Kurt Waldheim: When the UN Chief
Had A Country Home in Ridgefield

One of the best-kept secrets — or not — in the late 20th Century Ridgefield was the presence in town of one of the world’s top leaders. From 1972 to 1981, United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim maintained a country home off Wilton Road East and Spectacle Lane.

While he had the residence here, his presence was kept secret, though just how secret might be debatable. However, The Ridgefield Press agreed to keep him out of the local limelight of its printed pages.

It happened this way:

On Aug. 1, 1972, Karl F. Landegger sent a letter to Karl S. Nash, editor and publisher of The Press, explaining the situation. Landegger was a multimillionaire pulp and paper mill owner whose office was 200 Park Avenue in New York City and whose estate, Flat Rock House, covered more than 100 acres between Wilton Road East and Nod Road. He was, like Waldheim, a native of Austria. 

It was a very diplomatically written message. 

“Dear Mr. Nash,” he wrote. “I have lived in Ridgefield for the past 25 years, and I believe that some twenty years ago we met at some party.

“I am writing to you at the request of Dr. Kurt WaIdheim, Secretary General of the United Nations, who for the past ten years or so has spent many weekends with his family at my home in Ridgefield while he was Austrian Ambassador to the United Nations and, later on, Foreign Secretary of Austria and visiting here. 

“Dr. Waldheim is about to conclude negotiations for a four to five year lease on the house owned by Mr. Henri Doll on Spectacle Road, adjacent to my property. Dr. Waldheim and his family plan to use the house as a summer and weekend home.

“Dr. WaIdheim and I are personal friends and ride horseback together regularly on my property and in its vicinity. He has asked me to write to you and submit his request that he would greatly appreciate it if no mention were made in the locaI papers of his renting a house or living in Ridgefield.

“In New York, he is a public figure and as such under great pressure all the time, but he would like to be a completely private person in Ridgefield. There is also the aspect of personal safety. Although due to the nature of his position, he and his family are protected by security guards, we all know that there are a lot of ‘nuts’ around who may wish to attack a public figure.

“Dr. Waldheim would greatly appreciate your collaboration in this matter, about which I write to you in an entirely unofficial manner, although with his knowledge and approval.

“During August the house will be redecorated, and Dr. Waldheim and his family expect to move in about mid-September.”

While Waldheim’s being in Ridgefield was not publicized, it was hard not to notice the very tall and stately Austrian when he was shopping or dining in town — which was not infrequent. “Many people knew Mr. Waldheim was here and saw him from time to time about the village, but The Press never mentioned it,” Nash wrote in a 1984 story.

Karl Landegger died in January 1976. Waldheim was planning to retire at the end of that year and in August, Karl Nash sat down at his Underwood and two-finger typed a letter, just as diplomatic as Landegger’s, addressed to the secretary general:

“When you came to Ridgefield four years ago, your friend, the late Karl F. Landegger, wrote me at your request, asking our paper to respect your privacy in our town. We have done this and gladly.

“Now, with indications that you are about to leave, we would like to let our readers, the people of Ridgefield, know that you have been here and what you have thought of their New England town and of them.

“Could you, therefore, arrange for a member of The Press staff to talk with you briefly when you are here again in Ridgefield? Or in lieu of an interview, could someone here talk with you by telephone? As a last resort, would you care to pen a message to Ridgefield upon your departure?

“Mr. Landegger spoke highly of you and your friendship with him as you can see from the copy of his letter to me, which I send you. I am sure you must miss him greatly.”

Waldheim agreed to be interviewed. He arranged for Dick Minnig, a Press reporter, to meet with him at UN headquarters. 

But then Waldheim somewhat unexpectedly was named to another term as secretary-general, and he cancelled the interview, again not wanting the publicity in Ridgefield.

In 1981, Waldheim ran for a third term but failed, largely thanks to China, which repeatedly vetoed his candidacy.

However, he did not immediately go home and spent two years as a professor of diplomacy at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

In 1984, news that Waldheim would be returning to Austria to run for president sparked Karl Nash into writing a brief article about the diplomat’s dealings with The Press in the 1970s. 

