Joseph Knoche: 

An Artist in Rock

Most artists work in media like paint, metal, stone, or fabrics. Joe Knoche worked in rocks — good, old, Connecticut countryside rocks. Like few others could, he created stone walls, fireplaces and foundations that have lasted more than a century and show no sign of deteriorating — unless at the hands of man. 

His craftsmanship was so good that one of America’s leading artists of the 20th Century drew him at work many times.

Joseph John Knoche was born in Germany in 1868. When he was 14, his family moved to New York City where he apprenticed as a stonecutter at a cemetery. In 1893, he decided to come to Ridgefield, perhaps drawn by the need here for fine stonemasonry work on the many estates that were being built then. He and his mother moved to Pelham Lane on the Ridgefield-Wilton border.

Knoche established his own contracting business, with several employees. They did masonry

work on many of the large new and renovated “summer cottages,” as the estates were called.

Among the first walls he did were on the South Salem farm of a Dr. Agnew, which later became the home of U.S. Vice President Henry A. Wallace. He did Henry deB. Schenck’s new estate on Tackora Trail, which became the Mamanasco Lake Lodge, the Jesuits’ Manresa retreat house and now Christ the King religious center. And he worked on the new home of artist Frederic Remington on Barry Avenue. 

For these and other projects Knoche would often do the foundations and fireplaces, and then would frequently build a stone wall along the front of the property or rebuild an old wall. In some cases he would also wall off  gardens or fields.

 Around 1918, Knoche gave up general masonry contracting to concentrate practically exclusively on dry walls — that is, walls that employ no mortar, and are held together by the shape, weight and position of the rocks. And he was good at it.

“Everybody didn’t make dry walls the way Joe did,” said his daughter, Teresa Knoche Sheehy in an unpublished 1961 interview with Ridgefield Press reporter Peter W. Roberts. “He fit them right, he cut them correctly.”

The virtue of a dry wall is its appearance, she said. 

“It’s more difficult than a wet one,” she pointed out. And when mortar was occasionally demanded by an employer, he would always conceal it. 

 Among the many homes on which he created rock walls and other stone structures were:

• The John H. Lynch place on West Mountain Road, now the Ridgefield Academy and its campus.
  
• “Oreneca,” the West Mountain estate of  P.D. Wagoner, the Underwood Typewriter magnate, later the home of rare book collector Harrison Horblit.
  
• The Rainsford estate on the Ridgefield-South Salem line, which in recent years has been Le Chateau restaurant.
  
• Sunset Hall, the Old West Mountain estate that was the country retreat of several prominent New York businessman and, for many years,  the home of actor Robert Vaughn and now the home of Dick Cavett, the television interviewer.
  
• The Jonathan Bulkley estate on Rippowam Road, still owned today by the same family that established it more than a century ago.
  
• The very visible and tall wall at the corner of High Ridge and Barry Avenue that surrounds the former Sereno T. Jacob home. (Jacob, a World War I fighter pilot and feisty town official, gave two reasons for commissioning this wall: To keep his small children safe from traffic at the busy intersection, and to protect the public from his rather aggressive police dog.)
  
• Many long walls on the estate of Louis Morris Starr at the corner of Farmingville and Lounsbury Roads.
  

However, nowhere in the area is his work better known and appreciated than at the J. Alden Weir homestead along Nod Hill Road and Pelham Lane, now the National Park Service’s Weir Farm. Considered one of the great American Impressionist artists, Weir used Knoche’s talents to build walls

at his farm. So did his daughter, Cora Weir Burlingham,  who commissioned Knoche to erect more than a mile and a half of walls there. Knoche started that project in 1938 when he was 71 years old.

“Apparently, Mahonri Young liked to tease his sister-in-law, and the ‘Great Wall of Cora’ was his name for the system of elegantly constructed dry stone walls that Cora Burlingham had local mason Joe Knoche design and build on the property,” said Dr. Cynthia Zaitzevsky in a 1996 National Park Service report. “It is not yet clear whether Cora had a grand plan for the stone walls or whether they evolved incrementally, but they seem to have been completed by the late 1940s.”

  Mahroni Young was so taken by Knoche’s work that he drew many pen-and-ink sketches of the mason at work. The best-known shows him working on that “Great Wall of Cora.” 

“Joe Knoche and his men were one of Young’s favorite subjects,” said Dr.  Zaitzevsky. “He did numerous sketches of them, resulting in the etching [accompanying this profile], which shows the construction of one of the walls to the north of the house. The north side of the toolshed is also visible. 

“None of Young’s Knoche sketches and etchings is dated, but they must have been done in

the 1940s,” she said. (Young, who is also profiled in Who Was Who, is especially known for his huge sculpture of his grandfather, Brigham Young, outside Salt Lake City, Utah.)

Despite time, weather, vandals, and even rock thieves, Knoche’s walls are still a prominent part of Weir Farm and line both sides of Pelham Lane where the Weirs, Youngs, Burlinghams, and Knoche himself lived. (In modern times Knoche’s grandson, also named Joe Knoche and who also lives on Pelham Lane, has done much carpentry work on Weir Farm.)

