Lillian Loomis Dempsey: 

The Heiress of Northoline

A color postcard from around 1910 depicts “Northoline,” the then-new West Lane mansion of Lillian Loomis Dempsey. Recently widowed, Mrs. Dempsey had built the house after receiving a huge and somewhat controversial inheritance that made headlines from Georgia to New York.

 Lillian Dempsey was the wife of Thomas C. Dempsey, who had  died July 4, 1899, in Asbury Park, N.J. A few months later, on Sept. 25, 1899, The Baltimore Sun reported that “active negotiations have been pending for several weeks to prevent a threatened controversy” over Thomas Dempsey’s estate. 

That estate, according to The Sun and other newspapers, was said to be worth $1 million — equal to about $30 million in today’s currency.

“While Mr. Dempsey, who was 85 years old, was in bed three days before his death, he executed his will, by the provisions of which the bulk of his fortune goes to his widow, Lillian Loomis Dempsey, whom it appointed executrix,” the Sun continued, then adding, “She is about 32 years old and had formerly been the companion of one of his daughters by his first wife.”

In his will, Thomas left nothing to that daughter, Nellie, who was married to Richard Needham, a wealthy merchant from Columbus, Ga. He also ignored his son, Wilson P. Dempsey, who was an “inmate of a sanitarium” near Baltimore, The Sun said.

“Mr. Dempsey was a retired dry goods merchant of a Southern family, having his residence in Macon, Ga. He owned valuable real estate in that city and an old homestead in Ireland. The rest of his estate is comprised of securities, the exact amount of which is not known.”

Dempsey had lived most of the year in New York City and elsewhere in the North. “He was a member of the Roman Catholic Church and made liberal gifts to charity,” The Sun said. “There was much astonishment when it was ascertained that he had made no charitable bequests.”

While the will had been offered for probate in Macon, no formal objection had yet been filed, the newspaper said, adding, however, that “Mrs. Needham is much dissatisfied with its provisions, as she thinks she is entitled to a share of her father’s fortune. She has threatened to make a contest in behalf of herself and her brother.”

Who were this wealthy 85-year-old man and his 32-year-old wife?

A native of Ireland (he was not from a “Southern family,” as the Sun suggested), Thomas Charles Dempsey had been born in 1814 and came to the United States as a young man. He became a citizen in 1842 in Savannah, and was soon living in Macon where he amassed his fortune as a retailer and investor in real estate. Around the beginning of the Civil War, he married Marie Lumpkin. Wilson was born in 1863 and Ann Ellen, called “Nellie,” was born in 1871. His wife died in 1885.

Lillian Loomis Wickes was born in 1867 in Macon. While in school there, she became friends with Nellie Dempsey. At some point the widowed Thomas Dempsey began noticing this companion of his daughter and by the early 1890s, he had proposed to her. They were married around 1893, when he was about 79 and she was 27.

One wonders how Nellie Dempsey felt, seeing her old schoolmate become her stepmother. 

The next year, Lillian and Thomas had a daughter, Marie Monica. In 1896, Thomas Charles Jr. arrived, and on June 6, 1899 — a month before his father’s death — Norbert Anthony was born.

According to subsequent newspaper accounts, including an article in The New York Times, Mrs. Dempsey hired a New York City lawyer named Robert O’Bryne to handle the dispute over the will. In the end, Nellie and her institutionalized brother got $250,000, leaving around $750,000 for the widow Dempsey. That today would be about $7.5 million for Nellie and Wilson, and  $22.5 million for Lillian.

Attorney O’Bryne claimed a lot of credit for the settlement, but it is quite possible that Lillian Dempsey felt an obligation to her old friend and his brother — her stepchildren — and that Nellie, hardly poverty-stricken, realized that she would never get much more than that, especially considering that her dad had fathered  three children with Lillian — all of them then under 10 years old.

As one dispute ended, another began. Attorney O’Boyle filed suit in a New York City court in July 1900, claiming he had not been paid for his services. He maintained “he was the one who kept down a contest over Mr. Dempsey’s will, and for his services he was entitled to $24,000,” The Macon Telegraph reported.  

It added, “The widow vigorously denied owing him any money. She said she had never employed him, but had paid him for all he had done. He is insisting that what he did was worth the $24,000 additional.”

That $24,000 would be about $731,000 today.

The case went to a referee who apparently worked things out without publicity.

