Matilda Ziegler: 

The Heiress Who Helped the Blind

A wealthy heiress who found Ridgefield a retreat spent much of her life aiding the blind. Nearly a century after her death, she still is helping the visually impaired. Inspired by a young son who lost his sight, Matilda Ziegler founded a magazine and a foundation, both aimed at the blind. 

Her Main Street mansion is now Wesley Hall, part of the Methodist Church complex.

Electa Matilda Curtis was born on a farm in 1841 in Saratoga County, N.Y.,  and, when she was about 18, married a local boy, Edward Gamble. They had a son, Charles, who was blinded in an accident as a child. By 1870, she was divorced and living with the 10-year-old boy at her parents’ farm in Schuylerville.

Within 15 years, her life had changed dramatically. Mrs. Gamble was living in New York City when she met William Ziegler, a millionaire industrialist. Born in 1843 of Pennsylvania Dutch farmers, Ziegler had worked a printer’s apprentice, clerked in a drug store, learned telegraphy, pharmacology, and chemistry, went to business school, and worked for a wholesale drug and chemical company before he wound up acquiring and heading a large company that produced baking powder and other cooking chemicals.

William and Matilda were married in 1886.

William Ziegler later  became famous for financing several unsuccessful expeditions to the Arctic in an effort to plant the American flag at the North Pole. He also created one of the most valuable estates in America. In 1902 he bought Great Island on the Darien shore and built a mansion as the center of a spread that included a huge 20-stall stone stable with indoor ring, a polo grounds, and a yacht basin. In 2016, the Ziegler family placed the 63-acre property on the market for $175 million, ranking it at the time as the fifth highest-priced home for sale in the entire United States. The price was reduced two years later to $120 million. The property is still owned by the family.

Ziegler himself got to enjoy his estate only three years, dying in 1905 of complications from a runaway carriage accident the previous year.  He left behind an estate worth some $30 million ($884 million today), of which $18.5 million went to his adopted son, William Jr. (who was actually his nephew).  Matilda was bequeathed $50,000 a year ($1.4 million) as well as lifetime use of their Fifth Avenue mansion and the Great Island estate. After a lawsuit challenging parts of the will, she wound up with another $2.5 million  ($70-million) in cash and stocks. 

Soon after William’s death,  Mrs. Ziegler — she  went by Matilda Ziegler, E. Matilda Ziegler or Mrs. E. M. Ziegler, but never by Electa Ziegler — began devoting herself to the needs of the blind. In 1907, she founded the Matilda Ziegler Publishing Company for the Blind in New York City.

“As the loving mother of a son who lost his sight in childhood, Mrs. Ziegler knew from personal experience how few resources were available to enrich the lives of the blind,” says the E. Matilda Ziegler Foundation for the Blind.  “At the time, communications reading material in Braille was limited. By creating and distributing a monthly, general-interest magazine in Braille, Mrs. Ziegler helped break through the isolation that defined the lives of blind people.”

When the magazine started in 1907, circulation was 6,500 copies and a subscription cost only 10 cents a year — a nominal fee that was charged to make the publication eligible for an inexpensive second-class mailing rate. About a year  later, a law was passed, making periodicals for the blind postage-free, and the magazine itself became completely free.

Each 48-page  copy, looking like a large scroll when it was delivered,  included a summary of current events, scientific advances,  a short story,  poetry,   popular music,  reports from blind people describing their successes in various fields, and sometimes even raised maps as “illustrations.” By 1919,  the magazine was producing 96,000 copies annually, which required printing more than 6,000,000 pages per year on a special Braille press. The print edition lasted until 2009, but the magazine continued online with audio feeds until 2014 when it shut down.

Along with the magazine, Ziegler built a printing plant that produced not only the magazine, but books for the blind.

In 1929,  Ziegler established the E. Matilda Ziegler Foundation for the Blind to pay for the magazine and for other services that benefited the blind.

Meanwhile, in 1912, she bought Hawley Cottage, later called Ashton Croft, the Main Street

mansion built about 1892 by Henry E. Hawley, a tea importer. His widow, Elizabeth, sold the 11.4 acre estate to Ziegler for an undisclosed sum. The property then extended from Main Street along King Lane to High Ridge Avenue.

Why Mrs. Ziegler bought a house in Ridgefield when she already had a six-bedroom mansion 15 miles away on Great Island is unclear. Also unclear is why the renovated the exterior, which had been shingled, into a Tudor-style design of posts, beams, and stucco. (The only other Tudor building on Main Street, built at about the same time, is the so-called Pizza Block of stores and offices in the central business district.) One of the exterior changes  she made to the house was facing porches and chimneys with stone, similar to the look of the manor house at her Darien estate.

It’s also unknown how often she was in Ridgefield instead of her Manhattan and Darien homes. She must have spent some time here — she had three automobiles registered in Ridgefield in 1914.

In 1924, when she was in her middle 80s, she sold the house  to Sanford H.E. Freund, a New York City attorney. Tax stamps on the deed suggest that the price in today’s dollars was about $720,000. The Odd Fellows bought the estate from the Freund family in 1956. Three years later,  the organization sold most of the property — retaining the carriage house for its lodge — to Jesse Lee Methodist Church, which planned to eventually build  a new church there to replace the old one at Main and Catoonah Streets. 

