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.”

The Colts of High Ridge

This handsome family portrait shows Harris Dunscombe Colt Jr. and his wife, Teresa Strickland Colt, with their son Harris George Strickland Colt, at their High Ridge home around 1937. Little Harris became  a memorable character on the New York City bookselling scene, the subject of a biography flatteringly reviewed by The New York Times.

H. Dunscomb Colt was an internationally known archaeologist who specialized in Middle Eastern deserts. Also an expert on Rudyard Kipling and a noted collector of old engraved views of New York City, he is profiled in a Who Was Who biography posted here (search “Dunscomb” to find it).

The Colts lived at 15 High Ridge, the Peter Parley House. This picture was taken by the then well-known Kaiden-Kazanjian Studios from New York.  

Teresa Colt died in 1955 and two years later Dunscomb married Armida Maria-Theresa Bologna Walsh, a native of Trieste. After his death she donated thousands of items in her husband’s archaeological, engraving and Kipling collections to museums and libraries in the U.S. and Europe. Many ancient pieces were given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Armida died in Washington, D.C., in 2011 at the age of 99.

Little Harris, born in 1935, went on to graduate from Princeton and become a financial analyst on Wall Street with J.P. Morgan, Dean Witter and Auerbach Pollok & Richardson.  He lost his Wall Street job in 1975 and decided that was the chance to follow his dream. An avid student of history who read many books about Napoleon in French, he opened The Military Bookman, a New York City store specializing in military books and items related to the military.

His wife, Margaretta, “joined him in this endeavor, even though it meant wrangling with a predominately male customer base, including ‘Soldier of Fortune’ types and even some with ‘SS tendencies,’” wrote the New York Times’s Dwight Garner, reviewing her book, “Martial Bliss, The Story of the Military Bookman,” in 2015.

A “pleasure of Ms. Colt’s book is feasting on details about the store’s offbeat band of customers: the regulars, the cranks, the autodidacts, the dandies, the lurkers, the charmers, the cheats, the mouth-breathing Soldier of Fortune types,”   Garner said.

“Historians and journalists were devoted to the store, and leaned on it for their research. ... George C. Scott was a patron of the store. So were Paul Newman, Robin Williams, Bette Midler, and James Gandolfini. Richard Nixon’s office rang for books. The talent agent Michael Ovitz dropped in to buy a pile of gifts for Tom Clancy. The store became a hangout, a bookish ‘Cheers.’ ”

Garner was disappointed that the book did not have more about Harris Colt or the author herself. “We don’t learn a great deal about her or her husband’s lives before they wed in middle age,” he wrote. “She was tall and willowy; he was short and alert. In photographs, they put you in mind of Julia Child and her husband, Paul. What information there is about Mr. Colt arrives only haphazardly. He coxed crew at Princeton, for example, and collected Napoleonic sabers. Nor do we learn from this book the sad news that this man, who cuts such a warm and witty figure here, died in 2004.”

The Military Bookman closed in 2003, although today there is a store of the same name in Manhattan, operated by Chartwell Booksellers.

Gerard Herrick: 

Rotary-Wing Pioneer

Long before the military developed vertical take-off and landing aircraft, like the Osprey, Gerardus Herrick of High Ridge had invented an aircraft that did that.

Gerardus Post Herrick, who generally went by the name of Gerard, was a rather eccentric but talented lawyer and a skilled research engineer.  Born in 1873, he was a member of the 13th generation of the Post family to live in New York City since the clan arrived in 1654. He graduated from Princeton and became an attorney. 

After serving as a captain in World War I in the Army Air Service—not as a pilot but as a gunnery officer—he came up with the idea of a convertible aircraft that could fly either fixed-wing like a conventional plane or vertically as an “autogyro.”  In the 1920s and 1930s, he partnered with a couple of aircraft manufacturers to build a working model of his autogyro. 

   “The first aircraft, the HV-1, was ready on Nov. 6, 1931,” the Smithsonian Institution says. “The test pilot, Merrill Lambert, made several successful test flights in both fixed- and rotating-wing mode, but when he attempted an in-flight transition between the two, the aircraft fell out of control and crashed. Lambert bailed out of the aircraft, but was killed when his parachute failed to open.” However, an analysis of the accident found the basic design was sound, and Herrick continued to develop what he called a “vertiplane.” 