Meanwhile, Lillian Dempsey, who had been living in New York City, decided she would like a country house and somehow came upon a tract of West Lane farmland on a small ridge overlooking South Salem. The land was owned by John Brophy, who, like her husband, was a native of Ireland. Brophy had for many years been a  U.S. customs official at the Port of New York, a job in which he dealt with many influential people. It’s possible he and Thomas Dempsey had known each other and that Brophy offered the land to his widow.

She bought the property in 1901 and built her 22-room house. It is not known how much  she used Northoline, but she probably was in New York City and Macon much of the year. She apparently lived a quiet life, and her name no longer appears in newspaper articles. She was not active in the social world nor did she seem to become involved in any philanthropy. She was living in Macon in 1930, but by 1940 when she was 73, she shared a home in Scituate, Mass., with her two sisters. She died in 1946 in Cambridge, Mass., and is buried in Macon.

Her house is at 209 West Lane, a little south of Silver Spring Road and a bit north of the New York line — presumably the inspiration for its name, though it’s really more west than north of the state line. It later had a less controversial but far more famous owner:  Metropolitan opera star Geraldine Farrar, who bought the place in 1924, renaming it “Fairhaven.” Here, though retired from the stage, she entertained many international celebrities in the arts, especially the world of music.

Now surrounded by trees and shrubs, the house still stands, though at last look, it was painted white.

Maude Davis: 

Flappers, Bouviers and Kennedys

In Maude Davis, Ridgefield had a link to some of the more colorful and interesting characters of the 20th Century — from the “flappers” of the 20s to the Kennedys and Bouviers of the 50s and 60s. An aunt of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy, she was the mother of an author who documented the lives of both Bouvier and Kennedy families.

Maude Bouvier was born in New York City in 1905, a daughter of John and Maude Sergeant Bouvier — her brother was Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis’s father.  She came of age in the “Roaring 20s” and in an interview with a Long Island history project, reminisced about her youthful life at Lasata, the family estate in East Hampton, and in New York City. When she and her twin sister, Michelle, were 18, their photos appeared often in the society sections of New York newspapers. “Oh, my,” she said in that 1993 interview, “those debutante parties at the Ritz Carlton! We were doing all the usual things. We went to boarding school at Miss Porter’s. We went to coming-out parties at Sherry’s. We did all the things debutantes did.”

It was the era of the flappers and Prohibition, but she was not drawn into its perils. Whiskey

and other drinks were readily available at parties, she said, “but my twin sister and I were probably the most stupid innocents in East Hampton. We never drank or smoked. I don’t know why …”

She added that, “We were from an old family in New York. We didn’t worry about keeping up with the Joneses — we were the Joneses. But we had a wonderful time, just dancing and singing at parties.”

On a stormy Labor Day in 1928, she married stockbroker John E. Davis in Lasata’s large living room. The scene is described in “The Bouviers,” one of many books written by her son, John H. Davis. “Maude remembers that just as she said, ‘I do,’ the sun streamed through the great French windows,” he wrote.  Then, the wedding party went onto the terrace where a jazz band played the Charleston. Bridesmaids and ushers bobbed to the beat, he wrote, while sister Michelle, the matron of honor, led the dancing like a high-stepping Rockette.

After her marriage, her interests turned to civic and charitable work in New York City, often involving hospitals. During World War II, Davis served as a “gray lady,” helping wounded soldiers returning from Europe. She was also a longtime volunteer at Memorial Sloan Kettering  Hospital.

From 1928 until 1998, she spent most of her summers and autumns in Ridgefield, a town she deeply loved. After renting various houses, she and her husband eventually bought 17 East Ridge, a large Victorian next to today’s East Ridge Middle School. 

Among the summertime visitors to the Davis home was her young niece, Jacqueline Bouvier, and the Davises were often a part of Bouvier and Kennedy gatherings. Maude Davis attended the wedding, inauguration and funeral of John F. Kennedy.

She remained in the East Ridge house until the death of her husband in 1966 when she bought

a much smaller place on New Street that had previously belonged to Metropolitan Opera star Geraldine Farrar (Farrar had called the place “Butterfly,” after Madama Butterfly, the opera in which she had starred with Enrico Caruso).

She was an expert golfer and, with her husband, was among the founders of Silver Spring Country Club. 

