David Dann,

Newlyweds In The Tombs

The story of David Dann and his wife, Susan, reads like an episode from Upstairs Downstairs, Downton Abbey or some other Edwardian melodrama. Susan, a maid in the home of a rich New York City banker, was accused by her employer of thievery, and thanks to incompetent police, she and David were both thrown into Manhattan’s notorious “Tombs” prison, eventually rescued by a wealthy lawyer and future candidate for governor of Connecticut.

David Dann was born on a Ridgefield farm in 1873, a son of Levi Dann, who was a Civil War veteran and well-respected local citizen. In the summer of 1895, a young Irish woman named Susan Lyons was visiting in Ridgefield and met David, then working as a house painter. They fell in love and David followed Susie to New York City where she worked as a servant in the Broad Street home of Maurice B. Wormser, a prominent Manhattan banker. They were married soon after but kept their marriage secret, an arrangement that contributed to their arrest.

On the evening of Saturday, Jan. 18, 1896, Maurice Wormser played host to his brother and his brother’s wife. Around 10 p.m., as the couple was about to depart, the brother asked to see an evening newspaper, which was in the dining room. 

“I went into the room to get it and found the silverware drawer open,” Wormser later testified in court. “I thought nothing in particular of this, but then at 10:45 two servants saw Susan Dann, who was known as Lyons, a waitress in our employ, in the dining room with a big tray of silver, which she was sorting over. The house was then locked up and the burglar alarm set.” The two servants were named Amelia and Minnie.

At 8:30 the next morning, Susan Dann reported to Wormser that the silver had been stolen. “She said she discovered this when she had returned from mass,” Wormser testified.

However, the cook, a Mrs. Ebert, had told Wormser that Susan was seen admitting the baker at 7:45 a.m. and had also been seen at 7:15 in her nightclothes when Mrs. Ebert had dealt with the milkman. That prompted Wormser to question Susan about how she could have had time to go to mass.

“She admitted that she had not been to mass, but said that she had an appointment to meet a man. After some further questions, she said the man was her husband, although we thought until then that she was a single woman. She stated that she was married a week ago last Sunday in the Dominican Church.”

Since Susan Dann was the last one reported seen with the silverware, and the doors were locked overnight, suspicion pointed to her. However, she denied having taken anything. “I put the silver away, as I always did, on Saturday night,” she told a newspaper reporter. “And when I missed it on Sunday morning, I reported it at once to Mr. Wormser.”

She admitted lying about going to mass, however, and had instead gone for a walk with her husband. She said lied because she did not want Wormser to know she was married until her husband had found work in the city, in case she might lose her job.

“I know they say the house was locked, and that the basement gate was fastened,” she said. But when she returned from her early morning meeting with her husband, she found the gate open. “And that was not the first time I have found it open,” she said.

She also told a New York Herald reporter that Amelia’s and Minnie’s statements that she was handling the silver late Saturday evening were false.

Adding to the suspicion surrounding the Danns was the fact that Nellie Lyons, Susan’s sister, visited the Wormser house Saturday evening. Nellie at first denied she had been there, but later admitted she had indeed paid a visit to her sister.

A police captain named Casey of the East Sixty Seventh Street station house headed the investigation. He told a reporter for the Herald on Jan. 23 he was “confident he had arrested the persons concerned in the robbery.”

The police suspected the Danns in part because of the lies Susan and Nellie told. Detectives used Amelia, the servant, to identify Nellie Lyons as the woman who visited the house Saturday and, Amelia maintained, several times in recent months. 

Both Susan and David were taken to the precinct station house where they were questioned and eventually arrested, and sent to the city prison, known as The Tombs (today’s city prison, the fourth edition of the facility, is still nicknamed The Tombs). Because Nellie had lied about being at Wormser’s Saturday, police arrested her on a charge of complicity in the theft. However, police also suspected her because the house in which she worked as a cook had been robbed by a masked man several weeks earlier after the owner had been put to sleep with chloroform.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Ebert, the Wormser cook, identified David Dann as a man who had come to the house about 10 days earlier. Posing as a plumber, she said, he went through various rooms in the place. Though nothing was taken, it was just one more alleged event that was suspicious.