“Kurt Waldheim, former United Nations secretary-general, has had his picture in the papers this week, riding a horse in Rock Creek Park in Washington,” Nash wrote. “This never happened to him in this paper during the decade when he was ‘at the vortex of world conflict,’ as one headline writer put it. And with good reason. At least it seemed so at the time.”

He went on to explain the letter from Landegger and the decision to not mention the secretary-general’s presence in town. The story appeared under the small headline, 

Now It Can Be Told: 

Waldheim Lived Here

As many will recall Waldheim soon became involved in a “vortex” of a different sort of conflict back in Austria. As he ran for president of Austria in 1985-86, revelations began to appear that he had lied about his military service during World War II, and that he had been an officer in the German army who had been involved in the deportation of Greek and Yugoslav Jews and others to death camps. The charges have been extensively debated over the years, but a U.S. Justice Department investigation allegedly found evidence that he was, indeed, involved in the deportations. 

Consequently, the United States government banned Waldheim from entering this country — so did most countries of the world. Waldheim nonetheless served six years as president of Austria (1986-92). He died in 2007. 

His old Ridgefield friend, Karl Landegger,   incidentally, had fled Austria in 1938 when the Germans annexed the country as part of the Third Reich. He came to New York in 1940 and moved to Ridgefield in the early 1950s.

His family, who still live here, have been major philanthropic contributors to the community over the years.

Konrad Bercovici: 
Gypsies and Gusto

Konrad Bercovici, a self-styled “gypsy,” was a popular American writer and journalist whose friends included Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. His successful lawsuit against Charlie Chaplin generated many a headline three quarters of a century ago.

Although his home was literally on the state line along West Lane in Lewisboro, N.Y., Bercovici always considered himself a Ridgefielder. In fact, his mailing address was Ridgefield because the Ridgefield Post Office delivered his mail.

A native of Romania, Konrad Bercovici was born in 1882 to an intellectual Jewish couple who taught their children Greek, French, and German as well as Romanian. At a young age he became fascinated with the Roma — what he always called gypsies. “He spent much of his youth among the tents of gypsies who poured into Romania from the borders of Hungary, listening to their songs and learning their language,” said the New York Times.

When he was 11, his father was killed in an anti-Jewish riot and the family soon moved  to Paris where they began socializing with the literary community. He studied the organ under Charles-Marie Widor — the man who taught Albert Schweitzer — and was soon proficient enough that he gave a recital at the Cathedral of Notre Dame. 

While still a teenager, he began to write professionally, often about the Roma. He sold short stories for $5 each, while also working at a variety of jobs, including painting the frame of the Eiffel Tower.

He met his wife, Naomi, a sculptor, in Paris. The couple moved to New York City in 1904. There, to earn a living while pursuing his interest in writing, Konrad shoveled snow from the city streets, played piano in silent picture theaters, sold artificial flowers, and worked in sweatshops.

His first book, Crimes of Charities, appeared in 1917 and criticized what he considered the indifference of organized charities to the people they were supposed to be helping. 

The same year, he joined the staff of the New York World, writing sports stories and features, and three years later moved to the New York Evening Post, covering stories in many parts of the world. At the same time he continued turning out short stories for literary magazines.

During the 1920s he also wrote a dozen books of fiction and non-fiction, soon gaining an international reputation as a lively and interesting author. He became one of the Algonquin Table “regulars” that included  Irving Berlin, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, and Alexander Woollcott. Among his circle of friends were such artists, writers, actors, and musicians  as Melvyn Douglas, Diego Rivera,  F. Scott Fitzgerald,  Paul Robeson, Ernest Hemingway, Wilhelm Van Loon, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Gershwin brothers. A  portrait of him sketched by the young Amadeo Modigliani is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Over his long life, he produced around 40 books, many of them about the Roma — his Story of the Gypsies has been considered a standard work on the subject. However, he also wrote fiction and non-fiction on historical figures, including That Royal Lover, about Romania’s King Caroll, and Savage Prodigal, a biography of the French poet Rimbaud.

The Bercovicis moved to West Lane around 1930, but also maintained a residence in New York City. Among his local friends was author Margaret “Peggy” Shane of North Salem Road, mother of Betty Grace Nash, longtime managing editor of The Ridgefield Press and wife of publisher  Karl Nash.