   The plane was a fixed-wing monoplane with a large overhead propeller, shaped somewhat like a smaller wing. The aircraft could take off as a monoplane and once in the air, convert to a

hovering aircraft using the large overhead propeller. It could then land in a very small area. The aircraft could also take off vertically, but could not convert to horizontal flight in mid-air, and had to remain a “helicopter” until it landed.

 A new version, the HV-2a, began flying successfully in 1936, cruising at 100 mph as a fixed-wing plane and 65 mph in autogyro mode. The 2,300-pound aircraft needed only 60 feet of runway to take off. Unfortunately, the aircraft’s “remarkable performance did not justify production as the weight penalties imposed by carrying both rotary and fixed wing structures eliminated its commercial advantage over conventional airplanes,” the Smithsonian said.  

   Herrick continued to work on convertible airplane ideas and unsuccessfully tried to gain investor and government support until his death in 1955. He didn’t limit his interests to aircraft, however, and over the years the attorney/engineer wrote a manual for small-arms instructors, and did research work into blast furnaces, steam engines, lenses, and rifle sights.

   “Gerard Post Herrick was one of the earliest to advocate combining fixed-wing flight with rotary-wing flight,” wrote Dr. Bruch H. Charnov in a study of the inventor. “He has been given little notice by vertical flight historians, quite unjustifiably becoming one of the forgotten rotary-wing pioneers, the champion of a concept that even today in various forms seeks legitimacy.”

   He and his wife, Lois, had their High Ridge home here starting in the 1920s. A large garage in back once housed the HV-2a, historian Dick Venus recalled. After Lois Herrick died in 1983, Mr. Venus was at an estate sale on the property when he came across “the largest propeller that I had ever seen, lying on the floor of the garage. No doubt this enormous thing could lift a house right off the ground if you had a machine with the energy to turn it.”  He concluded it was a spare for the HV-2a, which had already been donated to the Smithsonian Institution.

   Incidentally, Herrick was a cousin of Myron T. Herrick, the U.S. ambassador to France who greeted Charles Lindbergh on his arrival in Paris in 1927. Myron must have been popular: He’s the only American ambassador to France with a street in Paris named after him — Avenue Myron Herrick.—from “Hidden History of Ridgefield”

Emily Eaton Hepburn: 

Landmark’s Builder

Ridgefield had many notable “summer residents,” New Yorkers who built weekend and vacation retreats that, more often than not, qualified as mansions. Emily Eaton Hepburn was among the more remarkable of these part-time Ridgefielders, but her accomplishments have been largely overlooked locally. 

A prominent figure in New York City’s intellectual, civic, and business scene over a half century, Emily Hepburn at the age of 61 built one of New York’s landmark hotels. The New York Times once called her “a real estate novice who created one of New York’s most distinctive skyscrapers.” 

The Vermont native was an 1886 graduate of Saint Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y. where she met her husband, Alonzo Barton Hepburn, then a lawyer and state banking official. He became a leading New York City banker and was named United States comptroller of the currency by President Benjamin Harrison. 

   The Ridgefield Press took note of their impending arrival in May 1908. “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 newspaper said.   The report was a bit misleading. Emily, not Barton, was actually overseeing the design and construction of “Altnacraig,” a magnificent mansion on High Ridge whose name could be translated, “high rock.”  The building later became a well-known nursing home, also called Altnacraig, whose residents included suffragist Alice Paul. Altnacraig burned to the ground in a suspicious 1994 blaze, and was replaced with a house of similar size. (Pictures of Altnacraig are in the Old Ridgefield photos collection.)

   Barton also met an unlucky end: He was run over by a bus while crossing a city street in 1922. “He was benefactor to Hepburn Hospital in Ogdensburg, N.Y., and six libraries in St. Lawrence County, N.Y., all of which are named for him,” reports St. Lawrence University, where his and Emily’s family papers now reside.

   Emily Hepburn had long been active in civic and charitable organizations including the New York Botanical Garden, City History Club for children, Inwood House girls reformatory, and the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. Here, she was a member of the Ridgefield Garden Club, a group that both beautified and promoted the town. 

She was also active in the suffrage movement and, after women had won the right to vote, she addressed a new need in New York: Housing for young, working women. After the war, many recent college-graduate women were coming to New York to seek careers. In 1924 Mrs. Hepburn and several others built the American Woman’s Association, a high-rise residence for working women, at 353 West 57th Street.