Over the years she was also active in the Ridgefield Garden Club, serving a term as its president. For many years she fought to keep the town beautiful. For instance, in 1973, when she discovered that a road widening project on Peaceable Ridge had resulted in the cutting of many dogwoods, she wrote The Ridgefield Press, decrying the work and calling for more care in highway planning. “In the spring when the dogwood was in bloom, right here in Ridgefield we had our own Greenfield Hill,” she wrote, referring to the location of the famous Dogwood Festival in Fairfield. “The dogwood has to rank high on everybody's list [but] one more lovely dogwood-lined road has bitten the chain-saw dust.”

As Davis grew older she sold Butterfly and would stay instead at The Elms Inn on Main Street until she became too frail to do even that.

In 1999, “shortly before she died, she expressed a fervent wish to see Ridgefield again,” said her son John. Arrangements were made to have her stay in an inn and to celebrate her 94th birthday at the Silver Spring Country Club. But by the time of her birthday, she had become too weak to make the trip from New York City. 

“She died peacefully in her New York apartment after her desire to go to Ridgefield one more last time was thwarted,” John Davis said.

Geraldine Farrar: 

A Great Human Being

Geraldine Farrar was still a teenager when she became a star, heralded around the world for her voice as well as her acting ability.

One of the Metropolitan Opera’s greatest lyric sopranos, Miss Farrar had spent 16 years with the company, singing the leads in Madama Butterfly, Carmen, Tosca, and many other productions.   

“Miss Farrar was the last of a great operatic tradition set by such stars as Enrico Caruso and Antonio Scotti,” The Ridgefield Press said in her obituary. 

Born in Massachusetts in 1882, she was a daughter of Sidney Farrar, a 19th Century professional baseball player with the Philadelphia Phillies, who later lived on North Salem Road—Farrar Lane is named after him, not his more famous daughter. He bought the place in 1923 and the story about his moving in said ”His daughter, Geraldine Farrar, will arrive later, it is expected.” 

Sidney Farrar and his wife, both church singers, sent Geraldine to singing lessons when she was 12.  

In 1901, she made her debut with the Royal Opera in Berlin and so impressed Lilli Lehmann that the star took Miss Farrar as a pupil. She went on to sing with companies all over Europe. She made her acclaimed debut with the Met in 1906, and over the following years, shared leading roles

with such greats as Caruso, Scotti, and Louise Homer. She knew many notables in the arts, including Camille Saint-Saens, Giacomo Puccini, Mark Twain, Sarah Bernhardt, Nellie Melba, Fritz Kreisler, and Jules Massenet. She was also the lover of Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini (who twice performed in Ridgefield). She made several films, including Carmen and Joan of Arc. 

When she sang her last role in 1922, “a cheering crowd surged forward shouting her name,” The Press said. “Outside 40th Street between Broadway and Eight was a solid mass of fans.”  

For years, recordings of her music were produced, and are still being sold today.

She wrote two autobiographies, “Geraldine Farrar: The Story of An American Singer” (1916) and “Such Sweet Compulsion” (1938). Several biographies have also been written.

In 1924, a year after her parents moved here, she acquired Fairhaven, a large home on West Lane. In 1954, she decided to downsize and, with her companion of 50 years, Sylvia Blein, moved to a much smaller place on New Street.

During her years in Ridgefield, Farrar didn’t just twiddle her thumbs. She did  much work for

the Red Cross, and during the war, drove for the American Women’s Voluntary Services and served on the War Price and Ration Board. She also helped the Girl Scouts and served as finance chairman of the organization. She sang at fund-raising concerts for Danbury Hospital in the late 1930s.

On the night she died in 1967 at the age of 85, the Metropolitan Opera was performing Madama Butterfly, an opera Farrar had starred in nearly 100 times. That week, The Press suggested her epitaph might be a sentiment she herself once expressed: “Far more important than being a great artist is to become a great human being.” 

Rev. John Ball: 
Church Founder, Rights Leader

In 1940, Ridgefield’s black community was large and active enough that members decided to establish their own church. They approached the Rev. John Ball, who had recently become a pastor in Norwalk and, led by Ball, the Goodwill Community Baptist Church had its first service March 5, 1941, in the First Congregational Church chapel. 

A year later, the 34-member congregation bought the former creamery on Creamery Lane from Samuel S. Denton, and converted it to a house of worship under Ball’s leadership.  

Born in 1908 in Richmond, Va., John Percell Ball was the son of a Baptist minister who was pastor of the Goodwill Baptist Church in downtown Richmond — Ridgefield’s church was named after his father’s congregation. He graduated from Virginia Union University in Richmond and was ordained a Baptist minister in 1934. 