Matilda Ziegler died in 1932 at the age of 91.

Her adopted son, William Ziegler Jr. (1894-1958), continued her work, serving as president of both the foundation and  publishing company  as well as the American Foundation for the Blind, and the American Foundation for Overseas Blind. His son,  William Ziegler III, his son, became president of the foundation and the publishing company, serving until his death in 2008.  

Today, while the magazine is gone, the foundation is alive and quite active in providing money for vision research — in the past decade, more than $4.5-million in grants were awarded to “scientists whose research holds the promise of major impact.”

A Lost Landmark

The black-and-white picture here is a rather remarkable snapshot in several ways: The crowd, the trees and the beauty of a long-lost landmark.

First off, for newer-comers, the scene is Main Street looking west from about where folks sit in front of Tazza and drink coffee. That big, handsome building is the Jesse Lee Methodist Church on the corner of Main and Catoonah Streets. The accompanying color photograph shows what the same corner looks like today.

The occasion is the September 1958 parade that marked the end of Ridgefield’s six-month celebration of its 250th anniversary. That tent at the right with a cross on it was part of a float, possibly done by St. Mary’s School pupils. (Many other pictures of 250th anniversary parades have been posted here.)

Trees dominate the picture, especially that Norway spruce at the right. It was one of two spruces that stood tall in front of the rectory, hidden at right by the boughs. The other, just a bit north, snapped in half when Ridgefield’s village was hit by a twister on July 13, 1950.

The tree at the left would have been near the front of Bedient’s or now, Books on the Common.

Then there’s the church. This picture does a remarkably good job of capturing the beauty of the facade of the building. If you enlarge the picture and look closely, you can see many find details like dentilated moldings, gable carvings, and nice use of clapboards and facings. And, of course, there are the two handsome towers.

Why, many have asked, would a building as beautiful as this, in the very center of the town, be torn down, as happened in 1964?

Several factors contributed to the church’s demise. To the growing congregation of Methodists, the church’s serious lack of parking space became a real problem. The building could not be expanded to handle the increasing needs of the membership. Then, too, the building was old — the earliest parts dated from 1841 — and was probably expensive to maintain.

So the congregation moved a couple blocks south to its present site, building a much bigger church, with support facilities and plenty of parking spaces. 

Couldn’t the building still have been preserved? Probably, but in the early 1960s, Ridgefielders were only beginning to develop a strong preservationist movement that resulted in establishment of historic districts and a commission to oversee them, as well as organizations like the Keeler Tavern Preservation Society, the Ridgefield Preservation Trust, and the Architectural Advisory Committee. 

The church might have been nice for a new, smaller religious congregation, but none was available or wanted the building. It could have been “repurposed” but apparently its age and the fact that it looked so much like a church dissuaded potential buyers. (However, the rectory next door — which looks like a Victorian house — was repurposed, and today serves as offices and shops.) 

If the same opportunity were to occur today, the church would probably have been preserved,

perhaps for use as shops or offices, or maybe even as a historical museum.

The church was replaced by a two-story, flat-roofed building of stores and offices that was aimed at looking colonial, with brick to match the town hall and the Ernest Scott buildings on two other nearby corners, and the firehouse and telephone building up Catoonah Street.

Incidentally, in 1964, the historic Philip Burr Bradley/Biglow/Ballard house farther north on Main Street was also torn down. That was not the choice of the townspeople, however; part of Elizabeth Ballard’s bequest of the land to the town included that the house be razed so the land could become Ballard Park. She also did not want the house to be a burden on a community that had only recently set up the Community Center in the Lounsbury mansion — Ridgefield already owned one big old mansion on Main Street and didn’t need another, she felt.

The Catoonah Street Triangle

As work continues on remodeling the front terrace of the Town Hall, we thought it would be fun to see what the view from there more than a century earlier looked like.

This picture, probably taken around 1900 and looking northwesterly, shows the intersection of Main Street (foreground) and Catoonah Street, running off to the left. The Town Hall would be at the  right, beyond the lens of the camera.

The remarkable feature of this picture is its clear depiction of a triangle that had existed at Main and Catoonah before the age of the automobile. Soon after this shot was taken, a watering trough was erected in the triangle and thereafter, the triangle began to disappear. At some point it was completely removed, along with the trough, apparently to deal with increasing traffic from the proliferating horseless carriages. 

Often in the case of main highways, triangles don’t fit in with officialdom’s idea of an ideal intersection. Main Street once had at least two other triangles that have vanished: At the intersection of Gilbert Street, and at the intersection of Branchville Road (Route 102). It is quite likely that the junction of Main Street and Danbury Road was also once a triangle.

The only Main Street triangles left are at West Lane and at the very southern end, where the road splits into Wilton Roads East and West. And the state has repeatedly tried to do away with the triangle holding the Cass Gilbert Fountain at West Lane.

This picture is from the cover of a 1924 brochure for a celebration of the 100th anniversary of the first Jesse Lee Methodist Episcopal Church building in Ridgefield. That structure is not the one shown here, but a smaller building that stood at the intersection of North Salem Road and North Street — now the Lounsbury section of the Ridgefield Cemetery (No images of that first church exist.