Hepburn was dissatisfied with the result, however, and on her own, planned a better building, with a more modern architect. “The boxy, unornamented American Woman’s Association clubhouse

had been simple to the point of drab, the ‘International Style’ with a migraine, designed by the otherwise traditionalist Benjamin Wistar Morris,” wrote Christopher Gray in The Times. “Mrs. Hepburn went to John Mead Howells, son of American author William Dean Howells, and a graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts.” 

   Hepburn almost single-handedly set about gaining support for the project, including selling stock (one of the stock purchasers was Sara Roosevelt, mother of Franklin Delano Roosevelt).  The

result was the 380-room Panhellenic House at First Avenue and East 49th Street, completed in 1928, described in early promotional brochures as “a club-hotel for women.”  The 28-story, orange-brick building is considered one of the great Art Deco skyscrapers in New York.

   “I wanted to prove that women could do big business,” Hepburn once said about her late-blooming career. The quotation appears “Daughter of Vermont,” a biography of her published in 1952, four years before her death.

   The hotel was not just a residence, but also a place where women could, in today’s parlance, “network,” and learn from each other. One supporter of the project called it “a training school for leadership, a mental exchange” for women.

    Hepburn, who also built and lived in an apartment building at nearby 2 Beekman Place, found occupancy rates at the Panhellenic House declining during the Depression, and opened the building to men as well as women, renaming it the Beekman Tower Hotel. The hotel continued in business until 2013 when it was converted to long-term residential suites.

 The Beekman, incidentally, is a block from the United Nations. The Times once reported that, “according to legend,” Hepburn “persuaded the Rockefellers to buy the East River land for the United Nations.” 

How’s that for good business sense? 

E. P. Dutton: 

A Devout Publisher

E. P. Dutton has left the world with countless books and Ridgefield with one of its finest mansions. The founder of the publishing company that bore his name for more than a century also contributed considerably to bringing the Ridgefield school system into the 20th century.

Born in New Hampshire in 1831, Edward Payson Dutton grew up in Boston, graduated from Boston Latin high school, and was supposed to enter Harvard when, dreading having to study more Greek, he convinced his father to bring him into his dry goods business. 

He worked there a couple years when a friend who had a book store introduced him to bookselling. 

When only 21, he and the friend formed Ide and Dutton, booksellers. They did well and decided to move into publishing as well as selling; their first book was Horace Mann’s lectures on education, which became a big seller. In 1858, Dutton bought out the business, which became E.P. Dutton & Company, and which in 1869 he moved to New York. 

In 1923, shortly after his death at the age of 92, Dutton was called by The New York Times “the dean of a daring group of leaders of the book industry” who had made New York City the literary capital of America. He “was a link between a half-forgotten day when Boston held up her queenly head as the mistress of letters on this side of the Atlantic, and these new times when a writer’s door of fame is planted firmly in the rocky soil of Manhattan.” 

When Dutton came to New York, there were only two publishing houses in the city; when he died, there were 1,200.

In addition to the longstanding E.P. Dutton imprint, he had early on bought Ticknor & Fields, a Boston publisher, and acquired American rights to the British series, Everyman’s Library, under which his company turned out scores of affordable titles. 

Dutton published more than 10,000 different titles during his life. When he died, there were 4,000 active titles in his company’s catalogue. 

Many of his authors were leading writers of their era, including G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, John Dewey, and Algernon Blackwood.

He led his company for 71 years; “probably no other publishing house in the country was under the direct guidance of its founder for so long a period,” The Times reported.

In the early 1890s,  Dutton decided to build a house on High Ridge, and hired Ridgefield's top builder to do it. “Big Jim” Kennedy spent two years carefully erecting the place, which still stands at 63 High Ridge. (In the 1970s, reported historian Dick Venus, someone did a surveyor's sighting from the front door to the back door of this house and found less than a quarter inch difference, despite the huge weight of the mansion whose roof alone is nearly the size of a football field.) 

Venus remembered as a young boy seeing Dutton riding his buckboard, pulled by a beautiful mahogany bay. Dutton had a wide leather belt across his lap. “I learned later that the strap was to prevent him from falling from the wagon,” Venus wrote, “for even at his advanced age, he drove at a very fast pace. Come to think of it, he must have pioneered in the use of the seat belt.”

Venus also told of races down Main Street that Dutton would participate in around the turn of the 20th Century, along with his friends, George Haven, Barton Hepburn and Dr. Edwin Van Saun. “Like his friends, Edward Dutton was an avid horseman and his horse were considered to be among the very best.”

