Alonzo Barton Hepburn:

Farm-boy Financier of Altnacraig 

Barton Hepburn apparently had a lot on his mind as he rushed along 23rd Street in New York City that cold Friday afternoon in January 1922. He was on his way to the Fourth Street branch of the Chase National Bank — an institution he once headed. As he reached the intersection with Fifth Avenue, he did not stop and strode into the traffic. He was promptly hit by a Fifth Avenue bus.

Hepburn suffered a double fracture of his right leg. Doctors that Friday didn’t think the injuries were serious, but by Monday “they saw that the aged financier’s nervous system was not rallying from the shock,” The New York Times reported. Two days later,  Hepburn was dead. He was 75 years old.

A man many considered a genius at banking and at finance in general, Hepburn had risen from being a farm boy and small-town teacher to become the United States controller of the currency, heading the agency that charters and regulates all national banks. He was later president of Chase National Bank, one of the country’s largest financial institutions. 

He and his wife Emily also built the legendary High Ridge mansion called Altnacraig.

Alonzo Barton Hepburn was born in 1846 on a farm in Colton, N.Y., one of the most northern and remote parts of New York State.  

Alonzo, as he was called as a boy, had no interest in farming, much to the distress of his father. He had instead come under the influence of his three uncles, one of whom founded the famous Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper.  The others were also “in occupations that seemed to Alonzo more interesting, if not more profitable, than farming,” The Times said.

He attended nearby St. Lawrence Academy, then a teacher training school and now SUNY at Potsdam. To continue his studies he borrowed $1,000 to take courses at Middlebury College in Vermont. He taught in local schoolhouses in winter and labored in the summer on farms to work his way through Middlebury, graduating in 1871.

Hepburn then became a professor of mathematics at St. Lawrence Academy, by then called Potsdam Normal School. He was soon named principal of the Ogdensburg Educational Institute, the high school in Ogdensburg.

Meanwhile, he was also studying law on the side. After he was admitted to the New York

Bar. he opened a law office in Colton. There he had some clients who owned huge tracts of forest land in the northern Adirondacks. He saw an opportunity and began buying timberland — 30,000 acres at 50 cents an acre (equal to $10 an acre in 2019 dollars) — and soon left the law for lumber.

He was elected a state representative yearly from 1875 to 1879, and in 1880 was appointed superintendent of the State Banking Department, where he was a leader in efforts to reform the way New York State banks did business. As his interests turned more toward banks, he sold his lumber business for $200,000 (about $5,250,000 today) and devoted the rest of his life to banking.

He became a national bank examiner in New York City around 1890, gaining such a reputation as a conscientious reformer that, in 1892, President Benjamin Harrison appointed him the U.S. controller of the currency. A year later, he resigned to become president of the Third National Bank in New York City.  By 1899, he was president of Chase National Bank, a post he held until 1911 when he became chairman of the Board of Directors.

 He was also a director of such companies as New York Life Insurance, Sears, Roebuck & Company, Studebaker Corporation, the Woolworth Company, and the Great Northern Railway Company.

Hepburn was a writer, producing both books and many magazine articles on banking and finance as well as money itself — he wrote History of Coinage and Currency in the United States: Perennial Contest for Sound Money (1903) and  A History of Currency in the United States (1915). 

One of his more unusual books was published in 1913 by Harper & Brothers. The Story of An Outing is a light-hearted, 100-page account of a hunting safari that year to Africa with four friends. It contains many pictures of the hunters, the native people they met and the places they went, along with the usual  shots of dead animals.

 Hepburn was also a philanthropist, particularly when it came to education. He left   bequests of some $3 million — about $45 million today — of which $2 million went to colleges and libraries, including Middlebury, Princeton, Columbia, Williams, NYU, and one school in the South: The historically black Tuskegee Institute. He also gave $500,000 to libraries in his native St. Lawrence County, N.Y. (the Hepburn Library in Norfolk and Hepburn Library in Colton are on the National Register of Historic Places), and $600,000 to the A. Barton Hepburn Hospital in Ogdensburg, N.Y., now the Claxton Hepburn Medical Center.