Captain Casey told a Herald reporter that “he had been looking up Dann’s record, and it was anything but satisfactory in Ridgefield. He has been shifting about from place to place in this city, apparently trying to get work.” He maintained that the silver had not been pawned and that “his men would discover it in the possession of the confederates.”

Alas for Casey, that never happened.

Word of the arrests quickly reached David’s hometown. “It is said in Ridgefield by a good many people that David Dann, who has been under arrest in New York with his wife on a grave criminal charge, has always appeared to be a quiet, inoffensive young man, and people here cannot believe that he would go wrong,” the Ridgefield Press reported.

Levi Dann, David’s father, quickly began seeking support for his son and daughter in law. A Catholic, he approached Father Richard Shortell, popular pastor of St. Mary’s Parish, who helped gather statements about David’s character. 

Levi also knew Melbert B. Cary Sr., a prominent New York City attorney who had palatial

residence in Ridgefield. Levi approached Cary about helping his son. Cary immediately wired Father Shortell, saying the imprisonment was “an outrage,” and maintaining he would procure David’s release as soon as possible.

Melbert Brinckerhoff Cary was a good man to have on your side. A Princeton graduate who practiced law with a leading Manhattan firm, Cary was also a writer, whose books included The Connecticut Constitution (1900) and The Woman Without A Country. In 1902, Cary ran for Connecticut governor on the Democratic ticket—he had been chairman of the Democratic State Central Committee for several years. He lost to a Meriden Republican, but remained a power in Connecticut politics as well as influential in Ridgefield goings on. He died in 1946 at the age of 93; at the time he was the oldest living Princeton alumnus.

Levi collected a large number of testimonials from Ridgefielders, endorsing his son’s good character, and turned them over to Cary. “Mr. Cary was zealous in his endeavor to free these innocent persons,” the Press said.

Cary told the Times on Jan. 31, “I have gone through the evidence … and the only way it connects Susie Dann with the silver is through the fact that she had charge of it. The only way her husband is connected with it is through the fact that the morning after the robbery, he walked with her in public for an hour. The only connection made between Miss Lyons and the Wormser house is through her visit there the night the theft was committed. Yet our clients were kept in jail ten days. It was simply an outrage.”

After those 10 days under arrest, the three suspects were “liberated from the Tombs,” as the Press put it. A grand jury found no evidence to support the arrest of the three.

“The prisoners report the most abusive treatment from the detectives, and say they were placed in the same cells with the foulest criminals,” the Press said. “Every conceivable effort was made to extort a confession, and the unfortunate victims were subjected to all sorts of indignities.”

After their release, Susie Dann discussed her treatment with a reporter from the New York Times, who described her as “a tall, comely young woman, with a slight Irish accent.” 

The Sunday she reported the missing silver, she said, she went to the police station where “Capt. Casey asked me all kinds of questions. He asked me why I had not said anything about being married, and I said it was because my husband was out of work, and I did not want to lose my place until he got work. Then he asked me if I was really married. He also asked me a great many other insulting questions.”

That night she went to her husband’s boarding house room, where “detectives kept coming around and asking me to tell them where the silver was.”

Then, on Tuesday night, “Detective Herlihy came up and told me my sister was drunk down in the police court, and that she had said I stole the silver and had told where half of it was. They took my husband and me down to the station that night, and said we wouldn’t be detained, and when they got us there, they locked us up. Detectives and the matron came to me about every fifteen minutes and kept asking me insulting questions and telling me I was lying and try to make me confess that I was a thief.

“After our arrest Detective Herlihy went up to my husband’s boarding house and told Mrs. Knott [the landlady] that Mr. Wormser would give her $20,000 if she would tell where the silver was.”

Susie also described her and her sister’s experience in the Tombs. “They put us in with the lowest kind of women. We heard things that were terrible to us, and were compelled to associate with women who were awful. They said things that men would not say.”