He came north in 1938, first serving as pastor of a Methodist congregation in New London and soon settling in Norwalk where he was pastor of Grace Baptist Church for 20 years and then founder of Canaan Institutional Baptist Church. 

The new church on Creamery Lane was officially dedicated in 1942, and chief speaker at the service was the Rev. W. B. Ball, the pastor’s father. Among the guests were the Rev. William Lusk of St. Stephen’s, the Rev. George Tompkins of Jesse Lee Methodist, and the Rev. Hugh Shields of the First Congregational as well as Selectman Harry E. Hull.

Though he was primarily a pastor in Norwalk, where he lived, he participated over the years in many Ridgefield community events and was well known and liked here. At the town’s memorial service for President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945 in the high school auditorium (what’s now the Ridgefield Playhouse), he was one of two soloists to sing — the other was Metropolitan Opera star Geraldine Farrar.

In Norwalk, he was much more active, serving on the Norwalk Common Council and as head of the NAACP. He was instrumental in getting Norwalk to hire its first black teacher, and was also behind efforts to hire the first black firefighter and policeman. He helped pass the city’s Fair Housing Law and was involved in creating the Fair Rent Commission. He co-founded NEON, Norwalk’s anti-poverty agency, and worked to help the homeless. 

Over the years, he lobbied for civil rights not only in Norwalk, but also in Hartford and Washington. 

Ball served the Goodwill congregation until 1959, and returned in 1969. However, dwindling membership led to the closing of the Goodwill church by 1975. The building is now an apartment house. 

Ball died in 1992 at the age of 83, leaving “his mark upon Norwalk as a mighty warrior and an ambassador for the cause of Christ,” his Canaan congregation said. 

*  *  *

For years it was thought that the Goodwill building had been moved to the site from the old Village Green, where it had served as the First Congregational Church from around 1800 to 1888.

However,  Robert J. Walker, who bought the building in 1976 and converted it to apartments, believed this to be impossible.

In renovating the structure extensively, he found that the first floor, rotted and termite-infested, was the only portion of the three-story building that could have been the old creamery. His study of the framing – it was actually two buildings joined together – indicated that the structure was not large enough to have been the old Congregational church, photographs of which he had examined. However, pieces from the old church, such as beams, may have been used in constructing the creamery.

Louise Davidson: 

Artist of Many Interests

Louise Davidson was the epitome of a free-spirited woman in early 20th Century, an artist of many talents and a friend of many artistic people in New York and Paris. Her varied career touched on music, acting, writing, painting, cartooning, and jewelry design. But in Ridgefield, her home for her last 34 years, she was better known for her work on the home front during and after World War II.

Called  “Lulu” by her friends, Louise Elizabeth Davidson was born in 1887 in Jacksonville, Fla. Her great grandfather, a native of Hartford, opened a store in Jacksonville in the mid-19th Century when the new settlement had a population of only 450. Her father died of yellow fever when she was a baby, and she grew up in a household of women that included her mother, grandmother, great grandmother, and great-great grandmother.

Her stepsister, author and scholar Lillian Gilkes (also profiled here), once recalled how Davidson  exhibited her free spirit from an early age. Many unusual characters would visit their Jacksonville home and one day, young Louise — still in a high chair — took a dislike to a woman guest and began deliberately misbehaving.

“Louise,” said her great-great grandmother, “Mrs. Niles is accustomed to being among ladies.”

“Well, what did she come here for?” Louise reportedly replied.

She attended private schools in Jacksonville, graduated from Agnes Scott College in Atlanta, and studied singing and dancing in New York City. At a recital she gave, she met Geraldine Farrar, the opera star from Ridgefield, and they became lifelong friends.

Her voice wasn’t strong enough for opera, but Davidson got a role in the Edwardian musical comedy, The Better ’Ole, which toured the country in 1919. 

Professional acting roles were hard to come by, so she worked as publicity director with the International Concert Bureau, creating advertising and brochures for musicians. Soon, she effectively became the agent for several, even touring with them. She went on to become a publicist for Brunswick Records, a major label in that era, and managed several stars, including Georgette LeBlanc, a French soprano for whom Claude Debussy wrote an opera. The two were to become longtime friends in Paris.

