year that he had the right under law to shoot and kill dogs that were attacking deer.

Under Jones’s guidance in 1954, the town built its first dog pound to hold strays the warden had captured. It had six runs. First Selectman Leo F. Carroll said in 1959, when many of the state’s pounds were being criticized as cruel canine prisons, Ridgefield’s pound has “heat, light, meals, and each guest has his own private runway where he takes his exercise at his leisure.” 

Sometimes even high-class impoundment did not sit well with locals, however. In 1957, Police Chief John F. Haight reported that some local children broke into the pound and “liberated” a beagle that had escaped from its Danbury owners.  Chief Haight said the children felt sad for the dog being locked up, but warned that “sometimes vicious dogs are kept at the pound, and any child gaining entrance to the building via a window might run the risk of being badly mauled or bitten.”

By the early 1960s, the pound was overcrowded and was housing two dogs per run. It wasn’t until 1973 that the town tore down the 1954 shelter and built a new 14-run building. By then Jones had retired.

 Especially later in his life, Jones became well known an expert lapidary, a person who cuts and polishes gemstones. And to get the gemstones, he had rocks. Lots of them. “The quantity of rocks in and around the Lounsbury Road home of Mr. and Mrs. Fred  B. Jones might lead one to believe that the couple was planning to build a house of stone,” said a 1974 Ridgefield Press interview with Jones. “Not so. These are not ordinary rocks, they’re semi-precious stones in the rough.”

“A rock hound, Mr. Jones is hooked on the beauty which can be wrought from rough stones.”

  By the 1970s, he and his late wife, Ruth, were traveling 25,000 miles a year, acquiring and selling rocks in a business called as Fred’s Gem Den. 

Fred Jones died in 1999 at the age of 91.

Over his years in office as dog warden, Jones put in some long hours and was on call 24/7. Once he told a woman whose dog had run off to be sure to let him know if it returned. Two days later, his phone rang. “I wanted you to know that Rover just came home,” the woman reported. 

It was 2:30 in the morning.

The Steele Family: 

Early Black Ridgefielders 

Although a few black slaves and freemen had lived in Ridgefield in the 18th and early 19th Centuries,  the first home-owning black family to settle here may have been the Steeles of Farmingville.

According to research done by Keith Jones for his book, “The Farms of Farmingville,” in 1865 Isaac Hart Steele of North Salem, N.Y., paid $300 to William Lee for a small, already antique house on two acres along what is now Limekiln Road. Located  just south of Poplar Road, the house still stands today.

Jones says there were indications the Steele family may have been living there as early as 1859. That is when his daughter, Mary E. Steele, was born to his first wife, Sarah A. Steele. Sarah died in 1862 at the age of 32, and by 1865 when the the house purchase took place, Isaac was married to Catherine “Katie” Pines Steele.

Isaac Hart Steele’s home sat on two acres of limestone ledge, making it unsuitable for farming, Jones said. To earn an income, Steele worked on neighboring farms, including that of Azariah Smith. Apparently his abilities at farming gained a reputation for excellence because Steele was hired to oversee the fields on Gov. George E. Lounsbury’s large farm, The Hickories. 

His wife,  Katie, may have worked as a member of the household staff at The Hickories, Jone said. Her step-daughter, Mary, may also have worked for the governor; when she died in 1933, her occupation was listed as “servant” in the town’s death records.

Mary E. Steele was born in 1859, possibly in the Limekiln Road house, and attended school in the old Farmingville Schoolhouse near the site of today’s Farmingville School.

She told an interviewer in the 1920s  that her ancestors had lived in the North Salem area since the 1700s, and recalled hearing her great-grandmother tell of attending a gathering in North Salem during the Revolution when General Washington and General Lafayette and their staffs stopped for refreshments on their way to Hartford. Aunt Sibby Sickle had also been present when the French Army under General Rochambeau passed through North Salem and Ridgebury. 

Town Historian Richard E. Venus knew Mary Steele in her later years. She was “a nice little old lady that everyone thought the world of,” he recalled in 1983. “She was a very pleasant and cultured person.

“Mary did a lot of walking and always dressed in a black dress with large white collar and a black straw hat with a white band. If she happened to be going by at meal time, she was always invited in to eat with the family.”