Karl Nash was well acquainted with Bercovici whom he described as “a frequent speaker at service club meetings over the years, tackling his subjects with a gusto that marked his writings.” In one talk that Nash covered in June 1945, Bercovici told the Ridgefield Lions that he favored imprisoning the entire nation of Germany for the war and its atrocities.  “There is no reasonable argument why a whole nation that has proven itself asocial should not be treated by the civilized nations of the world as an asocial individual is treated by society,” Bercovici told the club. “The crime committed by a thousand or a million or ten million is not less a crime because it has been committed by a mass.”

Some of Bercovici’s books became movies, including The Volga Boatman (1926), produced by Cecil B. DeMille. He himself worked as a screenwriter  for several years in Hollywood where he became friends with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin. It was Chaplin’s hit The Great Dictator (1940) that was the subject of a 1947 lawsuit in which Bercovici  sued Chaplin, charging that he plagiarized material that Bercovici had written.

 

Bercovici was represented  by attorney Louis Nizer. In his book My Life in Court, Nizer explained that “The claim was that Chaplin had approached Bercovici to produce one of his gypsy stories as a motion picture and in the course of those friendly negotiations, Bercovici gave him an outline of ‘The Great Dictator’ story about a barber who looks like Hitler and is confused with him.” The case was settled, with Chaplin paying Bercovici $95,000 ($1.1 million in 2020). but with Chaplin also gaining rights to a couple Bercovici books that he could turn into movies.

In his autobiography, Chaplin insisted that he had been the sole writer of The Great Dictator’s script. He came to a settlement, though, because of his “unpopularity in the States at that moment and being under such court pressure, [he] was terrified, not knowing what to expect next.” 

Bercovici died in 1961 at the age of 80, leaving four children including journalist Rion Bercovici, artist Mirel Bercovici, and author Revolte “Rada” Bercovici.

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.

Karl S. Nash, 

The Country Editor

While most people thought of him as a newspaperman,  Karl Nash was really a teacher. His subject was Ridgefield and his students were its residents. As a country newspaper editor and publisher for more than 60 years, he spent his life telling townspeople about themselves, their neighbors and their institutions.

Nash not only taught Ridgefield, he also served it in many official capacities – including  20 years on the Board of Education. 

 Karl Seymour Nash was born in 1908, descended from several of the founding families of the town including not only the Nashes, but the Seymours, Smiths, Olmsteds, and Keelers. His homestead on Main Street had been in his family since the town’s first settlement.

His father, Howard Patterson Nash, died when Karl was 13, and his mother, Christie Law Jones Nash, was left with little money and five children to support. She worked as a librarian at the Ridgefield Library almost next door to their home  — now an apartment building at 486 Main Street — and hooked rugs to sell. 

As the oldest child, Karl became a head of the household, helping care for the children and doing many of the chores. As he grew older, he also worked at his grandfather’s Walnut Grove Farm in Farmingville, including delivering the dairy’s milk in the village.

He was a top student at Hamilton High School (later called Ridgefield High School) on Bailey Avenue, where he graduated in 1926. He went off to Harvard, planning to become a minister.

However, after getting a Harvard degree in government in 1930, he turned to journalism instead. 

As a teenager he had already developed a nose for news, covering local events for The Ridgefield Press and area dailies, and even starting his own, short-lived “Ridgefield Record.” Back home from college, he became a Danbury Evening News reporter and in 1935, married Dorothy C. Baxter, granddaughter of D. Crosby Baxter who had founded The Ridgefield Press in 1875. (While the Baxter family was no longer associated with the newspaper, they were prominent in the community.) Karl and Dorothy later divorced; however, Dorothy’s brother Frank was married to Karl’s sister, Elizabeth, who became the longtime treasurer of the Acorn Press, parent company of the Ridgefield Press.

In 1937, Karl and his brother, John, bought The Press for just under $2,500. It was a struggle. “I had been married in 1935 and had an eight-month-old daughter, so I didn’t have any money to invest,” Nash recalled years later. “John had $92 and he and I borrowed $250 from my mother. With this and $2,000 we borrowed from the town’s jeweler, now the town’s banker  (Francis D. Martin), we bought the Press.”