In 1873, Hepburn married Harriet A. Fisher of Vermont. She died in 1881, leaving him with two young sons. Around 1885, he met Emily Eaton, who was 19 years younger than he was.

“It seemed unbelievable that he should be interested in me,” Emily said 60 years later. But Hepburn immediately began wooing Emily in a rather unusual way: He founded a cribbage club, named her president, sent her a cribbage board, and scheduled meetings — at which he was the only other member present. He would write letters that would include messages like “Can’t we have a meeting of the Cribbage Club the first night after I get back?”

She was soon beating him at the game, but he had won the prize. They were engaged in 1886 and married a year later. She became, with her husband’s support, an active suffragist and after Barton’s death, a Manhattan activist  for women and business leader who built the landmark Beekman Tower hotel near the United Nations in New York City (her profile has been posted on Old Ridgefield).

While Barton was Chase president, the Hepburns decided they wanted a country retreat. 

They opted for a lot on High Ridge in Ridgefield with a spectacular view to the west but from which one could also see Long Island Sound to the south.  The Ridgefield Press reported in May 1908 that “Mr. A.B. Hepburn, one of the most prominent financiers of the country, former comptroller of the currency and now president of the Chase National Bank of New York, is building one of the most handsome homes to be seen in this town of beautiful homes.”

The magnificent mansion was called Altnacraig, a Gaelic name that they translated, “high crag”  (Hepburn traced his ancestry to Scotland. However, Philip Palmer, operator of Allt-Na-Craig House, a B&B  in Scotland, reports the term means “water from the hill.”)  The building later became a well-known nursing home, also called Altnacraig. The mansion burned to the ground in a suspicious 1994 blaze, and was replaced with a house of similar size, but entirely different design.

The Hepburns counted many people in the arts among their friends, including artist Frederic Remington, novelist Irving Bacheller (both born in St. Lawrence County) and writer/humorist Mark Twain. 

Bacheller introduced the Hepburns to Twain, who lived in Redding. When the Hepburns arrived at Twain’s house, called Stormfield, for their first visit,  they were greeted by the yapping of  Twain’s dog. Before even introductions took place,  Twain told them, “This is my dog; whatever he does is law in this house.”

Soon after, the dog got a hold of Barton Hepburn’s brand new hat and took off with it, prompting Twain to point to a motto hung over his mantlepiece: “Life is just one damned thing after another.”

Frederic Remington:

He Knew the Horse

Frederic Remington’s pictures and sculptures depicting the Old West are in countless museums and collections, and bring large prices: A sculpture in bronze, called “The Wounded Bunkie,” sold at auction for $5.6 million in 2008 while an oil painting, “A Reconnaissance,” fetched $5.2 million at a 1999 auction. 

Even postal people love him: Few Americans outside of presidents like George Washington have been so extensively remembered on United States postage stamps—at least six bear his art or his face.

Unfortunately for Remington, his stay in Ridgefield was brief. He died six months after arriving.

Though his fame is based on the Old West that he so colorfully documented, Frederic Sackrider Remington spent all but a few years of his life in the Northeast. He was born in 1861 in Canton, N.Y., son of a newspaper editor who wanted him to pursue that career. 

While he attended military schools in Vermont and Massachusetts, Remington found he loved to draw more than to write or fight, and he wound up attending the School of Fine Arts at Yale, where he also played football for the Bulldogs. His first published illustration was a cartoon of a “bandaged football player” for a student newspaper. 

He left Yale when his father became seriously ill and died. With an inheritance in hand, Remington decided against returning to college, and headed west in 1881 to seek adventure; he was only 19 years old. In the next few years, he traveled widely in the western states and territories, working as a cowboy, a sheep rancher, a saloon owner, a reporter, and at other jobs—all the while sketching what he was seeing. 