The Methodist church shown here was built in 1841 and expanded somewhat over the years. In the mid-20th Century, it grew too small and the parking too limited so the congregation decided to build a new church a quarter mile to the south. This building was razed in 1964 and replaced by the brick stores-and-offices building there today.

The rectory, however, was not torn down. Visible just beyond the church, but half hidden by the trees, it became a three-story collection of shops and offices at 409 Main Street that is still used today (long called the Hackert and Monti building for post-Methodist owners).

Conrad Rockelein,

90-Hour Weeks

Conrad Rockelein was the epitome of the hard-working immigrant, a man who spent years of 90-hour weeks at his craft of haircutting. But his legacy to Ridgefield is not old pictures of ancestors who are well-coiffed, but one of Ridgefield’s first “neighborhoods.”

Rockelein was born in Germany in 1867, came to this country at the age of 14, and spent most of his life in Ridgefield.

On April 22, 1889, when Rockelein put up his first barber’s pole on Main Street, old “Doc” Reynolds was operating the only other barber shop in Ridgefield. But, according to newsman and historian Karl S. Nash, “Doc liked to go fishing and he closed his shop most any time he thought the fish would be biting. So his new competitor wasn’t long in getting his shop on a good paying basis.”

“Back in 1889, I opened my shop at 7 a.m. and stayed at my chair until 9 p.m. every day except Saturday when the shop was open till midnight,” he told The Ridgefield Press in 1940. “And then I was on the job also from 7 a.m. to noon on Sunday. 

“The price of a haircut in those days was 25 cents. A shave cost 10 cents, or 15 cents with bay rum.”

His business grew quickly and was prospering when the Great Fire of 1895 burned down most of the commercial section of town, including Rockelein’s shop. “But the embers had hardly cooled before he was temporarily set up for business again in the back room of Will Benedict’s Store,” Nash wrote.

Soon he had a shop running over where Deborah Ann’s Sweet Shoppe is now and in the years that followed, he moved to various locations around the village, including his own home  (from 1900 to 1908, he was in ill health — possibly due to those 90-plus hour weeks of work —  and mostly retired from barbering).

In 1938 when he observed his 50th year in business, Rockelein estimated he had performed 20,000 haircuts, but he would not venture a guess on the number of shaves. He finally retired in 1945.

Rockelein lived on Mountain View Avenue, in a sizable neighborhood he himself subdivided. In fact, he could be considered one of Ridgefield’s first developers. 

By 1910, he had acquired 19.4 acres of hayfield which he laid out into 75-by-250 foot lots.  A new subdivision plan, filed in 1927, called the neighborhood Mountain View Park and named its three roads Island Hill Avenue, Hillsdale "Street" and Mountain View Avenue.
He felt his development would serve many of the immigrant Italian, German and Irish families that had been coming to town and were becoming prosperous enough to build houses of their own. 

He named the development for its views of Titicus Mountain to the west and Copps Mountain to the north — views obscured today by trees that have been planted and have matured since Rockelein bought the treeless hayfield.

Despite all his work, Rockelein found time to be active in the Jesse Lee Methodist Church, where he was a steward, trustee and treasurer. He also belonged to the Masons.

He died in 1954 at the age of 87.

Rev. James Coleman,

Saddlebag Preacher

The Rev. James Coleman lived and died in Ridgefield, and though he was a pioneer in spreading Methodism in the early years of the United States, little is known or has been published about this “saddlebag preacher.”

Coleman was born in 1766. Some reports say his birth was in Black River, N.J., and others say in England — and that he came to this country in 1791, settling first in Ohio, then Long Island, and next  Stamford. It was in Stamford in 1804 that he married Martha DeForest, a local woman. Six years later, the two moved to Ridgefield, buying property in the Scotland section of town, on the east side of the Titicus River. He and Martha had five children, at least one of whom married a minister.

At some point in his early life, Coleman became a Methodist, a denomination whose teachings were being spread throughout the new United States by Jesse Lee and other itinerant preachers. 

In 1802, Coleman was appointed a Methodist preacher in a circuit of towns that included Norwalk, Fairfield, Stratford, Milford, Danbury, New Canaan, and Redding, 

Soon, however, he was to take on a larger task and territory.  He traveled by horseback on what was called the Courtland Circuit, a journey of at least six weeks extending through eastern New York and western New England to the Canadian border. During his life he is said to have preached Methodism through eastern Canada and most of New England. And he did it all four seasons of the year.

An 1899 history of Fairfield County calls Coleman “one of the best-known preachers of his day in his denomination.” George L. Rockwell, in his “History of Ridgefield,” says Coleman “labored and served in the township, and he is spoken of with grateful appreciation and affection by the early Methodists of Ridgefield.”

Ridgefield had already established a Methodist community or “class” by 1790. But Danbury had not. And it was James Coleman who got the ball rolling in a rather accidental way in the early 1800s.   James Bailey describes it this way in his “History of Danbury”:

“James Beatys lived a few rods beyond the base of Sugar Hollow Mountain, near the corner of the present Starr’s Plain and Long Ridge Roads,” Bailey wrote. “One cold winter day Mr. Beatys was cutting wood in his door yard when Rev. James Coleman, known as ‘Uncle Jimmy,’ a Methodist preacher whose circuit extended from Ridgefield to the Canada line, passed by on horseback, on his homeward journey from Canada.