Melbert Cary not only got the Danns freed from prison, but also sued Susie’s employer. Cary blamed Wormser for convincing the police that she should be arrested. He sought $20,000 damages (around $575,000 today) for each of the three people imprisoned. 

It seems unlikely, however, that much if any money was awarded; perhaps there was an out-of-court settlement for a small amount. Four years later, David Dann was working as a janitor. By 1910, he was painting houses in Rye, a town in lower Westchester County, New York, where he and Susan rented a house. They had four children by then. 

In 1916, the Danns were back in Manhattan, where David was still painting houses. But in 1918, when he filled out his military draft information, he was in a New York City hospital, suffering from tuberculosis. A month later, David Dann was dead, only 45 years old. — From "Wicked Ridgefield" by Jack Sanders, © 2016, The History Press

Melbert Cary: 

A Man of Many Parts

Melbert Cary was — as they used to say — a man of many parts. He was a lawyer, a politician, a novelist, a historian, a leader in medical education, and a philanthropist. He came close to being the third Ridgefielder elected governor of the state. But one of his more unusual, and probably least successful “parts” was being an inventor.

Cary’s namesake son and his daughter in law gained even more notoriety for their accomplishments and gifts than he did.

Melbert Brinckerhoff Cary Sr. was born in 1852 in Racine, Wisc. By his own account, after graduating from Princeton, Phi Beta Kappa, in 1872, he “spent a year cattle-ranching in the far West.” He returned to Wisconsin, practiced law briefly in Milwaukee and then became assistant general solicitor of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway until 1882. He moved to New York in 1883 and formed his own law firm, which grew into Cary, Miller and McEwen.  His specialty was railroads.

Cary came to Ridgefield in the early 1890s, owning “Wildflower Farm” along both sides of

lower West Lane. His mansion stood atop a hill across from Cedar Lane. The spread included a sizable farm on the north side of West Lane; two barns on the property were later converted into houses at 334 and 336 West Lane.

Cary quickly became active in the Democratic party in Connecticut, and served as chairman of the Democratic State Central Committee for several years. 

In 1902, a year after Republican Governor George E. Lounsbury of Ridgefield left office, Cary ran for governor on the Democratic ticket.  He lost to a Meriden Republican named Abiram Chamberlain, but remained a power in state politics as well as influential in Ridgefield goings on. He was a delegate to the 1908 Democratic National Convention that nominated the golden-throated William Jennings Bryan for president. (Bryan spoke in Ridgefield in 1907 — “Main Street looked as though half the population of the town had turned out,” The Ridgefield Press reported. However, Bryan was as successful in his bid as Cary had been in his.)

Cary was also a writer, whose four books included “The Connecticut Constitution” (1900) and “The Woman Without A Country” (1934) and, when he was in his 80s, the novel, “Back Stage” (1938). 

His wife, the former Julia Metcalf, was active in the woman suffrage movement.

Although Cary moved around in New York’s high society, hewas  evidently in touch with the ordinary folk of Ridgefield. When the son of a local farmer ran into trouble with the New York City police and, with his wife, was thrown in jail, Cary volunteered his services to rescue them.

It was like an episode from “Downton Abbey” or “Upstairs, Downstairs.” In 1896 young newlyweds David and Susan Dann were held in Manhattan’s notorious “Tombs” prison, accused of involvement in the theft of silverware from a banker’s Manhattan townhouse where Susan worked as a maid. Susan was a recent immigrant from Ireland and David was a poor housepainter who grew up on a Ridgefield farm.

There was no real evidence that Susan or her husband had anything to do with the stolen silver, yet they, along with Susan’s sister, spent 10 days in the Tombs.  “They put [her and her sister] in with the lowest kind of women,” Susan told a newspaper. “We heard things that were terrible to us, and were compelled to associate with women who were awful. They said things that men would not say.”

David Dann’s father, Levi, was a farmer who lived near Cary’s Ridgefield mansion. He knew Cary was a prominent New York lawyer and approached him about helping his son. Cary did so immediately, and soon told The New York Times, “I have gone through the evidence … and the only way it connects Susie Dann with the silver is through the fact that she had charge of it. The only way her husband is connected with it is through the fact that the morning after the robbery, he walked with her in public for an hour ... Yet our clients were kept in jail ten days. It was simply an outrage.”