The business included a small print shop that produced stationery products for local customers. 

“How John and I thought we could both ever make a living from this run-down $12,000-a-year-gross business, I don’t know,” he said. “But we went to work at it and worked hard. We put ourselves on the payroll at $25 a week and for months on end didn’t collect it.”

A year later, they established The Wilton Bulletin and moved  their operations from the Masonic Hall, just south of town hall, into an old garage on Bailey Avenue. Over the years the parent company, Acorn Press, grew into a multi-million dollar group of eight weekly newspapers, which merged in 1997 with the Hersam family’s weeklies based in New Canaan to become Hersam Acorn Newspapers. In the early 2000s, Hersam Acorn was publishing nearly 20 newspapers in southern Connecticut, Westchester, N.Y., and Vermont. The papers remained in the hands of the Nash and Hersam families until October 2018 when they were purchased by Hearst.

John left the business in 1948 to own and operate other weekly and daily newspapers in Connecticut and Massachusetts. He died in 2013 at the age of 101.

In 1951 Karl married Elizabeth Grace Boyd, daughter of novelists Thomas Boyd and Margaret Woodward Smith. She had been hired as an intern on a 75th anniversary issue project, and the two co-edited the newspaper for many years. Under their leadership in the last half of the 20th Century, the Press’s paid circulation reached nearly 90% of the homes in Ridgefield.

Always active in town, Nash was chairman of the school board for 17 years and a member from 1942 until 1962, “devoting my efforts to raising the standard of a somewhat backward school system,” he said years later.

He served on several school building committees, belonged to the Parks and Recreation Commission, and moderated countless Town Meetings. 

A Republican much of his life, he was kicked out of the party in 1963 when he helped people

who were forming the Good Government Party in reaction to what they saw as anti-education efforts by both established parties. The GGP ran candidates for the school board in 1963 and 1965, and though none was elected, one collected nearly 1,300 votes. The GGP itself never had more than 75 members and was disbanded in 1981 after many years of inactivity.

Always curious about the town’s past, Nash wrote many pieces about Ridgefield history and as chairman of the town’s huge 250th anniversary celebration in 1958, arranged to have Silvio Bedini write the town history, “Ridgefield in Review.” 

He also organized, wrote for, and led substantial projects to compile histories of all aspects of Ridgefield life for special 75th and 100th anniversary editions of The Press in 1950 and 1975. The result was hundred of thousands of words of history of the community, illustrated with scores of pictures.

In 1983, the year he turned 75, Nash was named the Rotary Club Citizen of the Year.

He was 84 when he died at his retirement home in Cocoa Beach, Fla. in 1992.

Many who knew him considered Karl Nash the epitome of the country journalist. “He was a gifted and tough editor who taught dozens of young men and women how to write — and appreciate the beauty of — a simple, declarative sentence,” said his son Thomas B. Nash in his father’s obituary. “He was a serious newsman who sought to treat people fairly and in a consistent manner.”

“Karl had a love and sensitivity for his home town that came from being not only a  native son, but also a descendant of the founders and earliest settlers of the community,” said an editor who worked under him for many years. “Generations of Ridgefield were in his blood.”

Karl Nash himself was less effusive about his contributions. “Our papers might be called progressively independent,” he wrote in 1960. “They are said by some to be a force for good in their communities, by others a menace to the inhabitants.”

 “They continue to grow and prosper, however,” he added, perhaps with a twinkle in his eye.

William O. Seymour:

Bridges and Oil for the Waters

William O. Seymour was one of Ridgefield’s leading citizens at the turn of the 20th Century, so perhaps the Ridgefield Press obituary writer was a bit flustered by Seymour’s importance when he wrote on the front page Jan. 26, 1911: “He was a man among men, a consistent Christian, a good citizen, one of the few whom our town could afford to lose.” 

A man known for his calm and warm demeanor, Seymour might have smiled at the gaffe.