“According to the hospitable custom of the day, Mr. Beatys invited the traveler in to dinner, an invitation gratefully accepted. Finding that his guest was a minister, Mr. Beatys asked him to make an appointment to preach at his house, which he did two weeks later, giving the first Methodist sermon in Starr’s Plain at a house of a very strong Episcopalian.

“The sermon made a deep impression, and was followed by another a little later, the result of which was a number of conversions, including the children of James Beatys, whose distress was great when he saw his children turn from the church of their father to Methodism.

“The outcome of these meetings was the organization of the first Methodist class in the town of Danbury...”

Today, Danbury has two Methodist congregations, one at Long Ridge that Coleman founded and one in the city proper that grew from his preaching in Danbury.

The Rev. Daniel Garrett, a longtime professor of theological subjects, said the incident described by Bailey was typical of how itinerant preachers would go about introducing themselves and their religion into a community. “They organized what they called ‘classes’ in which people gathered in small groups for weekly discipline and oversight,” Garrett said. “These classes as they grew became circuits, and then later banded together as churches. The real genius of the growth and development was the small groups that were formed.”

It is impossible to tell how many new churches Coleman inspired along his circuits through New York, New England and Canada, but his name pops up in the early records of many congregations. 

He died in 1842 at the age of 75 —  that in itself might be considered an unusual feat in the early history of American Methodism. After all, according to a historian at the Long Ridge church he helped found, of the first 700 Methodist preachers in America, nearly half died before they reached the age of 30. 

Coleman is buried in Titicus Cemetery next to his wife, who died two years later, and his son, John. 

William J. Cumming: 

First to Go, First to Die

Bill Cumming was the first man from Ridgefield to enlist in World War I and was the first in the conflict. An ambulance driver, he was “a soldier to the end,” said the headline in the Feb. 5, 1918 Ridgefield Press.

Son of James and Margaret Cumming, William James Cumming was born in 1895 in South Salem, N.Y. His parents, natives of Scotland,  moved between 1906 and 1909  to Ridgefield where his father worked as a gardener on local estates.  

Cumming enlisted on April 3, 1917 — three days before Congress declared war on Germany. He died in less than a year, on Jan. 5, 1918, in a hospital in Vitel, France, where he was being treated for “a serious illness” (which may have been the result of an influenza virus that was soon to cause one of the deadliest pandemics in history).

“I do not think we have a member that was thought more of than Private William J. Cumming and a better boy could not be found,” Private W.E. West wrote to the Rev. John M. Deyo, Cumming’s pastor here. “He was the first one in our company to be taken from us…Even in the end he did not give up and died a brave American.” 

In his sermon at the funeral in the Methodist church, Mr. Deyo used St. George and the Dragon as his theme. “For over three years,” he said, “the foulest dragon of all time has gone forth in his slime and devoured the flower of youth on a gigantic scale. Private Cumming answered the call and went forth to give battle to the foul dragon. Private Cumming has now answered his final summons. Though no longer with us, he conveys to us a message: ‘Carry on.’”

Cumming had been a private first class in the 102nd Ambulance Company and is buried in the American Cemetery, Romagne sur Montfacon, Meuse, France. There is also a monument to him

in the family plot at Fairlawn Cemetery on North Salem Road. “Died in the line of duty,” it says.

The Cumming family lived on Catoonah Street in a green-shingled, 19th-Century house just west of today’s post office.  James and Margaret, Bill’s parents, were known as Jim and Ma. Their son, Henry, also served in World War I, and they themselves were very active on the home front, even after the death of Bill. Jim Cumming was Ridgefield director of  the efforts of local farmers to grow food for the war effort. He also served on the school board.

Ma Cumming “was some kind of a little dynamo,” said town historian Dick Venus. “She was a detachment commandant in the local Red Cross and she and her group performed yeoman’s service. When the local Home Guard was organized, Ma presented the platoon with a flag that she had made.”

After the war, she became the first president of the American Legion Auxiliary and spent countless hours selling poppies to benefit the veterans, Venus said.

“One of our fondest memories is of Jim and Ma, sitting side by side, in their rocking chairs, on the front porch, after their duties for the day were completed,” Venus said. “It kind of gave you the feeling that everything would be all right.”

The Cumming homestead became vacant in 2003 after the death of their daughter in law, Helen Cumming, widow of their son, Donald. In December 2016, the house was torn down and today is an empty lot.

Phineas C. Lounsbury: 

The Dry Governor

Although he was governor of Connecticut – the first of two Ridgefield brothers to run the state, Phineas Lounsbury is better remembered today as the man who built what’s now the Community Center, a building of several names. Officially titled the Veterans Memorial Community Center,  the place is also today called the Lounsbury Mansion. The governor himself, however, called the place Grovelawn. 

Born  in 1841 on the family farm, The Hickories, in Farmingville, Phineas Chapman Lounsbury attended the Farmingville Schoolhouse and later the Florida Schoolhouse as a boy. 

His parents were devout Methodists. Every Sunday, “we trudged over the three miles from the old homestead to the preaching service at half past ten in the Methodist church [on Main Street], Sunday school at noon, preaching service again at 1:30 in the afternoon, after which we walked back and spent the balance of the day with father in reading, meditation and prayer.”