A deeply religious Episcopalian who was a benefactor of St. Stephen’s,  Dutton would often drive his horse and buggy into the woods  where he would park, meditate, and read prayers in his breviary.  

In 1912, he joined others in contributing the money to buy the East Ridge land on which the

big, brick Benjamin Franklin Grammar School, later to be Ridgefield High School, was built in 1915. In her autobiography, “Memories,” Laura Curie Allee Shields tells how her first husband, Dr. William Allee, approached Dutton for a contribution, explaining the need for a modern school in Ridgefield. “Mr. Dutton was most enthusiastic and sympathetic, and he turned to Doctor and said, ‘Suppose we take it to the Lord.’ Doctor told me he knelt down by the couch and made a most beautiful prayer for direction and wisdom. Rising from his knees, he went to his desk and made out a check for $1,000 and, giving it to Doctor, told him, ‘Here, my boy, go to it!” ($1,000 then was worth nearly $25,000 in today’s dollars.)

Dutton’s firm continued on until the 1990s when it was acquired by Penguin Putnam, which still uses the Dutton imprint on about 40 books per year, half of them fiction and half non-fiction.

William O. Seymour:

Bridges and Oil for the Waters

William O. Seymour was one of Ridgefield’s leading citizens at the turn of the 20th Century, so perhaps the Ridgefield Press obituary writer was a bit flustered by Seymour’s importance when he wrote on the front page Jan. 26, 1911: “He was a man among men, a consistent Christian, a good citizen, one of the few whom our town could afford to lose.” 

A man known for his calm and warm demeanor, Seymour might have smiled at the gaffe.

Born in 1833 in Ridgefield, William Oscar Seymour got his early education in local schoolhouses. He then attended the Amenia (N.Y.) Seminary, a Methodist secondary school that was well respected and produced several university presidents and bishops. 

Seymour returned to Ridgefield to become a grammar school teacher, but seeing the need for a “high school” in town, established the High Ridge Institute in the late 1850s. Seymour’s school, which had both boarding and day students, served up to 40 boys. At the time Seymour lived in the “Peter Parley house” — the childhood home of author Samuel G. Goodrich — on High Ridge, from which he also ran the school.

By 1869, Seymour was looking at an entirely new career:  civil engineering, a subject he had previously taught to young men. Railroads were expanding at a rapid rate. Before 1871, about 45,000 miles of track had been laid in the United States. Between 1871 and 1900, another 170,000 miles were added. Seymour saw an opportunity not only for profitable work but perhaps also for adventure. 

In 1873, he began working for the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, which at the

time was the largest road in New England. He started out as a “rodman” — a menial job involving carrying and holding a rod used during the process of surveying for a new line. By 1877, he was the railroad’s chief engineer.

He left in 1881 to join a Massachusetts railroad, but soon decided to head west. He spent nearly five years designing and building railroads for the Wisconsin Central in Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota. His projects included building a 104-mile line from Chippewa Falls, Wisc., to St. Paul, Minn, crossing the St. Croix River with a 2,239-foot long iron bridge on stone abutments (years later the bridge was later abandoned but the abutments still stand in the river). Another line he built ran 124 miles from Chicago, Ill., to Schleisingerville, Wisc.

In 1887, Seymour returned to his home town where Gov. Phineas Lounsbury, a fellow Ridgefielder, appointed him one of the state’s three railroad commissioners — a post of considerable importance in that era when the state was served by more than two dozen railroads and streetcar companies. He remained a commissioner until his death 24 years later.

He was also a leading citizen in local government, serving as a probate judge, a state representative, a borough warden, and a member of the Board of Estimate (predecessor to the Board of Finance),  He was vice-president of the First National Bank of Ridgefield, which he helped found in 1900. 

In 1908, Seymour was chairman of the town’s Bicentennial celebration, which included a parade, speeches, other special events, and the publication of a book that offered many pictures of

people and places of Ridgefield along with essays about the town. Fifty years later, Seymour’s great-grandson, Ridgefield Press publisher Karl Seymour Nash, was chairman of the town’s 250th anniversary celebration.

When he had returned to Ridgefield, Seymour built a sizable house on Parley Lane, just down the hill a few hundred feet from the Peter Parley house he had earlier owned.  The house is still standing, though it underwent a major rebuilding and expansion in the 1990s.