In the late 1930s, Knoche took a break from wall building to work on his own plan for a monument to the memory of J. Alden Weir. “The monument was to have been built on an island in what is known as Weir’s Pond,” according to Peter Roberts’ profile of the mason. Knoche spent

weeks in the woods at his home,  searching for a granite ledge from which he could cut stone for columns and haul them out by truck. He found such a spot and “at once began his work of quarrying out these granite columns. He was several months at this project and each column was a masterpiece.” Each was a foot square and six feet long.

The final monument was never built, however.

Joseph Knoche married Mary Margaret Hickey, a native of Ireland, in 1905 in Manhattan. Mary, who had come to this country in 1896 at the age of 13,  died in 1927. Joseph died in 1949 at the age of 80. 

Joseph and Mary produced two sons and two daughters, plus many grand- and great-grandchildren, a number of whom still live in and about Ridgefield. One of those grandchildren, Joe Sheehy, was a young boy in the late 1940s. One of his strongest memories of his grandfather was the hands that had handled countless rocks and built miles of walls and foundations.

“They were like sandpaper,” he said.

The Bulkleys: 

The Home on the Hill

In 1902, Jonathan and Sarah Tod Bulkley established one of Ridgefield’s many grand estates. More than a century later, Rippowam is the only remaining estate that is virtually unchanged in acreage and in use from that “Golden Era” when many New Yorkers built their country homes here.

What’s even more amazing, Rippowam is still owned and occupied by the same family.

Descended from the founders of Fairfield, Jonathan Bulkley was born in 1857, graduated from Yale in 1879 and joined the paper manufacturing firm of Bulkley, Dunton and Company, which his father had established in 1833. The company still exists; it calls itself  the largest paper company in North America providing paper products to magazine, book, and catalog publishers. It’s also one of the oldest continuously operating businesses in New York State.

Bulkley was also a director of various other companies, a member of New York social clubs and an influential man in the life of the city. 

The home he and Sarah built at 600 Park Avenue in 1911 is considered one of the city’s architectural treasures. The mansion was designed by James Gamble Rogers, whose many major projects included Sterling Memorial Library and a dozen other buildings at Yale and more at other universities, including Northwestern, Columbia and NYU; the Federal Courthouse in New Haven; Presbyterian Hospital in New York; Butler Library at Columbia; and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York. 

The Bulkley home was the scene of one of New York’s costlier burglaries. According to an account by New York City building historian Tom Miller: “On Feb. 22, 1927, Sarah Bulkley left the house at 3 to attend a tea. Around her neck hung a pearl necklace valued at $50,000 and her fingers were weighed down with several expensive rings. It was a fortunate choice of accessories for Mrs. Bulkley.
“When she returned at 6:30 she found her safe opened and empty. Gone was all of Sarah’s jewelry – diamond bracelets, diamond and emerald rings and a lorgnette chain with 97 diamonds valued at $20,000. ($20,000 then was equivalent to $275,000 in today’s dollars.)
“Bulkley and his sons, who were 29 and 27 years old at the time, had been home all afternoon; none of the servants knew the combination to the safe other than Sarah’s personal maid, Ida Kaemfer; and police called it an ‘inside job.’ All circumstantial evidence pointed to Ida.
“Mrs. Bulkley, however, insisted that the maid was ‘above suspicion.’  The case was never solved.”

Both Jonathan and Sarah were involved in many in philanthropic and social endeavors. He was president of the East Side House Settlement, one of New York’s oldest organizations helping the poor (it still exists today in the South Bronx). Sarah was vice president of the New York Y.W.C.A and active in the the Girls Service League in New York. 

Sarah was also president of the Garden Club of America from 1932 to 1935 and traveled widely in the United States and in Asia promoting the aims of the club. At one point in the 1930s, Japanese Prince Fumimaro Konoye came to Ridgefield to visit Mrs. Bulkley at Rippowam. When she later went to Japan on behalf of the garden club, the prince entertained her. (Konoye went on to become prime minister of Japan, but resigned shortly before Pearl Harbor. In 1945, he was closely involved in efforts to stop the war.) 

Sarah Bulkley, who summered in Ridgefield for 40 years, was a charter member of the Ridgefield Garden Club, serving as its president in the 1920s. Along with her daughter, Sarah Bulkley Randolph (1897-1982), she was one of the founders of the Ridgefield Boys Club. 

Rippowam, which is situated on Rippowam Road near the top of West Mountain, overlooks Lake Rippowam in Lewisboro and includes land in that town. The cave of Sarah Bishop, the legendary post-Revolutionary-era hermitess, lies within the estate’s bounds. 

The Ridgefield Press noted in 1939 that Rippowam was well-known for its “swinging bridge” which Sarah designed around 1920. The bridge extended from the edge of a 60-foot-deep wooded ravine some 50 feet out to the top of a large oak tree to which it was fastened and from which it swung from side to side a few inches from its anchorage. The bridge eventually deteriorated and was removed.

The family allowed kids from the Boys Club to use a pond on the property many years ago.

Jonathan Bulkley died in Ridgefield in 1939 at the age of 82. Sarah Bulkley, a native of Cleveland who grew up in Brooklyn, died in 1943 at the age of 72.

While the family still owns the Ridgefield home, it sold the Manhattan residence three years after Sarah’s death to the Royal Swedish Government. Today it is the residence of the Swedish ambassador to the United Nations.