Lounsbury got his equivalent of a high school education from the Rev. David H. Short’s private school at the corner of Main Street and King Lane and went on to graduate from Wesleyan University. 

As a young man he worked as a clerk in a New York City shoe store, learning the shoe

business. After the Civil War broke out, he enlisted as a volunteer in the 17th Connecticut Infantry in August 1862, but due to a serious illness he was honorably discharged that December.  While he left before his unit did any fighting, he became active after the war in the regiment’s veterans organization, serving as its president for a while. He “delivered a 42-minute oration at the dedication of a monument to the regiment at Gettysburg in 1884,” reports Jeremy Main in a profile of Lounsbury that appeared in The Ridgefield Press.

Lounsbury returned to Ridgefield where he joined his brother, George, in a shoe manufacturing company under the name of Lounsbury Brothers — their father, Nathan, had been both a farmer and a shoemaker, as had a sizable number of Ridgefielders of the mid-19th Century. The factory was at first located in New Haven, but later more conveniently in Norwalk.

“Phineas built ties with the New York banking society and sealed them by marrying Jenny Wright, daughter of Neziah Wright, a founder and treasurer of the American Bank Note Co.,” said Main. “Phineas joined the board of the Merchants Exchange Bank in New York and became its president in 1885.”

Over the years he also served as chairman of the board of Atlantic National Bank and on the boards of many other businesses, including Ridgefield’s First National Bank.  

He began his political career in 1874 when he was elected a state representative from Ridgefield. His knowledge of financial matters and his oratory skills led him to become a Republican party leader and, in 1887, he was elected governor of the state.

Main said that Lounsbury’s single term in office, from 1887 to 1889, “apparently was a quiet one, distinguished by the passage of ‘The Incorrigible Criminals Act.’ Much like contemporary ‘three strikes’ laws, his law mandated a 25-year sentence for those who committed for the third time a felony that carried a two-year sentence. Lounsbury made clear his harsh view of criminals by saying the prison would serve its purpose by ‘shutting up forever within its walls and behind its bolts and bars, the entire criminal class of the state.’ ”

Lounsbury may not have fought any battles in the Civil War and few in the state capital, but

he was in the middle of one of the fiercest fights in 19th Century Ridgefield’s government. In 1872, a new state law allowed towns to ban liquor sales, and there was a strong support in Ridgefield for outlawing  “licensing”  the sale of booze. Local petitioners  believed ‘‘the sale and use of a beverage of intoxicating liquors is a great curse of any community, productive of much of the crime and misery which affects society.’’

In Sept. 3, 1872, a Town Meeting voted 104 to 49 to ban the sale of intoxicating liquors in Ridgefield.  However, by April 1873, some Ridgefielders were getting thirsty. Twenty-five men turned in a petition to rescind the ‘‘no license’’ vote. 

On April 26, 1873, at probably one of the most ‘‘spirited’’ town meetings in Ridgefield history, voters were asked to rescind the ban on liquor sales. Phineas’s brother, George Lounsbury, later also a governor of Connecticut, moved that the selectmen be allowed to license the sale of ‘‘spirituous and intoxicating liquors, ale and lager beer.’’ 

Up stood Phineas Lounsbury. Unlike George, Phineas was a leader in the temperance efforts. He moved that the vote be taken by paper ballot and that the voting box be kept open for two hours, presumably to allow him to run up and down the village street to gather supporters. When the ballots were counted, 104 favored alcohol sales, and 111 opposed. Ridgefield remained dry.

Battles over prohibition continued for years, with Phineas Lounsbury always among the leaders of the teetotalers. Late in life, Lounsbury owned The Ridgefield Press and told its small staff never to run advertisements for alcohol. One day, he picked up the paper, saw a liquor ad and was so angry, he immediately sold the paper.

Despite their different views on alcohol, the brothers remained close. Speaking at Ridgefield’s Bicentennial celebration in 1908, Phineas called George “one of the best brothers that ever lived — one of God’s noblemen.” George had died four years earlier.

Lounsbury made contributions to the community, including donating in 1882 the land for and part of the building cost of the Center School on Bailey Avenue — he would probably be a bit disappointed that his gift to education is now a municipal parking lot. 

He also donated a fire engine, worth $1,000 (about $30,000 today), to the new fire department formed after the great fire of 1895 that destroyed much of the village (his house was only a few doors from the southern limit of that blaze, and he no doubt was especially sensitive to the need for fire protection).

“He was a generous, if somewhat ostentatious, donor to the Methodist Church,” reported Jeremy Main. “When the plate came around, he held up a $5 note so people could see how much he was giving.” (It was equivalent to more than $140 today).

After the war, Lounsbury bought an old Main Street house, possibly dating from the 1700s, that had held three generations of physicians named Perry (profiled in Who Was Who). He  renovated

the colonial-style building into a snazzy Victorian with mansard roof. However, attending the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, Lounsbury was impressed with the stately design of the Connecticut Building, and decided he’d like a new house of similar design. To make room for the new place, he moved his old house to Governor Street, where it served as a boarding house and then office building until it was torn down in 2014 to make way for the Ridgefield Visiting Nurse Association headquarters.