Venus said Mary Steele “told wonderful stories. She was a great storyteller and a most interesting person to listen to.”

The Steele family belonged to St. Stephen’s Church.

Katie Steele died in 1889. Three years later, Isaac Hart Steele sold the Farmingville property for $712, more than twice what he paid, and bought a place on Danbury Road near where Adam Broderick is now. He lived there for a while, eventually returning to North Salem, where he died in 1921 at the age of 87. 

Mary remained in Ridgefield, living in an apartment over a store on Main Street, a little north of where Books on the Common is now. In January 1932, she was asleep when a fire broke out in a nearby apartment. She was rescued by firefighters. 

She died nearly two years later, in December 1933, at the age of 75.

Mary, along with father Isaac, mother Sarah and step-mother Katie, are buried with other members of the Steele family in the historic June Cemetery on June Road in North Salem.

The old Steele homestead on Limekiln Road included a barn, now converted into a house, that stands only a couple of feet from the edge of the road’s pavement  — perhaps closer to a road than any house in town. Keith Jones reported that he was told by a former owner that a mid-1980s town road crew worker was “reluctant to enter the building, reciting local tradition that the attic was haunted by the ghost of an old, white-haired man who could be seen hovering behind [the] gable window. 

“Perhaps, the attic ghost — if there really is one — is the heart-broken spirit of Hart Steele in search of his wife, Catherine, both of whom barely scratched a living from this small, limestone infested property,” Keith Jones wrote.

Dr. Blandina Worcester Brewster: 

Early Woman Physician

A respected physician when relatively few women were practicing medicine, Dr. Blandina Worcester was “one of the pioneer women doctors of this country, her example having inspired other women to enter the profession,” The Ridgefield Press reported in 1984 when she died at the age of 82. 

Dr. Worcester was not only a leading pediatrician in New York City, but also a professor of pediatrics at a top university. 

What’s more, she and her husband established a family that 80 years later, is a significant part of Ridgefield’s life.

A native of Geneva, N.Y., Dr. Worcester was born in 1902, graduated from Radcliffe College in 1923, and from Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1927. During her internship at Johns Hopkins, she worked with the Frontier Nursing Service in rural Kentucky, riding to her patients on horseback. 

She established a practice of pediatrics in New York City in the 1930s, was on the attending staff at Bellevue Hospital’s Children’s Medical Service from 1933 until 1968, was medical director at The New York Infirmary for many years, and was a professor of clinical pediatrics at New York University’s Medical School for 38 years. 

In 1935, she married Carroll H. Brewster, a lawyer and partner of Davis Polk in New York City, and a year later, the couple bought the Farmingville farm that had been “The Hickories,” the home of George H. Lounsbury (also profiled in Who Was Who), governor of Connecticut. When the Brewsters bought the place, it had recently been used as a private girls school.

Dr. Worcester — she used that name throughout her career — lived in New York and spent summers and weekends here until her retirement in 1971, after which she moved fulltime to Ridgefield. 

She was a voracious reader but in her last few years, became nearly blind. Nonetheless, she continued to play bridge with some of her many Ridgefield friends.

Dr. Worcester was also a woman of scholarship and a keen mind, and both of her two sons became leaders in academia. When he retired in 1999, the Rev. John Gurdon Brewster had been Episcopal chaplain at Cornell University for 34 years — a position he held longer than any other university Episcopal chaplain in the country. He is also a sculptor and his work is in many collections, including Union Theological Center and The Vatican.

Carroll Worcester Brewster, a Yale Law School graduate, was a dean at Dartmouth, and then president of Hollins College. He was later president of Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, his mother’s birthplace (she was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters there in 1983).  

In 1966, Carroll Brewster became a member of the Ridgefield Conservation Commission. He resigned in 1969 to pursue careers that included legal counsel to the government of Sudan, as well as college leadership. On his retirement, he returned to Ridgefield and rejoined the Conservation Commission in 2000 and is still serving today — a half century after he began the job.

Carroll Brewster lives on the family farm, whose development rights the family deeded to the town in 1996, preserving more than 100 acres in Farmingville. 

His daughter, Dina, resurrected The Hickories as an organic farm in the early 2000s, and continues to run the operation, now the largest and one of the last working farms in Ridgefield.