Born in 1833 in Ridgefield, William Oscar Seymour got his early education in local schoolhouses. He then attended the Amenia (N.Y.) Seminary, a Methodist secondary school that was well respected and produced several university presidents and bishops. 

Seymour returned to Ridgefield to become a grammar school teacher, but seeing the need for a “high school” in town, established the High Ridge Institute in the late 1850s. Seymour’s school, which had both boarding and day students, served up to 40 boys. At the time Seymour lived in the “Peter Parley house” — the childhood home of author Samuel G. Goodrich — on High Ridge, from which he also ran the school.

By 1869, Seymour was looking at an entirely new career:  civil engineering, a subject he had previously taught to young men. Railroads were expanding at a rapid rate. Before 1871, about 45,000 miles of track had been laid in the United States. Between 1871 and 1900, another 170,000 miles were added. Seymour saw an opportunity not only for profitable work but perhaps also for adventure. 

In 1873, he began working for the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, which at the

time was the largest road in New England. He started out as a “rodman” — a menial job involving carrying and holding a rod used during the process of surveying for a new line. By 1877, he was the railroad’s chief engineer.

He left in 1881 to join a Massachusetts railroad, but soon decided to head west. He spent nearly five years designing and building railroads for the Wisconsin Central in Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota. His projects included building a 104-mile line from Chippewa Falls, Wisc., to St. Paul, Minn, crossing the St. Croix River with a 2,239-foot long iron bridge on stone abutments (years later the bridge was later abandoned but the abutments still stand in the river). Another line he built ran 124 miles from Chicago, Ill., to Schleisingerville, Wisc.

In 1887, Seymour returned to his home town where Gov. Phineas Lounsbury, a fellow Ridgefielder, appointed him one of the state’s three railroad commissioners — a post of considerable importance in that era when the state was served by more than two dozen railroads and streetcar companies. He remained a commissioner until his death 24 years later.

He was also a leading citizen in local government, serving as a probate judge, a state representative, a borough warden, and a member of the Board of Estimate (predecessor to the Board of Finance),  He was vice-president of the First National Bank of Ridgefield, which he helped found in 1900. 

In 1908, Seymour was chairman of the town’s Bicentennial celebration, which included a parade, speeches, other special events, and the publication of a book that offered many pictures of

people and places of Ridgefield along with essays about the town. Fifty years later, Seymour’s great-grandson, Ridgefield Press publisher Karl Seymour Nash, was chairman of the town’s 250th anniversary celebration.

When he had returned to Ridgefield, Seymour built a sizable house on Parley Lane, just down the hill a few hundred feet from the Peter Parley house he had earlier owned.  The house is still standing, though it underwent a major rebuilding and expansion in the 1990s.

William O. Seymour was 77 years old when he died. Writing the next week from Montreal, where he was a consular official, historian George L. Rockwell said in a tribute to Seymour : “The welfare of the town was always uppermost with him. Office sought him and not he the office. In public meetings, when debate at times waxed to the point of bitterness, with a few chosen words would he pour oil upon the troubled waters.”

William Winthrop: 

Mr. Ridgefield Lakes

William “Willie” Winthrop was one of the most influential  — and colorful — characters in 20th Century Ridgefield. Responsible for the town’s largest development, he frequently clashed with town officials and even ran into problems with the law. 

In 1932, Winthrop came to Ridgefield and within 10 minutes of seeing the Fox Hill Lakes, a large subdivision planned around several man-made lakes, he placed a deposit on the development which he renamed “Ridgefield Lakes.” He then spent the next four decades developing the region, involved in the building of more than 325 houses and creating lots for even more. 

Many of the houses were constructed as summer cottages, but virtually all have since become year-round homes. 

He envisioned The Ridgefield Lakes as “a true haven for people who wanted a home they could afford and a haven for a potential area for their retirement years.”

A native of Minneapolis, William Lawrence Winthrop was born in 1895 and served as a gunnery sergeant with an aviation unit of the U.S. Marine Corps during World War I. He became an attorney, but he did not practice law in Ridgefield.