Grovelawn was completed in 1896. It had a staff of 14 people indoors, and 12 for the grounds, which included almost all of today’s Veterans Park block, plus where the Boys and Girls Club is now.  He also had places in upper New York State and in Florida where he’d spend parts of the summer and winter.

Lounsbury died at Grovelawn in 1925 at the age of 81. In his obituary, The Press said: “His career was notable and brilliant. … By his masterly insight into public questions and oratorical powers [he] became a recognized power.”

Lounsbury had no children, and his estate was left to a niece who had little interest in living at Grovelawn. The house sat unused for almost 30 years. As World War II came to an end in 1945, the town voted to buy the property as a memorial to veterans, and created the Ridgefield Veterans Memorial Park. However, it wasn’t until 1953 that the mansion was leased to the Veterans Memorial Community Association, a private non-profit group that would run the building as a place for meetings, classes, social events, youth camps, a rifle range, a nursery school, and even a teen center.

One of the more unusual features of the property is a bell mounted on pedestal. Cast in 1845 in Ohio, the bell had been gathered, perhaps from a schoolhouse,  during a Confederate Army scrap drive, to be turned into weaponry. The scap collection was captured by a Connecticut unit led by Colonel Alexander Warner. Painted on the bell were the words: “This bell is to be melted into a cannon — may it kill a thousand Yankees.” Warner bought the bell from the Army, kept it for a number of years and eventually gave it to Governor Lounsbury.

The bell was rung to mark the signing of the armistice at the end of World War I and again, in September 1945 to mark the end of fighting in World War II.

Charles Wade Walker: 

Happy, Musical & Armed

Music was Charles Wade Walker’s first love and primary profession, but this prominent, many-faceted Ridgefielder also ran a magical Main Street store that entertained a generation of kids and adults. So Walker doesn’t seem quite like the kind of fellow who’d be a pistol-packing leader of a posse, and perhaps he should not have been.

Born in 1880, the Albany, N.Y., native came here in 1910 after having been an organist in several New York City churches. Over the years he was music supervisor for the schools, a tenor in the Ridgefield Male Quartet, organist and choirmaster at the Jesse Lee Methodist Church, a piano tuner, conductor of the St. Cecile Choral Society, and a trumpet player in the Ridgefield Band.

For many years he operated Walker’s Happy Shop on Main Street, a popular newspaper and novelty store. The sign in the front said, “Toys to make the kiddies happy, sweets to make the ladies happy, and smokes to make the men happy.” 

In 1917, when he installed a soda fountain, he put up a window shade with the sign, “Meet me here at the fountain.”

Walker was also a justice of the peace and town constable, long before Ridgefield had its own formal police department. It was, perhaps,  a job for which the musician and merchant was not always well suited, as evidenced by the story told by Town Historian Richard E. Venus in a 1987 “Dick’s Dispatch” column in The Ridgefield Press. 

It was in mid-winter one evening in the 1930s when Irene Zwierlein heard a noise in the

basement of her Barry Avenue home. Her husband, Joe, was attending a meeting in town, and she was alone in the house. “She opened the kitchen door that led to the basement and there, in the darkness, was the outline of a man,” wrote Venus. “The man hurled a rubber boot at Irene and then fled out the back door of the basement.

“Irene quickly recovered and soon had the police, in the person of Charles Wade Walker, on the scene. Word spread quickly through the neighborhood and soon a posse of neighbors was organized. It was led by a very nervous, part-time policeman.

“The trail of the intruder was easy to follow as there was a light, freshly fallen snow….The tracks led north through the fields to Ramapoo Road and an old hay barn that had a ground floor basement. The barn was part of Irving Conklin’s dairy farm and while the upper part of the barn was used to store hay, the basement sheltered a dozen young heifers that Irving used to winter there.

“The basement doors were always left open, in order that the herd of heifers would have easy access to the tiny pond where they got their water. The tracks of the culprit led directly to the open barn door.

“At this point, a decision had to be made: Do you barge into the barn or do you wait for the quarry to come out? Perhaps this is a good time to explain that the officer carried a gun, but, as he said later, he was terrified at the thought of ever having to use it. In fact, he said that he had never used it, even in practice.

“By now the posse had grown to a considerable size and they wanted some action. The man had managed to enter the barn without disturbing the heifers and they remained quietly in their shelter.

“However, at the approach of this small army, led by Charles Wade, a distinct rumble could be heard. Just as they reached the door, the herd, probably encouraged by the man, stampeded out the barn. Several people were knocked flat, including the officer, whose gun went off harmlessly into the air.

“The heifers raced across the open field, with the perpetrator keeping pace in their midst. He sure could run and with all the tracks made by the crowd, it was impossible to follow him.

“Several people thought they knew who he was, but positive identification could not be made and he got away scot-free.”

Walker may not have like toting a gun, but he was probably more knowledgeable than most about the law; before he came Ridgefield, he had studied law in New York City. His knowledge was put to use as a prosecutor in the town Justice Court. He was also a village traffic officer from 1938 to 1951,  and a volunteer fireman. And if that wasn’t enough, he belonged to the Masons, Odd Fellows, Lions, and the Grange — and contributed poetry to The Press.

He continued to live in Ridgefield until about a year before his death in a Hartford nursing home in 1961 on the eve of his 81st birthday.