William O. Seymour was 77 years old when he died. Writing the next week from Montreal, where he was a consular official, historian George L. Rockwell said in a tribute to Seymour : “The welfare of the town was always uppermost with him. Office sought him and not he the office. In public meetings, when debate at times waxed to the point of bitterness, with a few chosen words would he pour oil upon the troubled waters.”

Dr. B.A. Bryon: 

Physician and Entrepreneur

Long before “subdivision” was a common word in Ridgefield, Dr. Benn Adelmar Bryon was a subdivider, probably the first. A road and a neighborhood recall his name today.

Born around 1866 in Saugerties, N.Y., Bryon graduated from Bellevue Medical College (now New York University Medical School) in 1890 and came to Ridgefield at the turn of the century to open a medical practice. 

He built a house on High Ridge that later served for decades as Frances Cleaners as well as a home to the business’s owners, Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Strouse. However, after a few years there, he bought a house on Main Street where he lived and practiced for many years. It stood where the CVS parking lot is now.

When he came here, there were only three other doctors in town — and one had a drinking problem. “His patients felt that he was an excellent practitioner of the medical profession,” former town historian Dick Venus said of Bryon.

 The doctor, who always signed his name B. Adelmar Bryon, was often called “Barney” by townspeople. Venus theorized that it may have been because he drove rather fast, like race car driver Barney Oldfield, or simply because people made up a name for the mysterious “B.”

A small-town doctor didn’t make a lot of money back then so Bryon turned to other endeavors to supplement his income. 

In 1903, he bought a piece of land at the top of Titicus Mountain on which a rock spring flowed. He dubbed the spring St. George and was soon bottling its output under the name of  St. George Pure Water. Sales were reportedly respectable.

But his real interest was real estate. “Barney was truly a man of vision and the town is better off because of his efforts,” Venus said.

Between 1908 and 1912, he developed Bryon Park, the subdivision off High Ridge and Barry Avenue that includes Bryon and Fairview Avenues and Greenfield Street. Consisting of dozens of homes, it was the first housing development in the town since the proprietors had laid out Main Street in 1708.

“In that day there were no zoning regulations in Ridgefield, nor any building code,” The Ridgefield Press reported in a 1980 feature on the Bryon family. “Dr. Bryon even enlisted the aid of his 16-year-old son to do electrical work in some of the new houses.” That son was Adelmar R. Bryon, who later became a missionary to China and longtime Presbyterian minister near Woodstock, N.Y.

Bryon also was the original developer of the Lake Kitchawan neighborhood of nearby Lewisboro. While his development there was popular and respected, another project he undertook in that town became famous as an eyesore. 

According to former Lewisboro Ledger editor Chris Noblet, around 1940 Bryon wanted to build a service station on Route 123 where Oak Ridge Commons is now. When town officials rejected the plan, Byron apparently decided to seek a sort of revenge and instead erected some perfectly legal, but shoddy houses in a development he called Vista Woods. A half dozen houses were erected, and others started but never finished. “The houses were right up against the road so you could barely get a car in front,” wrote Noblet in 1977, quoting a resident, who also said: “They painted the houses up and put on imitation siding. It looked like shingles, but it was tar paper.”

Writing later about Vista Woods, Lewisboro historian Maureen Koehl said, “Everyone I talked with remembered the collections of derelict cars and household detritus littering the yards — bathtubs, iceboxes, sinks and just ‘stuff’ that never seemed to go anywhere. There were no lawns or attempts to landscape the yards.”

In 1961 a New Canaan firm bought up all the houses, tore them down, and built Oakridge Condominiums  and Oakridge Commons.

Bryon had a much better reputation in Ridgefield. He “exhibited not only a great deal of foresight, but a considerable amount of courage as well,” Venus said of Bryon’s development. “There seems little doubt that it was the biggest, if not the very first, project of its kind ever attempted in Ridgefield.”

Late in life, Dr. Bryon moved his practice and home to Norwalk where he died in 1949.

Incidentally, in 1921 his daughter, Kathryn G. Bryon, founded the town’s first Girl Scout troop, consisting of a handful of girls. She would be astounded at the hundreds of Girl Scouts in Ridgefield today.  

H. Dunscombe Colt: 

Archaeologist of the Desert

The historic Peter Parley house on High Ridge was home to not only its namesake author and his minister father, but another man who shared with them an interest in history, literature and religion.