When he came to town, Ridgefield had neither zoning nor planning. “I hired an engineer and surveyor to plan and lay out this property,” he said in 1966. “Unlike so-called ‘planners,’ I knew this

could not be done in three weeks. I did get a plan suitable to my dream for this place in two years and I changed it repeated to achieve a real plan which would not only be suitable for homes but provide for the comfort and recreation of those who chose to build a home there.”

Winthrop maintained that “long before the alleged planners and zoners dreamed up the open space and recreation areas of which they prate, I dedicated by use and deed more than 125 acres of lakes and another 30 acres for open spaces.”

Especially after zoning arrived in 1946, he maintained running battles with the town. He fought zoning and planning officials, complaining that their rules were keeping the little people out of Ridgefield and making it more difficult for the poor to find homes. 

When planning — which included the control of the design of subdivisions — was proposed in the 1950s, he said it was “an expression of extreme snobbery, and is designed to eliminate ... the men in overalls.”

He doggedly opposed most of the town’s school building projects, calling them extravagant. 

Conflicts between Winthrop and town officials were sometimes quite public and often colorful such as at a Planning and Zoning Commission public hearing on a Winthrop proposal, at which he fought with commission Chairman Daniel M. McKeon over when he could speak.

“Mr. Winthrop, you’re out of order,” said McKeon. “Take your seat.”

“What?!” replied Winthrop.

“Take your seat!” McKeon repeated.

“What was that?” Winthrop asked.

“Please sit down!” demanded McKeon.

“Why?” asked Winthrop.

“Please sit down!” McKeon said again.

Winthrop turned to the audience and declared, “He robs me of a half a million dollars and wants me to sit down!”

Then he turned to McKeon and added, “You never had to work for yours.”

A by-now irate McKeon shouted: “You’re out of order — sit down!”

Ambling to his seat, Winthrop turned toward McKeon and said, “To hell with you!”

Coleman London, who was sitting in the audience, leaned over to Karl Nash, who was covering the meeting for The Ridgefield Press, and said, “THAT was worth the price of admission.”

Winthrop was more liberal in his views on national and international affairs, however, and,

though he was a Republican, he was an admirer of Presidents Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy. Among his interests were American Indians, and he once proposed a national holiday honoring them.

He also had some run-ins with authorities. He was arrested in 1937 and 1952 for writing fraudulent checks, and was brought to court by the town for zoning violations. In 1967, he was charged with drunken driving after his car on Danbury Road turned  toward Limestone Road, and into the path of an oncoming police cruiser, sending the officer to the hospital.

He died in 1971 at the age of 75.

Winthrop’s wife was Frances Ney Winthrop, a graduate of the Chicago School of Ballet, who was a dancer in several Broadway shows. They included the 1920 and 1921 versions of the revue, “George White’s Scandals,” with music by George Gershwin, as well as William B. Friedlander’s “Frivolities of 1920.” She died in 1982 at the age of 84 and is buried alongside her husband at Fairlawn Cemetery.

D. Crosby Baxter: 

The Little Acorn

D. Crosby Baxter was a jack of many trades, but the one he may have been least adept at has had the most lasting effect on Ridgefield. In 1875, Baxter founded the town’s only newspaper. 

He admitted that he wasn’t very good at newspapering, but he knew Ridgefield needed a newspaper. So in the basement of his home on Main Street on Jan. 13, 1875, he started “Baxter’s

Monthly.” Within two months, the journal was a weekly named The Ridgefield Press.

Baxter was, as his obituary said in 1923,  “a unique character whose individuality stood apart from others.”

 Darius Crosby Baxter was born in Somers, N.Y.,  in 1842, and moved to Ridgefield with his parents when he was 11. He started out as a shoemaker, but turned to storekeeping for a livelihood after he lost his left hand in a blasting accident. 

In 1865, Baxter married  Flora E. Farvor of Washington, Conn. They lived for a while on West Lane, later on Catoonah Street, and then in a house he bought on Main Street just north of the building where Planet Pizza is. 

It was perhaps because of his dealings with fellow local merchants that Baxter realized a need for businesses to get their messages out. In 1875 at the age of 32, with no experience in either printing or journalism, he founded Baxter’s Monthly to do just that. He bought a printing press and began work in his basement. 