Jack B. Ward: 

A Caring Citizen

The front-page headline in the Aug. 6, 1998, told the story: “Jack B. Ward, dead at 82, used fortune to aid others.” 

The son of a leader in the baking industry, Ward gave away millions to Danbury Hospital, the Visiting Nurse Association, the Ridgefield Fire Department, Jesse Lee Memorial United Methodist Church, and many other organizations and individuals over four decades. 

 “All he ever wanted to do was to help people,”  said his longtime companion and business partner, Olaf Olsen. 

Born in 1916, Jack Boyd Ward grew up on the family’s 800-acre farm in New Rochelle, N.Y. He was a grandson of Robert Boyd Ward, who founded the Ward Baking Company, later Continental Baking, whose most famous products included Twinkies and Tip Top Bread. In the early 20th Century, Ward was the largest baking company in America.

Ward’s father, William Breining Ward, became president of the company and was only 44 years old when he died of a heart attack in 1929 — son Jack was 13 at the time.

Jack Ward served as a flight instructor in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II. He was married and divorced, and had a daughter.

Introduced to the town through visits to dine at Tode’s Inn at Ridgefield and The Elms Inn, Ward moved to town in 1957, buying a spread on Peaceable Street and Golf Lane that was once the Ridgefield Golf Club. The estate had been created in the late 1930s by C. Chandler Ross, a noted portrait painter, and was later owned by Lyle B. Torrey. The 19-room Georgian Colonial house sat on

54 acres, most of which have since been subdivided.

Most of his 40 years here were spent at Ward Acres Farm where he and Olsen raised hunter and hackney horses, and maintained a museum of antique carriages that eventually included more than 50 vehicles. Up to 45 horses were stabled at Ward Acres in its heyday, and many were champions – one of his horses sold for $4.5 million. 

He had loved show horses since he was a small child. At the age of 6, he participating in his first show, riding a Welsh pony in Madison Square Garden. “Two ponies were in the class,” he told an interviewer in 1990. “The other pony was black with a little girl on it. They asked us to trot and canter. I was bouncing along, having a wonderful time. The blue ribbon, that’s first, went to the other pony. My ribbon was red and I was delighted. I happened to love red. I didn’t care if it was first or second.”

He and Olsen had a pond at Golf Lane and Lewis Drive where Olsen especially maintained a collection of exotic waterfowl, including black swans from Australia. “That was quite an attraction, and many people would come up there and look,” Ward said.

 His parents influenced his desire to give. “My family has always been interested in philanthropy in a very quiet way,” he said in 1982. “My father had many large memorials that he made for his parents. One was Ward Manor, an old folks home up in New York State. Another was a place for poor little mountain children down in Baxter, Tenn., and another was for farm boys in

Kentucky. So I really grew up with this interest in giving money, not necessarily just for the poor but for the underprivileged and the sick and the old.”

Perhaps the fact that his father died so young led Ward to focus much of his generosity on health care.  Almost as soon as he arrived here, he bought the town a new, modern ambulance. He equipped the Districting Nursing Association with its first car and fixed up its headquarters on Catoonah Street. 

In 1968, he contributed $150,000 ($1 million in today’s money) toward the cost of a new coronary intensive care unit at Danbury Hospital. Later the same year, having heard that cancer patients were having to travel to New Haven or New York for radiation treatment, he donated $100,000 ($690,000) for a cobalt unit to the Danbury Hospital, where he also served as a director and a trustee.

“In the early days when the Danbury Hospital development fund was just getting started, Jack played an enormous role,” said Frank Kelly, former president of the hospital. “The whole region owes him a tremendous debt of gratitude.”

Among his many smaller gifts was $5,000 ($36,000) to expand and fix up the old Titicus School for its use as the American Legion Hall.

Ward was a member of Jesse Lee Memorial United Methodist Church where he made a many donations in memory of his mother, Ethel Haney Ward, who had lived with him at Ward Acres until her death in 1965. These included the altar, stained glass windows, and bells. He helped plan the church’s move from an old building in the center of town to the new brick church at the head of Branchville Road. 

Many of Jack Ward’s contributions to people and organizations, including the town, were private and unpublicized, noted Sue Manning, who was first selectman when Ward died. “He was a good citizen,” she added. “He was a caring citizen.” 

Hubert Main: 

Holy Music

Ridgefield has had a surprisingly noteworthy history in the world of religious music: It was childhood home of one of the world’s most prolific hymn writers, it was the adulthood home of a major hymn publisher, and it was the birthplace of a major hymn composer. Oddly enough, Fanny Crosby, Lucius H. Biglow and Hubert Main all knew each other.

Hubert Platt Main was born in Ridgefield in 1839. His father, Sylvester Main, was a music teacher who became a compiler of hymn books and eventually joined Lucius Biglow in the music publishing business. 

But Sylvester was also a childhood friend of Fanny Crosby, the blind author of more than 3,000 hymns, who grew up on Main Street. In fact, Crosby fondly recounted how Sylvester often protected her from the local bullies when she was a young girl.

Hubert displayed an early love of both music and independence. According to J.H. Hall in his book, “Biography of Gospel Song and Hymn Writers,” Main had an amazing memory of his early childhood to as far back as 1842 when he was three years old. “He hasn’t forgotten a whipping received in that year for repeatedly running off from home at evenings to the band room, hiding under the benches and listening to the music.”