In the early 1920s, Davidson was drawing a comic strip, The Dubb Sisters, distributed by Cosmos Syndicate, about two girls living in Manhattan. Around 1925, she worked with Anne Morgan, daughter of financier J.P. Morgan, and Mrs. W.K. Vanderbilt in raising money to build the 24-story “clubhouse” for the American Woman’s Association (a building that later became the Henry Hudson Hotel).

In 1930, on a vacation, she fell in love with Paris. She spent the next nine years living in a hotel on the West Bank, painting, writing, buying and selling antiques, and designing jewelry for Neiman Marcus. She became active in the Gurdjieff Group, a coterie of artists and philosophers that included Margaret Anderson, founder of The Little Review, who helped introduce writers like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and James Joyce; Dorothy Caruso, widow of Enrico Caruso, the singer; Katherine Hulne, author of The Nun’s Story; Janet Flanner, whose column under the byline Genet appeared in The New Yorker for many years; and Miss LeBlanc, the singer whom she managed.

Through Flanner, The New Yorker in 1936 published a childhood memoir by Davidson, called The Alley.

While in Paris, Davidson resumed her childhood interest in unusual pets, and allowed a garter snake to roam freely in her room, much to the distress of the hotel staff. The snake was a beautiful creature, she once told an interviewer, but she had to “get green tree toads to feed him once a month. I liked frogs, so I had to give up the snake.”

She also had a praying mantis that she would feed milk and bits of meat, as well as a large yellow snail. “He was quite tame and might have been here today, but I closed a door on him,” she said of the snail. “It’s strange how you can have an affection for a creature like that. But,” she added, “you can be in touch with everything on this planet.

Later, at her home on Olmstead Lane, she would periodically harbor ailing creatures and once nursed an injured robin back to health, allowing it to fly around the objets d’art and antiques in her house — her maid of many years threatened to quit on account of it.

As war threatened Europe, Davidson returned to the United States, settling in Ridgefield — probably because her friend Geraldine Farrar lived just around the bend on West Lane. With Farrar, she became active in the Red Cross and the American Women’s Volunteer Service, which, among other things sponsored the motor corps that provided essential transportation on the home front during the war years.

She helped organize several Bastille Day celebrations aimed at raising money to help war-torn France. For one, Main Street was closed off and there were dances in the streets, sidewalk cafes, and exhibits.

During the war, she operated a small book shop near where Ridgefield Hardware is today, and in 1946, began running an antiques shop at the then-new Stonehenge Inn. She also volunteered as publicist for the Ridgefield Summer Theater. 

Though then in her 60s, Davidson studied acting in the early 1950s with Eva LeGalliene at the White Barn Theater in Westport. 

Although she had studied many of the arts, she never took formal lessons in a musical instrument. However, she did learn the harmonica in the 1920s from her friend, Borah Minevich, a noted harmonica player.

Late in life, frail health confined her to her home that she had shared with her stepsister,  Lillian Gilkes. Unable to go outside, she became a great fan of baseball broadcasts and the New York Mets in particular — she knew every player and a wealth of statistics about them.

She died in 1976 at the age of 89. 

William Matheus Sullivan: 

The Man from Dunrovin

His name may be hardly known in Ridgefield today, but ask Kathleen Battle, Jessye Norman, or Renee Fleming who William Matheus Sullivan was, and they will tell you.

Ridgefield was once the home of Sullivan and his Dunrovin Music Festival that brought major opera and chamber music personalities to a privately created opera house off West Lane.  

He also created a foundation that has helped many of the top opera singers of the past half century.

A native of Brooklyn, N.Y.,  Sullivan was born in 1885 and graduated from Columbia University’s School of Law. He was an attorney for the Metropolitan Opera and for many of its singers, including Elisabeth Rethberg and Frieda Hempel, and often entertained celebrities in the arts at his Manhattan home. 

“He sponsored many first concerts for artists who have since become famous at his music room at his New York apartment,” said one account.

He personally sponsored violin prodigy Ruggiero Ricci (1918-2012) as a young boy; Ricci went on to become an international star, specializing in Paganini, who made more than 500 recordings and performed in more than 5,000 concerts. 

In 1936, Sullivan bought Dunrovin, the estate of the late Melbert B. Cary, as his country home.  He converted a carriage house into a theater modeled after Frederick the Great’s opera house in Bayreuth, Germany — one observer at the time described it as “the best private concert hall in the United States.” Sullivan planned to call it the Mozart Concert Hall but it soon became better known as “the Playhouse at Dunrovin.”