H. Dunscombe Colt was an internationally known archaeologist and an expert on Rudyard Kipling. Together with his father he lived in the 1920s, 30s and 40s where S.G. Goodrich (Peter Parley), son of the third minister of the First Congregational Church, grew up. 

Harris Dunscombe Colt II was born in 1901 in New York City, son of Harris Dunscomb and Elizabeth Bowne Colt. (Unlike his father, he ended his middle name with an E.) 

His dad, a Yale-educated lawyer, and his mother,  great-granddaughter of a New York City mayor, came here in the late 1910s and for a while, owned the Bluebird Apartments, located across the street from the West Lane Inn (though they never lived there).

The Peter Parley property was much bigger when they bought it and around 1920, the Colts sold a triangular piece at High Ridge and Shadow Lane to the Hyde sisters from New Jersey, who then built the English-style cottages and cobblestone courtyard, surrounded by high stone walls, that are a landmark at the south end of High Ridge today.

The Colts sent their son to England for his schooling. He studied at St. Paul’s and Oxford University, which he did not complete but at which he became interested in archaeology, the focus of his future career. 

His first dig was in 1922, excavating an ancient Roman site in Kent, England, with a team from London’s Society of Antiquaries. He then worked in Egypt under the noted British Egyptologist, W. M. Flinders Petrie, and took part in excavations on Malta. 

 From 1929 through 1935, he directed digs at Auja el Hafir and other locations in the Negev desert. According to a three-volume report on his archaeological excavations in Palestine published years later by Princeton University Press, the expedition “uncovered the remains of an ancient village in the Negeb. Among the ruins was found a hoard of Greek papyrus documents  dating from A.D. 500 to A.D. 700, which are a welcome addition to the mere handful of such documents found outside of Egypt and are the first to come out of Palestine.”

The excavation found that “the little Palestinian town went in heavily for religious literature but, what is more surprising, that at least some of the people in this Greek-speaking community had copies of Virgil and glossaries to help them read him. Among the finds is a Latin-Greek glossary of the Aeneid, to be dated in the 6th Century, which is by far more extensive than any similar Latin-Greek glossary thus far published.”

Also found were fragments of the Gospel of John. “These show that even at a late date in a comparatively obscure place, an astonishingly pure text of the New Testament was in common use.”

Colt ended his field work around 1940,  “I think a contributory factor may have been a realization that his personality prevented him from having some of the toughness which directing excavations needs,” wrote Crystal-Marie Bennett, a pioneering woman archaeologist and friend of Colt. Bennett said Colt later admitted to her “that the rigours of field archaeology were not for him and that he had preferred to use his talents in other ways to help archaeology.”

To that end he established the Colt Archaeological Institute, which financed archaeological digs but especially focused on publication of archaeological findings.  “To be published by Colt was a sought after honour among archaeologists,” Bennett wrote in a 1974 tribute to her friend.

Colt also inherited a love of collecting from his father, who had assembled an extensive series of engraved, historical views of New York City. For years he worked on updating an encyclopedia of American engravers. The work was done in cooperation with the American Antiquarian Society, of which he was a longtime member.

For much of his life, Colt would spend the warmer half of the year in London and the colder six months in the United States. Here he would usually focus on researching engravers while in London, it would be archaeology and Kipling. Besides Ridgefield, he had homes in New York and Washington.

“Colt may have been shy and diffident, almost retiring, but he was completely cosmopolitan, equally at home on both sides of the Atlantic, with a truly global approach to life and a breadth of vision which brooked no limitations, particularly in archaeology,” Crystal-Marie Bennett wrote.

His first wife, Theresa Strickland Colt, died in 1955. In 1957 he married Armida Maria-Theresa

Bologna Walsh, a native of Trieste, who later donated thousands of items in her husband’s archaeological, engraving and Kipling collections to museums and libraries in the U.S. and Europe. Many ancient pieces were given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

In 1984 and 1987, she donated 2,500 Kipling items to the Library of Congress which established the H. Dunscombe Colt Kipling Collection.  It includes Kipling first editions, periodicals, books about Kipling, books Kipling owned,  photographs of Kipling and his family, and drawings, manuscripts, letters, and clippings.

Colt died in 1973 in London at the age of 72 and is buried in an old country churchyard in Sussex, overlooking the South Downs in England. 

Armida died in Washington, D.C., in 2011 at the age of 99. According to her obituary, she “loved entertaining both in Georgetown and in London, where she lived part of the year.”