In the early days the paper was full of ads for local businesses but carried little “news.” Issues contained a few local social news items, usually reported in a light-hearted vein, as well as jokes, stories and poems.

An example of Baxter’s sense of humor appears on the third page of the first issue, under the headline, “Found”: “On the side walk, in front of the town house [hall], a piece of thin steel about too (sic) inches long, said to belonged (sic) to a ladies wardrobe and supposed to have been broken by making too low a bow to our curly-haired country clerk; the same can be had by calling at this office and paying for this ad.”

News items were often terse. In his “About Town” column one week in 1875, Baxter reported: “Warm. Potato bugs.” 

“The succinct quality of some of the writing may have been occasioned by the fact that every letter of type had to be picked up by hand, and Baxter had not been trained as a printer,” said Karl Nash in a history of The Press. And, of course, he had only one hand to work with.

Subscriptions were initially 75 cents a year, but once the paper went weekly, rose to $1.25 — about $27 in today’s money. That’s a lot, and apparently Baxter had trouble getting enough subscribers for a while. In 1877, he printed a notice saying he’d take produce to pay for a subscription “if the party has no cash.”

Incidentally, the first subscriber was William W. Seymour, great-great grandfather of future publisher Karl Nash and great-great-great grandfather of the next publisher, Thomas B. Nash. (In more small-town connections, Karl Nash’s first wife was Dorothy Baxter, granddaughter of D. Crosby, and Karl’s sister, Elizabeth, longtime treasurer of The Press, was married to Frank Baxter, D. Crosby’s grandson.)

Twenty five years after he founded the paper, Baxter reflected on the early days. “The first paper was printed on a Kelsey press made at Meriden, Conn.,” he wrote in 1900. “It was just large enough to print one page at a time; in fact, I did not have type to print only one page at a time. 

“Hon. R. J. Walsh of Greenwich, Conn., was a great friend of the little paper from the start, and done a great deal for it. We used to be up late at night after many had gone to their slumber, thinking what we could fill up the paper with, as we did not know anything about paper work.”

He said it “took all our spare time (a month) to get the paper out on time, for I did not know anything about setting type and sometimes I would make a mistake and have to set it all over again.”

He got help with the editorial content from folks like Hubert Main, the hymn composer (also profiled in Who Was Who), who would write humorous pieces; Dr. W.S. Todd, a local physician; and Henry Mead, a Main Street businessman.

Baxter’s motto for the paper was “Tall oaks from little acorns grow.” “It took hard work to have it grow,” Baxter said. “I got discouraged a lot of times, but I made up my mind it should grow to be a large tree, and it has, to a large and healthy tree. Many spoke discouraging words of the little sheet, but others encouraged me to keep it growing for perhaps if I had not started the little paper, Ridgefield would never had had a paper.”

His motto remained in place through the 20th Century, and when the Nash brothers, Karl and John, bought the operation in 1937, they named their company Acorn Press. The newspaper, now part of the multimedia, 12-newspaper Hersam Acorn Network, still has an image of an acorn in the nameplate at the top of the front page.

Five years after he began, Baxter moved the operations to the Masonic Hall. (The building next to town hall burned down in the great first of 1895 — but The Press did not miss that week’s issue, which carried extensive coverage of the blaze. A new Masonic Hall was quickly built, and The Press resumed work there, remaining until 1938 when the Nash brothers moved it to its present location in an old automobile garage on Bailey Avenue.

By the time Baxter sold the operation in 1880 to Charles W. Lee, The Press was running eight broadsheet pages. Only two of those pages were local news and advertising, however; the rest was “boilerplate” news, features and ads that had been prepared by a company in New York City.

Baxter next opened what was to be the town’s first livery stable. There he sold and rented horses, and performed taxi services, such as bringing people from and taking them to the train station on Prospect Street. Twenty five years later, the town had three livery stables.

After that, he ran a country market, called the Lakeview Store, on North Salem Road in the Scotland district. Around 1920, when he was in his late 70s, failing health forced him to retire. He died in 1923 at the age of 80.

“Mr. Baxter was gifted with good business senses and a sense of humor,” said his obituary, tersely adding, “He had many terse sayings.”