Francis A. Rockwell: 
Candlesticks and Wine

Francis Rockwell was a man of many talents who led what his obituary called “a prominent, useful and well-rounded life.” He was an inventor, an industrialist, a pomologist, and a winemaker. His metallic products were used throughout the nation — many are now well known in the antiques world — while his liquid products were consumed,  apparently with pleasure,  throughout the region, including New York City.

A member of one of the founding families of Ridgefield, Francis Asbury Rockwell was born in 1818, a son of a local cabinet-maker. In 1840 he married Mary Lee, who also had deep roots in the community and was a daughter of a local Revolutionary War captain.

Unlike his father, who was known as Uncle Tommy, Francis was more interested in metal than wood early in his career. He and his brother, John Wesley Rockwell, founded in the 1840s a company that at the beginning produced tin candlesticks but eventually expanded into many other products, all wrought of not only tin, but also iron and brass.

Francis Rockwell was not satisfied producing ordinary candlesticks and came up with many innovative variations, several of them patented. One was a design with a spring inside a candle-holding tube that forced the candle upward as it burned. Another had a canister to hold matchsticks attached to the candlestick base.

Their line of products expanded to include tools such as augers and drill bits; small farm implements, like hog scrapers (used to remove hair from the hide of butchered pigs); and even newspaper holders, devices from which periodicals were hung on a rack in a library reading room, making issues easy to display, remove, read, and replace.

One of the more usual Rockwell products was a “letter clip,” an ornate gadget that people  could use to hold small piles of letters together. Those were the days when letter-writing was not only popular, but almost an art. The clip could lie on a desktop, holding missives awaiting responses, or it could, hung from the wall near the front door, hold completed letters waiting to be taken to the post office.

A bedclothes clip Francis invented received wide attention in newspapers around the country. For instance, the Fayetteville North Carolinian reported in 1850, “A Yankee named Rockwell, of Ridgefield, Conn., has invented a little clasp, to be attached to bed rails, to keep the bed clothes from being removed by restless children, or others. It is no doubt very useful in cold weather.”

The Rockwell brothers started their manufacturing on Main Street in a small factory across from today’s First Church of Christ Scientist that later became the site of the Bailey Inn. They then moved to Catoonah Street, and twice had their facility heavily damaged by fire.  One of their buildings was called Catoonah Hall, which led to the road’s being called Catoonah Street.

Soon after the loss of Catoonah Hall to an 1868 fire, the Rockwell brothers decided to pursue different paths. John focused on turning his father’s homestead and woodshops into the Elm Shade Cottages, forerunner of The Elms Inn, on northern Main Street. Francis retired to his home at 305 Main Street, today often called “Red Chimneys,” to pursue pomology — the science of fruit.

Francis Rockwell’s earlier interests had not been entirely machined products.  As distant cousin and historian George L. Rockwell wrote, he was “interested greatly in the culture of fruit and products of the soil.”

Combining his knowledge of industry and of the fruit, Rockwell in the 1850s had begun manufacturing wine, both from grapes and from blackberries. At least some of his products, however, were probably not the sort one would consider “wine” today, but were more like sweetened fruit juice. It appears that his widest selling varieties were non-alcoholic, and were particularly appreciated by clergy for use as sacramental wine.

Thus, it was not surprising to find that The Church Journal, a 19th Century Episcopal newspaper circulated nationally, carried an 1859 article about Rockwell’s wines, heaping praise on the concoctions which it called “pleasant to the taste and genuine in manufacture.”

The Journal went on to say, “the Rev. Mr. Williams, rector of St. Stephen’s, Ridgefield, who has lived next door to Mr. Rockwell for the last six years, vouches for the purity of the wines from personal knowledge and observation, and specially commends some of the varieties for sacramental purposes.” (The description conjures up images of Messrs. Rockwell and Williams sitting on a back porch, conversing while sampling some of the less sacramental and more potent varieties!)

The New-York Tribune gave Rockwell’s wines even more news coverage, but was somewhat less exuberant. “It undoubtedly is pure, so far as any admixture of alcohol is concerned, but it is not pure grape juice, because it has a large admixture of sugar, which in our opinion is of no more advantage, and for which there is no more necessity.”

Nevertheless, The Tribune added that “the taste of this wine will please the mass of wine-bibbers.”

It also pleased judges at The American Institute of the City of New York for the Encouragement of Science and Invention, which awarded him a gold medal for the best Native Grape Wine and a silver medal for best Blackberry Wine in 1859. (For many years Gulden’s mustard had a copy of its American Institute Gold Medal Award shown on its jar label.)

For a while at least, Rockwell must have been producing a lot of wine because he was advertising “Rockwell’s Pure Grape and Blackberry Wine” in such publications as The Church /Journal as available in kegs of five gallons or more, for $2 a gallen. Bottles were $8 a dozen.