Around 1885, he came back east, studied at the Art Students League, and began an illustrating career with Harper’s Magazine in the days before photographs were common in publications. He returned to the West briefly to cover the Indian Wars in Apache country for Harper’s. By then, he was earning $1,200 a year as a commercial artist, a sizable sum at the time. “That’s a pretty good break for an ex cow-puncher,” he said. 

Remington went on to illustrate not only for magazines, but also books, and wound up writing a half dozen books of his own about the West. Virtually all of his illustrations, his paintings and later his sculpture dealt with the Western themes.  “I knew the wild riders and vacant lands were about to vanish forever,” he wrote. “And the more I considered the subject, the bigger the forever loomed.”

While he became widely praised as an illustrator, Remington wanted recognition as an artist. By the turn of the 20th century, he was devoting much of his time to painting and sculpture—and even burned many earlier works he felt were too much like illustrations.
Remington was living and working in New Rochelle, N.Y. when he decided he wanted a wilder environment. (Another noted New Rochelle artist-illustrator later did the same; Norman Rockwell moved first to Vermont, and later Stockbridge, Mass.) 

There are several stories about why Remington chose Ridgefield. One was that the town was recommended by his lifelong friend, Alonzo Barton Hepburn, with whom he had grown up in upstate New York; Hepburn, Chase Bank president, had recently built a mansion on High Ridge, called Altnacraig. 

Another explanation was that Poultney Bigelow, a close friend who was editor and founder of Outing magazine, had recommended Ridgefield for both its wildness and its sophistication. Bigelow lived in nearby New York State and probably knew the town from visits. 

Perhaps both Hepburn and Bigelow had talked up the town to Remington, who at the same time was being strongly influenced by the Impressionist movement—and a leading impressionist, J. Alden Weir, lived in Ridgefield and was often visited by Remington’s friend, Childe Hassam.

Remington wound up buying 42 acres along Barry Avenue on which he and his wife, Eva, designed a sizable home and a state-of-the-art studio that featured a huge fieldstone fireplace, and large (for the era) plate glass windows. The estate was known as Lural Place, according to his

Ridgefield Press obituary, but another source said he called it “One Hoss Farm.” After his death the estate became known as Oak Knoll, a name that has stuck over the decades since.
Remington moved into the home in July 1909. In December, he fell ill and was eventually diagnosed with appendicitis that developed into peritonitis. His condition was said to have been exacerbated by his treating himself with laxatives and the fact that he weighed 300 pounds. 

An emergency operation was performed at his house—reportedly on the dining room table. As The Press said at the time, “The artist rallied after the operation and it was believed he would recover. Complications, however, entered into the case on Saturday and the patient sank rapidly during the night.” He died Sunday, the day after Christmas. He was only 48 years old. 

During his career Remington produced more than 3,000 drawings, illustrations, paintings, and bronzes. “The extent of what he might have been was curtailed only by his untimely death at a time when he could have had 20 years of growth ahead of him, but he was already the paramount exponent of his kind of art and the most American of them all,” said biographers Peggy and Harold Samuels.

Remington loved riding and depicting horses in action, be it on canvass or in bronze. “When I die,” he told a friend not long before his death, “I want my epitaph to be, ‘He knew the horse.’” However, his spare gravestone in Canton, N.Y., bears only his name and the years of his birth and death.
In 1965, Remington’s house was declared a national historic landmark. The studio he had in the house has been reproduced in detail at the Remington Art Museum in Ogdensburg, N.Y., where his family once lived. 

For years, townspeople had wanted a road name recalling the artist. From shortly after his death until well into the 1950s, various movements tried to have Barry Avenue changed to Remington Road. In fact, a 1927 map of property along Barry Avenue called the highway “Remington Road.”
A new road at the1960s Westmoreland subdivision gave the town an opportunity to commemorate the artist: Remington Road runs between Barry Avenue and Peaceable Hill Road, intersecting Barry Avenue not far from Remington’s house. 

Perhaps the artist had gotten a chance to hunt on the Westmoreland estate during his brief stay here.—from “Hidden History of Ridgefield,” History Press, 2015