As a child, he would compose tunes by speaking “do, re, mi, fa...” for the notes. “If, when walking on the street, any air came to his mind, he would apply the syllables to it, and sing away,” Hall said.
As a young man, he moved to New York City where compiled books of music, was a choir leader and organist in churches, and eventually joined Biglow and Main, the music publishing company that his father had owned with Lucius Biglow. (Biglow moved to Ridgefield in the late 1880s, buying the estate that is now Ballard Park — donated to the town by his daughter, Elizabeth Biglow Ballard.)

Over his lifetime, Main composed more than 1,000 works, including “singing school pieces, Sunday-school songs, hymn tunes, gospel hymns, anthems, sheet music songs, love songs, quartets, and instrumental pieces,” Hall reports.

He composed the music for hundreds of popular hymns of the mid-to-late 19th century, among them “We Shall Meet Beyond the River,”  “Blessed Homeland,” and “The Bright Forever”— the words of the last two were written by Fanny Crosby.    

In the 1915 book, “Fanny Crosby’s Story of Ninety-Four Years,” she called Hubert Main “one of my most precious friends.” The book includes a picture of the two, seated together, called “Fast Friends.” 

Main also collected a huge library on music — he was “a veritable antiquarian in old music books,” said Hall. In 1891, he sold 35,000 volumes to the Newberry Library in Chicago, one of the world’s leading research libraries to this day.

Main was known not only for his independent thinking but for his sense of humor. “In regard to his religious proclivities,” Hall reports, “he was brought up a Methodist, joined the church in 1854 before he came to New York but he quaintly says that he is not outrageously pious, and could laugh at a funeral, even his own, if he saw anything comical, and he could just as easily shed tears at anything tender and pathetic.”

Hall added, “He is full of sunshine and good humor. He is immensely entertaining in his conversation, and one of  the best of companions. His letters to his friends are usually full of wit and humor. He remarks that he might be more dignified, but it would increase his doctor's bills.”

Main lived his later life in New Jersey where he died in 1925. He is buried there beneath a stone that says, “We shall meet beyond the river.” 

Amos Baker: 

The Apple Doctor

More than 7,500 varieties or “cultivars” of the apple have been known, and one of them was “discovered” in Ridgefield. However, you’d have a hard time finding Amos Baker’s fruit today.

Baker discovered his apple by accident. “According to the story,” Ridgefield historian Silvio Bedini wrote, “while Dr. Baker was waiting for his grain to be ground at the grist mill operated at Lake Mamanasco by Isaac Keeler, he passed the time by taking a walk through fields around the lake. He noticed a tree with brilliantly colored apples and he tasted one of them. They were of excellent quality and Dr. Baker made a mental note of the tree’s location. The following spring he returned to take some grafts from the old tree and the apple produced in this manner has since become known throughout the country.”

Bedini got this story from Rockwell’s “History of Ridgefield,” published in 1927. Rockwell also said the apple was known “throughout the country” which may have been a bit of an exaggeration. The Baker was probably never grown much beyond Connecticut and New York.

Today, in an era when you’d be hard pressed to find a store or even orchard selling more than 10 different kinds of apples, the Baker apple is virtually unknown.  Even the scientifically overseen orchards at Cornell University, with nearly 60 varieties, and the commercial Trees of Antiquity, with 176 varieties, have no Bakers.

Nonetheless, historians Rockwell and Bedini maintain that the the Baker apple was once “famous.”

The two-volume “The Apples of New York” by Beach, Booth and Taylor, published in 1905, describes the Baker as “a red apple of good size, pretty uniform in size and shape, and of fairly good quality. It is not so good a keeper as Baldwin and is inferior to it in quality and hardly equal to it in color. 

“The tree is hardy, healthy, vigorous, and reliably productive with a tendency to biennial bearing. There is a considerable loss from the dropping of the fruit. 

“Although it has been known in cultivation for more than a century, it appears to have practically passed out of the lists offered by the nurserymen in North America and evidently is nearly obsolete.”

The authors added, “It is stated that the original tree was in full bearing in its native place, Richfield, Ct., during the Revolutionary War. Forty years ago it was but little known outside the vicinity of its origin.”

Amos Baker was a prominent character in late 18th and early 19th Century Ridgefield. He was born around 1753. His birthplace is unknown, but may not have been Ridgefield. He was certainly living here by 1780 when he and his wife, Sarah, began recording the births of their children in town records.

Baker was a surgeon’s mate with Colonel Philip Burr Bradley’s battalion at the Battle of Ridgefield in 1777 and was part of Captain Isaac Hines’ Company at the Alarm at Fairfield in 1779. Perhaps his service with Colonel Bradley — whose home is where Ballard Park is today — introduced him to Ridgefield and its need for a doctor. Baker’s house, it turns out, was just north of Bradley’s, on Main Street — about across from the old Elms Inn.

Dr. Baker was an organizer back in the early 1800s of what is now the Jesse Lee Memorial United Methodist Church. “His kitchen served as one of the several meeting places for the first classes that were formed,” Bedini said.

Perhaps that kitchen also produced the world’s first Baker apple pie.