The Ebb and Flow of the Pond

When I first saw this Joseph Hartmann photograph many years ago, I figured it showed a mill somewhere in Ridgefield. It looked as if there was a sluice to power the mill built into that dam.

Only problem was: Where was the wheel the water would turn?

Then my boss, Karl S. Nash, publisher of the Ridgefield Press, explained what was probably shown here, a scene almost impossible to find today.

The stone-and-earth dam has an adjustable spillway, made of wood. Many farmers would use such an arrangement to keep their brook-fed ponds high in the winter so they could cut and store (or sell) ice, and low in the summer so the bog grass could grow, later to be cut as bedding for livestock.

This small barn or shed, and house to its rear, might be along some major highway in town, possibly North Salem Road. Karl believed that utility pole, visible just to the left of the barn’s peak, was part of an interstate telephone trunk line, connecting such cities as Boston and New York. It ran through town even before telephone service was available locally to many outlying sections of Ridgefield. It was the 1900 version of the underground interstate cable and gas lines that run through town now.

Unfortunately, neither Karl nor our readers back in 1982, when this photo was published in The Press, were able to identify the buildings shown here. Judging from their condition, they probably didn’t last too many years after the picture was taken by Joseph Hartmann.

Hester Hurlbutt: 

The Cutest Kid

Hester Hurlbutt may not have been famous or exceptionally accomplished. But in her 80s, the Ridgefield native and longtime teacher made national headlines in her fight against condominium developers who were kicking renters out of their apartments.

She may also have been the cutest kid ever photographed by Joseph Hartmann. 

Hester Elizabeth Hurlbutt was born in Ridgefield in 1896, the daughter of Frank and Annie Dunkerton Hurlbutt. Her father, who operated a shoe store on Main Street,  died when she was 10 and her mother passed away a year later. She then grew up with her aunt and uncle in the Hurbutt family homestead at Main and Market Streets  and also spent some  time with her maternal grandmother in the Finger Lakes region of New York.

Hurlbutt attended the Center School on Bailey Avenue and the Nash Private School, located

in what is now an apartment house just north of the Ridgefield Library.

When she was 20, she became a teacher of young women at a Delaware reform school, but in 1920, she moved to Boston where for the next 46 years, she taught sewing and clothing design in the public schools, retiring in 1966.

In the early 1980s, when she was living in Boston’s Back Bay, her apartment building began being converted to condominiums. Though in her 80s, she started attending Boston City Council hearings to seek support for legislation that would prevent the eviction of rent payers from apartments

turned into condominiums.

She helped found the Massachusetts Tenants Organization, and spent nearly three years fighting building owners. “I’m not easily frightened,” she said. “Why should I be? Why should I not stand up for my rights? I’m not going to be downtrodden and I’m not going to live in the slums.”

Her efforts made headlines in Boston newspapers and news segments on Boston TV, but  readers around the country learned of her efforts in 1982 when the Associated Press carried a story about the octogenarian battling the big-time developers.

As her building on Commonwealth Avenue continued to be converted into condos, she  

refused to leave, saying she could not afford the price of buying the unit and would not be able to find another apartment to replace her rent-controlled unit. 

“I’ve lived in the Back Bay for 60 years,” she told the Boston Herald American. “My friends, my doctor, my church, stores, hospital — all those things that are my lifelines are there.”

She was successful.

“She put up a good fight, was able to keep her apartment, and helped many others do the same,” said Del Bryon, a longtime friend, in a letter written a few years later. “She can be proud of her victory! A capable lady and a formidable opponent.”

Elise Haas, former president of the Keeler Tavern Museum, visited Hurlbutt in 1989. “A feisty little lady, she had filled her apartment with memorabilia of Ridgefield,” Haas said. “She told

many stories of Ridgefield and recalled Sunday afternoon walks with her parents to the Resseguie Hotel (Keeler Tavern) for tea. Phillis Dubois, a black woman who had lived since childhood at the old hotel, would pick up small Hester so she could look down the well.”

When she moved to Boston in 1920, Hurlbutt took out a subscription to The Ridgefield Press and continued to be a subscriber until the day she died. In a correspondence with this writer in 1990, when she sought help in getting reprints of some old family pictures that had appeared in the Press, she said she read the entire newspaper every week.

When she was younger, Hurlbutt would often return to Ridgefield, visiting old friends.