The building could comfortably seat 360 people and, in good weather, 100 more could be seated on the terrace. For more intimate gatherings of 150 or so, Sullivan provided Florentine oak chairs. 

The flooring was random oak boards, pegged into place — more than 3,500 pegs were used. A painting of an ancestral Sullivan castle in Killarney and Van Dyke’s “The Rest of the Holy Family during the Flight to Egypt” hung on the walls.

In 1937, Sullivan began staging music festivals in the playhouse that featured such popular operatic voices as Lily Pons, Grace Moore, Lawrence Tibbett, Edward Johnson, and Geraldine Farrar, who lived just up the road. The festivals on successive Saturday afternoons in the summer were aimed at introduced young operatic talent and raising money for music scholarships.

Gov. Wilbur Cross attended the opening concert and Sir Hugh Walpole, the English novelist and a friend of Sullivan, provided a dedicatory poem. Walpole had visited Dunrovin, declaring that “nothing in America had so much resembled his native England as this bit of loveliness set in the huge Ridgefield estate of the attorney,” reported The Bridgeport Post in 1937.

When war  broke out in Europe in 1940, Sullivan began turning over the proceeds from the concerts to the Red Cross. The playhouse was also the scene of many special concerts, some benefiting such causes as Danbury Hospital.

Suspended during the war, the festivals resumed in 1946, but ended with Sullivan’s death in 1947 at the age of 63. His opera house was later converted into a residence, which it remains today on Country Club Road.

In the 1940s, Sullivan was often seen on Main Street in the village walking his English sheepdogs; one of the dogs was the gift of his friend, the Duke of Windsor, when he was king of England. A portrait of the duke also hung in the playhouse.

In his will, Sullivan established the William Matheus Sullivan Musical Foundation which, to this day, awards grants to promising musicians to help with their studies. Nearly 500 singers have earned Sullivan Awards, among them Jessye Norman, Jerry Hadley, Kathleen Battle, Renee Fleming, Christine Brewer, Leona Mitchell, Susan Graham, Patricia Racette, and Elizabeth Futral — some of the finest American operatic singers of the 20th and 21st Centuries. 

Bart Salerno: 

Big Shop’s Savior

“He was a character beyond imagination,” said business associate Thomas Quinn after the 1988 death of Bart Salerno, an entrepreneur who started WREF, fed Olympic athletes, renovated old buildings, and enjoyed talking to anyone who struck his fancy. 

Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1923, Bartholomew T. Salerno grew up in New York City. He served as a sergeant in a U.S. Marine Corps bomber squadron during World War II and won the Distinguished Fly Cross “for extraordinary achievement while participating in aerial flight, in actions against enemy Japanese forces in the Pacific Theater of Operations.”

After the war, he graduated from Springfield College and became a teacher. He moved to town in 1954 when he was teaching art at Ridgefield High School after earning a master’s degree at  Danbury Teachers College. A year later, he bought the  carriage house of opera singer Geraldine Farrar and converted it to a home off Silver Spring Road.

He operated Bart Associates, a real estate and insurance firm, which for many years operated out of a converted freezer building on Danbury Road. But he had many other interests. For instance, he spent 15 years getting licensing and antenna approval for WREF, Ridgefield’s AM radio station. In its early years under Salerno's ownership, WREF broadcast local news and programming but has since become a totally automated, computer-operated, oldies rock station with no local coverage at all.

He was a small-scale developer who also owned apartment buildings and other properties. His largest development was the subdivision of the former Firestone estate in the northwestern corner of Wilton.

Perhaps his most important contribution to Ridgefield was his renovation of the Big Shop, the early 1800s hall and factory that Hannibal Hamlin, as vice president under Abraham Lincoln, spoke in, and that had been a center of Ridgefield industry in the 1800s. The large building had stood at West Lane and Main Streets but when the “new” First Congregational Church was about to be built in 1888, the Big Shop was moved to the center of the village. By the 1970s, it had become a run-down tenement and had reached the point where the town condemned it as unsafe for human occupancy. Salerno bought it, carefully restored and remodeled it, and now the handsome Big Shop holds restaurants, shops and offices at the north end of the Bailey Avenue parking lot. 

Salerno had an eye for a winner, as demonstrated in 1977 when he sponsored Karen Kopins  in a Miss Ridgefield pageant. She went on to become Miss Connecticut, competed in Miss America, and wound up an actress who appeared in movies and TV series. 