Cary not only got the Danns freed from prison and the charges dropped, but also sued Susan’s employer, blaming the banker for convincing the police that she should be arrested.

(The unusual story of David and Susan Dann is recounted in much more detail in “Wicked Ridgefield, Connecticut,” a book published by The History Press in 2016.)

Cary became quite involved in the stock market in which he invested heavily. However,

according to Ridgefield historian Dick Venus, “there were times in the early part of [the 20th] century when the world of finance sent out some unmistakable signals that it might be ailing. Then came the Panic of 1907 and 1908, and Mr. Cary was one of those who suffered serious financial setbacks.”

This probably led him to decide to sell his Ridgefield mansion in 1909. However, he held onto a couple of hundred acres of the estate with the hope of one day building a new house for himself. That never happened, and his home remained Manhattan, at first on Broadway and finally in the Hotel Gotham on Fifth Avenue (now called The Peninsula New York).

Cary remained active in community service. He served for 12 years as president of the Board of Trustees of New York Homeopathic Medical College, now New York Medical College, and 20 years as president of the board of the college’s Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital, the first teaching hospital in the United States to be owned by a medical college.

When Cary retired from the law in 1926, he was apparently able to spend more time with other pursuits. He sought — and successfully obtained — a patent on a rather unusual  lamp device that, as he put it, “can be easily and quickly attached to a vase or other receptacle without requiring any preliminary adjustment of or mutilation of the article to which the device is attached.” Simply put, it was a pair of opposing light-bulb sockets, attached to a flange that fit over the top of vases or jars so one could instantly create a decorative lamp. The top socket held the bulb that would provide illumination and support the shade while the bottom socket’s bulb would make the vase glow and provide weight to keep the array from tipping over. 

In 1926, two years after he applied, the U.S. Patent Office granted patent number 1,573,805 for the “lamp structure.” It is not known whether the device was ever subsequently marketed, successfully or otherwise.

When Cary died in 1946 at the age of 93, he was the oldest living Princeton graduate. 

Melbert Cary’s son, Melbert Jr. (1892-1941), who had lived at Wildflower Farm as a boy and was known as “Mike,” became even more famous than his father. The Yale graduate was a celebrated graphic artist and an expert on printing, who brought many European typefaces to America and wrote books on the printing and type.  

Cary founded the Press of the Woolly Whale, which republished out-of-print titles that he felt should be reintroduced to the public. 

His own professional library of 20,000 volumes was donated to Rochester Institute of Technology, where it is today considered “one of America's premier libraries on the history and practice of printing.” For many years, RIT has had the position of “Melbert B. Cary, Jr. Distinguished Professor,” and the school periodically presents the “Melbert B. Cary Jr. Award”  to those “who have advanced technology in graphic communications and related industries.”

One of his more unusual interests was antique and unusual playing cards, and his collection of more than 2,600 packs of cards was donated to Yale where it is now at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

 In 1923, Melbert Jr. married Mary Flagler (1901-1967), a wealthy granddaughter of Henry Flagler, who with the Rockefellers founded Standard Oil and who was largely responsible for developing Florida by creating railroad lines and towns there. Melbert and Mary eventually acquired a 1,8000-acre estate outside Millbrook, N.Y., which they turned into a vast wildlife refuge called Cannoo Hills. In her will Mary Flagler Cary established a charitable trust to oversee the estate, which became the Cary Arboretum. Today it is the Cary Institute for Ecosystem Studies, a nonprofit institution that has 120 staff members and maintains one of the largest ecological research programs in the world. Its areas of expertise include disease ecology — especially tick-related diseases, urban ecology, forest health, and freshwater ecology.

Mary also made another, rather astounding gift: She left $50 million — about $365 million in today’s dollars — to create a trust fund for the State of New York. She said the money could be used for any public, religious, scientific, charitable or educational purposes. The only restrictions were that the trust could not “carry on propaganda or otherwise attempt to influence legislation” and that it “not participate in or intervene in any political campaign on behalf of any candidate for public office.”