Asked in 1990 if she would be visiting Ridgefield again, she said her failing health prevented her from traveling very far from her apartment. “I would never be  lonely there,”  she said, “and I will return someday — because I shall be buried there.”

Indeed, after she died in 1991, she was buried next to her parents and other family members in the Hurlbutt Cemetery, a section of the Ridgefield Cemetery on North Salem Road. Her small gravestone says only “H.E.H.”

A few years later, this writer happened across an online dealer in antique photographs who

was advertising a group of Joseph Hartmann portraits of a child, each mounted on cardboard. They turned out to be pictures of Hester Elizabeth Hurlbutt.

Notes on the back, probably penned by her mother, gave the month and year of almost every picture.

The group of photos was purchased and many of the images appear here, along with one — by an unidentified photographer — showing Hester as a young woman. 

The childhood pictures demonstrate not only what a “cute kid” Hester Hurlbutt was, but also Joseph Hartmann’s skill at doing portraits of young children. 

They probably also reflect the love that Annie and Frank Hurlbutt had for their only child.

Joseph Hartmann: 

Artist and Historian on Glass

Joseph Hartmann may have thought himself an artist, but it’s doubtful he considered himself a historian. Yet, the photographs he took of Ridgefield and its people from the 1890s through the 1930s

are a graphic history of the town in one of its most fascinating periods.

Pictures of rich and poor, young and old, luxurious mansions and dusty workshops, are included in the 6,000 negatives he left behind. Almost all the negatives are on glass plates — he worked most of his years with a large-sized camera in the days before “film” was available. For each photograph, a glass negative had to be inserted into the back of the camera. He stuck with glass well into the 1920s, switching to a plastic negative late in his career.

A son of a physician, Josef Hartmann was born in 1867 in a German village not far from Munich, a great artistic center. He studied photography in Italy and was accomplished at his art when he came to the United States with his father in 1888.

Around 1890, he set up a studio in the top floor of the Bedient building at Main Street and Bailey Avenue — it burned down in the great fire of 1895, but he moved into its replacement soon afterwards. Over the years that followed, he took thousands of portraits in that studio. He also photographed weddings, civic and social groups, babies, musicians, insides and outsides of houses, cars, gardens, pets, and even bodies in caskets. 

“His work, characterized by the use of natural light and perfection of pose and detail, clearly

shows the influence of the Munich painting school,” said a 1981 article in Antiques Weekly.

His later work was influenced by Frederic Remington and Frederick Dielman, noted American artists who lived in Ridgefield and were friends of Hartmann. 

“His photographs … are marked by richness and depth of tone, marvelous resolution and perfection of composition,” the article said. 

In 1898, Hartmann married Amalie L. Diedrich (1867-1943), who had been working as a German teacher for the children of the Rufus King family on King Lane. They had three children,

including Elsa Hartmann, who became a longtime teacher at Ridgefield High School.

Hartmann was a longtime member of the choir of St. Stephen’s Church. 

Hartmann, who lived  on Catoonah Street just west of the post office, retired in 1938 due to

declining health, and died in 1942.

For many years after his death, his glass negatives sat in boxes in an unheated barn next to the Hartmann homestead on Catoonah Street, two doors west of the post office (next to the Cumming house that’s about to be torn down). 

In 1950, daughter Elsa donated the collection to The Ridgefield Press, hoping that they would

be cared for and that their images would be published in the newspaper.

“I personally carried the boxes of plates out of the barn cellar and took them by car, first to a garage at my house, then to The Press office,” recalled Press publisher Karl S. Nash in 1990. He did

not point out that the boxes were exceedingly heavy since they were packed tightly with big, glass plates.

For more than a decade, the boxes of negatives remained stored in the newsroom of The Press. Many were turned into prints that appeared in The Ridgefield Press, especially in the long-running

“Old Ridgefield” series that attempted to get many identified. The Press was assisted by The Hartmann Society, formed in the early 1980s by Barbara Wardenburg and others to both preserve and identify the pictures.

The Press in 1990 donated the collection to the Keeler Tavern Museum, which with the help of

the Hartmann Society and others, set about not only getting modern negatives and prints made from each plate, but also figuring out the people and places depicted. Committees of oldtimers worked for years to identify as many pictures as possible.

The museum still holds the collection today.

Many of Hartmann’s pictures were used in the 1999 book, “Images of America: Ridgefield,” produced by the Ridgefield Archives Committee, a sort of successor of the Hartmann Society that has melded into the Ridgefield Historical Society. The book is still in print today.