He part-owned the company that fed the athletes at the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid and then supplied food to the American team at Sarajevo in 1984. 

“He was happiest around peasants and poor people,” said Quinn, another partner in the food service company. Instead of hanging around formal functions in Sarajevo, Salerno could often be found playing cards with the locals. 

When he did join in the formalities, he was sometimes lost. “I can remember him sitting next to John Denver and Kirk Douglas and calling John Denver Kirk Douglas and Kirk Douglas John Denver,” Quinn said with a smile.

“He told John Denver he enjoyed him in Spartacus.”

Salerno was 64 when he died while on a visit to Florida.

Sidney Farrar:  

First Baseman and Opera Dad

Sidney Farrar had at least two claims to fame: A daughter and a glove. The Ridgefielder helped create one of the 20th century’s greatest opera stars and played for one of today’s major league baseball teams in its very first years.

Sidney Douglas Farrar was born in 1859 in Paris, Maine. By the 1870s, he was living in Melrose, Mass. where he was working in a box factory and playing semi-professional baseball for a local team. In 1880 he married Henrietta Barnes of Melrose, and two years later, their only child, Geraldine, was born. 

In 1883, Farrar joined the Philadelphia Quakers in the National League for the team’s very first season. A year later, they changed their name to the Philadelphia Phillies,  

The first baseman started seven years with the Phillies and was better known as a good fielder than a strong batter or runner. His last major league season, 1890, was with the Philadelphia Athletics in the short-lived and rebellious Players League. 

Farrar had a lifetime batting average of .253, with 905 hits but only 18 home runs. His best year was 1887 when he hit .282 and scored 83 runs. In 1888, he led the National League in being hit by pitches. In all, he played 943 games as a professional at a salary that ranged from $900 to $2,000 a season ($24,000 to $53,000 in 2016 dollars).

After he left Philadelphia, he played a couple of years of semi-pro ball in New Haven and Providence before retiring completely from the game to, according to The Ridgefield Press, focus on his daughter who showed “unmistakable signs of musical talent.” For a while, he operated a men’s clothing store in Melrose in partnership with Melrose native Frank G. Selee, a Hall of Famer who had managed the Boston Beaneaters (the first major league club to win 100 games in a season) and who later led the Chicago Cubs where, Baseball-Reference.com reports, he “was responsible for assembling the famous Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance double play combination.”

One baseball historian reports Farrar eventually sold his interest in the clothing store and borrowed thousands of dollars to help pay for his daughter Geraldine’s singing instruction in Europe.

Geraldine, who became a Metropolitan Opera star, owed not only her education, but at least some of her vocal talents to her parents. Both mom and dad reportedly had fine singing voices and performed a great deal in public, particularly with church choirs. “Farrar was a baritone, and it was said of him that if he was speaking in what, for him, was a conversational tone of voice on one side of a street, he could be clearly heard from the other side,” wrote Charles Paolino, a newspaper editor and historian. 

While still living in Melrose, Farrar ran for selectman of the town. “There was a great drive to defeat him,” The Press reported. “In the southern part of the town, there were some factories and Mr. Farrar had always been a friend of the factory worker. The election progressed throughout the day and at 4:30 in the afternoon, when the factories were let out, 600 men marched to the polls and swept their friend, Mr. Farrar, into office.”

Apparently to be closer to his daughter in New York after his wife died in 1923, Farrar bought a North Salem Road farmhouse and 30 acres from Joseph T. Hubbard,  calling it “Farrar’s Thirty Acres.” 

The Press said he convinced his daughter to move here and in 1924, Geraldine Farrar bought a place on West Lane. She lived in Ridgefield for the rest of her life here.

“In later life, when he had been widowed,” said historian Paolino, “Sid Farrar was a familiar figure at Geraldine’s concerts, and she said that he was often surrounded by other old ballplayers who may have looked a little out of place in the classical concert hall. It dawned on her, she said, that those old guys weren’t there to see her; they were there to see her dad.”

Farrar became active in the community, especially with the Masons, and was elected a director of the Ridgefield Savings Bank. He “was ever a booster of this town,” said his Press obituary in 1935.

 When his estate was probated, his possessions included a 1927 Locomobile sedan and 200 shares of International Telephone and Telegraph stock, then worth about $1,375.

Farrar Lane, off North Salem Road, was named for Sidney Farrar, whose farm bordered the road. The road, which existed long before Farrar moved there,  may be the old southerly end of what is now Mamanasco Road.