In 1936, Melbert Cary’s Wildflower Farm became the home of another New York lawyer, William Matheus Sullivan, who called it Dunrovin and built a small theater on the property where Metropolitan Opera stars would periodically perform. The opera house is still there, but the mansion burned to the ground late one Sunday night in 1977 after the owners left a bucket of hot fireplace ashes on the porch and returned to their New York City home.

William Matheus Sullivan: 

The Man from Dunrovin

His name may be hardly known in Ridgefield today, but ask Kathleen Battle, Jessye Norman, or Renee Fleming who William Matheus Sullivan was, and they will tell you.

Ridgefield was once the home of Sullivan and his Dunrovin Music Festival that brought major opera and chamber music personalities to a privately created opera house off West Lane.  

He also created a foundation that has helped many of the top opera singers of the past half century.

A native of Brooklyn, N.Y.,  Sullivan was born in 1885 and graduated from Columbia University’s School of Law. He was an attorney for the Metropolitan Opera and for many of its singers, including Elisabeth Rethberg and Frieda Hempel, and often entertained celebrities in the arts at his Manhattan home. 

“He sponsored many first concerts for artists who have since become famous at his music room at his New York apartment,” said one account.

He personally sponsored violin prodigy Ruggiero Ricci (1918-2012) as a young boy; Ricci went on to become an international star, specializing in Paganini, who made more than 500 recordings and performed in more than 5,000 concerts. 

In 1936, Sullivan bought Dunrovin, the estate of the late Melbert B. Cary, as his country home.  He converted a carriage house into a theater modeled after Frederick the Great’s opera house in Bayreuth, Germany — one observer at the time described it as “the best private concert hall in the United States.” Sullivan planned to call it the Mozart Concert Hall but it soon became better known as “the Playhouse at Dunrovin.”

The building could comfortably seat 360 people and, in good weather, 100 more could be seated on the terrace. For more intimate gatherings of 150 or so, Sullivan provided Florentine oak chairs. 

The flooring was random oak boards, pegged into place — more than 3,500 pegs were used. A painting of an ancestral Sullivan castle in Killarney and Van Dyke’s “The Rest of the Holy Family during the Flight to Egypt” hung on the walls.

In 1937, Sullivan began staging music festivals in the playhouse that featured such popular operatic voices as Lily Pons, Grace Moore, Lawrence Tibbett, Edward Johnson, and Geraldine Farrar, who lived just up the road. The festivals on successive Saturday afternoons in the summer were aimed at introduced young operatic talent and raising money for music scholarships.

Gov. Wilbur Cross attended the opening concert and Sir Hugh Walpole, the English novelist and a friend of Sullivan, provided a dedicatory poem. Walpole had visited Dunrovin, declaring that “nothing in America had so much resembled his native England as this bit of loveliness set in the huge Ridgefield estate of the attorney,” reported The Bridgeport Post in 1937.

When war  broke out in Europe in 1940, Sullivan began turning over the proceeds from the concerts to the Red Cross. The playhouse was also the scene of many special concerts, some benefiting such causes as Danbury Hospital.

Suspended during the war, the festivals resumed in 1946, but ended with Sullivan’s death in 1947 at the age of 63. His opera house was later converted into a residence, which it remains today on Country Club Road.

In the 1940s, Sullivan was often seen on Main Street in the village walking his English sheepdogs; one of the dogs was the gift of his friend, the Duke of Windsor, when he was king of England. A portrait of the duke also hung in the playhouse.

In his will, Sullivan established the William Matheus Sullivan Musical Foundation which, to this day, awards grants to promising musicians to help with their studies. Nearly 500 singers have earned Sullivan Awards, among them Jessye Norman, Jerry Hadley, Kathleen Battle, Renee Fleming, Christine Brewer, Leona Mitchell, Susan Graham, Patricia Racette, and Elizabeth Futral — some of the finest American operatic singers of the 20th and 21st Centuries.