John Ames Mitchell: 

The Father of Life

Magazine publisher, architect, artist, novelist, mystic, mystery: John Ames Mitchell was a Renaissance man who kept to himself but influenced many. 

Born in 1845, the Harvard-educated architect designed a number of buildings including the beautiful Unity Unitarian Church in Easton, Mass, but soon decided architecture wasn’t for him. He went to Paris and studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and in 1883 founded the original Life magazine, promising “to speak out what is in our mind as fairly, as truthfully, and as decently as we know how.”

Much more like today's New Yorker than the Life of the later 20th Century, Mitchell's magazine discovered and encouraged many fine writers and artists at the turn of the 20th Century, such as Charles Dana Gibson, the illustrator who created the Gibson Girl. It covered the literary scene as well as political and social issues. His staff  included the Harvard graduate and founder of Harvard Lampoon, Edward Sandford Martin. 

Life was purchased in 1936 by another Ridgefielder, Henry Luce, who turned it into a picture magazine. Mitchell and Horace Greeley of The New York Herald Tribune founded the Fresh Air

Fund, which for many years operated the Life Fresh Air camp for city kids on the site of today's Branchville School. 

Mitchell also penned a half dozen novels, the most famous of which, “Amos Judd” (1895), was made into the 1922 silent film, “The Young Rajah,” starring Rudolph Valentino. 

He was “a man who planted many seeds,” said Abraham Puchall, who has a much more than   passing interest in Mitchell. He has lived and worked in Mitchell’s world for years.

The headquarters of Mitchell's Life is now The Herald Square Hotel in New York, a gift to Mitchell from Charles Dana Gibson in appreciation of the publisher’s having seen and developed his potential as an artist. The hotel is operated by Puchall, whose Ridgefield home on West Lane was once Mitchell’s home, called Windover.

Puchall has spent countless hours researching John Ames Mitchell’s life and philosophy. 

Mitchell loved cherubs, he said, using them in his writing and as a symbol for his magazine — Gibson had noted sculptor Philip Martiny create a cherubic Winged Life over the main entrance to the Life building. To him,  Puchall said,  Cupid personified a cheerful but unrelenting guide to truths about human nature and the creative spirit. 

Mitchell died in 1918 and is buried in Fairlawn Cemetery.

While his magazine is gone, his books mostly forgotten, and his camp has vanished, Ridgefield has one monument to John Ames Mitchell that thousands see daily. Soon after the turn of the 20th Century, Mitchell donated a watering trough for horses, handsome enough to be placed in the middle of the intersection of Main and Catoonah Streets. It had a large bowl to serve passing horses and included, at its base, a special opening for village dogs in need of a drink. The trough now stands in the island at the intersection of West and Olmstead Lanes, where it is often mistaken for a fountain.

E. W. Kemble: 

He Pictured Huck

Like his friend and fellow illustrator Frederic Remington, Edward Windsor Kemble moved to Ridgefield from New Rochelle, N.Y., and wound up dying here not long afterward.

Kemble was born in California in 1861, a son of the founder of the first daily newspaper on the Pacific Coast. By age 20 the largely self-taught artist was living in New York City. In an era before photographs were used in periodicals, he worked as an illustrator at the Daily Graphic, the first illustrated daily newspaper in New York, and did drawings for other publications such as Life and Harper’s magazines — Life was published by Ridgefield’s John Ames Mitchell.

“While contributing to Life I made a small picture of a little boy being stung by a bee,” Kemble said in a 1930 interview. “Mark Twain had completed the manuscript of ‘Huckleberry Finn’ and... casting about for an illustrator, Twain happened to see this picture. It had action and expression, and bore a strong resemblance to his mental conception of Huck Finn.” 

Still in his early 20s, Kemble was hired to illustrate Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, now considered one of the greatest American novels of all time. He went on to do other work for Twain, including Puddn’head Wilson.

His “understanding and sympathetic” portrayal of black Americans in Huckleberry Finn was considered remarkable at the time, his obituary in The Ridgefield Press said. However, he himself admitted he had known hardly any blacks, and that the model for Jim (and most of the other characters, including Huck) was a teenage white boy named Cort Morris, who would pull down a black wool cap over his face to create the effect of being black.

Other publishers were taken by Kemble’s portrayal of Jim and approached him to do illustrations for works about blacks. Kemble, who had never been south of Jersey City, decided he needed to learn more about his subject, and for many months lived on a cotton plantation in the South to gain firsthand knowledge. He wound up being commissioned to illustrate Uncle Tom’s Cabin as well as an early edition of the Uncle Remus stories. 

While his illustrations of blacks often displayed “great empathy,” they sometimes reflected “the most outrageous of stereotypes,” one biographer said.

Kemble also drew scores of political cartoons for newspapers and was so effective at it that President William Howard Taft once remarked that “Mr. Kemble and his satiric drawings were one of the few forces in the country that he feared,” The Press obituary said.

Kemble moved here around 1930 to live with his daughter on Wilton Road West, where he enjoyed gardening and gatherings with friends. He died in 1933 at age 72 and is buried in Mapleshade Cemetery.