How long he kept up his winemaking is unknown, but during the Civil War, Rockwell was conducting business in Washington, D.C., where he was probably supplying small devices for the war effort. There he was also active with Connecticut’s efforts to aid wounded soldiers and, so doing, “he found greater opportunities for developing his love for his fellow man,” said The Ridgefield Press.

In retirement he focused on his interest in pomology.  At his Main Street home opposite Market Street, he planted many varieties of pear and apple trees, and was a proponent of the little known Baker apple, a variety discovered a century earlier by Ridgefield physician Dr. Amos Baker. 

“As a cooking apple, from its half-grown state until the time of its decay, it probably has no superior,” Rockwell said of the Baker apple. “As a market apple, its appearance and quality commend it to the good sense of the apple merchant, who always finds for it a ready market at the highest price.” He added that the fruit, yellowish striped with crimson, was “very tender, middling juicy, with a subacid pleasant flavor.”

Rockwell died in 1881 at the age of 63. “He has in one short week been stricken down from the full health and vigor of manhood, but as his whole life has been only an apprenticeship to a higher, he passed away entirely prepared, and in the full possession of his faculties to the last,” The Press said of his unexpected death. 

Mary “May” Rockwell: 

A Hotel of Culture

A house with a lot of history was torn down in 2014, but little of its former glory was left by then. The large Victorian on Governor Street, which had long been an office building, was razed to make way for the new Ridgefield Visiting Nurse Association headquarters. It was a building that had led four lives in its two centuries, including several decades as the House of Friends.

The building originally stood on Main Street, in front of today’s Community Center, where it had been the home of the Perry family, which produced three prominent Ridgefield physicians. It then became the home of Gov. Phineas Lounsbury, who turned a colonial-style structure into a Victorian. When he decided to build a grander place, today’s Community Center, he moved his old house to Governor Street where it became the home of  Mr. and Mrs. John W. Rockwell and and their daughter, Mary. John, longtime owner of The Elms Inn, probably paid a modest price because the Rockwells and Lounsburys were relatives.

 Mary Hester “May” Rockwell was born in 1874 and received an education that was well above the average schooling for a Ridgefield native of the era. In 1889, when she was only 15 years old, she was studying at Centenary Collegiate Institute, a Methodist-owned college preparatory

school in Hackettstown, N.J., that is now Centenary University.

In 1891, when she was 17, her parents sent her to Europe and she spent six months studying music in Berlin, Germany. She later also studied at Oberlin College.

“Miss Rockwell was a tall, stately woman whose life was clouded by poor eyesight,” wrote Karl S. Nash in 1980. “She was an albino with one-quarter of normal sight in one eye and none in the other.

“In the 1920’s when she was in her forties, she left the Methodist Church where she had grown up and embraced Christian Science. She threw away her thick-lensed glasses and never wore them again. In embracing the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy, she became more calm of spirit and more able to cope optimistically with her infirmity.”

Rockwell was an accomplished pianist who taught piano to hundreds of Ridgefield children over more than 30 years, at first with her cousin Faustina Hurlbutt. The Hurlbutt-Rockwell School of Music regularly gave public recitals at her home.

Her house became rather large for a single woman, so in the 1910s May Rockwell began

renting rooms in a boarding-house fashion. She didn’t rent to just anyone, however; she sought guests who were intellectually interesting as well as congenial, and she called the place the “House of Friends.”

   Among those friends, best known was Mabel Cleves, her companion of more than 40 years (previously profiled in Who Was Who).  Columbia-educated and Montessori-trained,   Cleves began teaching here in 1898, and established not only the first kindergarten in town but also a public preschool.  She also founded the PTA in Ridgefield.

In late life, Miss Cleves bought an automobile and learned how to drive it. She would take Rockwell and other friends on fairly long rides around the countryside. “Sometimes Mary and Mabel would go wading at Compo Beach or Sherwood Island,” Nash said.

Besides long-term clientele, guests at the house included actors and actresses doing summer theater, and teachers and professors on summer break. The place had a “high cultural level,” The Ridgefield Press once reported. 

At Oberlin, Rockwell had studied under Professor Charles K. Barry who later became a regular summer visitor at the House of Friends.

Among the more unusual guests there were Mr. and Mrs. William Picke. Mr. Picke was a tutor

for the Doubleday family of Westmoreland. “He was a distinguished-looking man with a goatee and a British accent,” said Nash, who then recounted this widely told incident:  “At the silent movies in the town hall one Saturday night, Mr. Picke looked about and whispered to his wife — loud enough for somebody to hear— ‘Oh, my dear, we are the only ones of the upper class here.’”

Frail and infirm, Rockwell sold the house in 1947 and died two years later in a nursing home. Mabel Cleves died in 1952.