Lillian Moorhead: 

Ahead of Her Time

Men had populated the Board of Selectmen for 265 years, when, in November 1973, that all changed: Lillian Moorhead was elected the first woman ever to hold a seat on the board. 

“Womenpower” did it, she said the day after the election. “I hope my election will encourage more women to run for office.”

It may, indeed, have have helped do just that, for in the years after her election, women began winning more and more seats in town government, often holding majorities on boards and commissions. And eight years after her pioneering win, Ridgefield elected its first woman chief executive, Elizabeth Leonard, who, ironically, defeated Moorhead for the job of first selectman.

“I was in favor of a state income tax and Liz creamed me,” Moorhead said 10 years later. (In 1991, after years of debate, the income tax was finally adopted. “It takes the state a while to catch up with me,” Moorhead said afterwards with a smile.)

A native of New Jersey, Moorhead was born in 1932. She and her husband, James, had lived in the South and on the West Coast before moving to Ashbee Lane in 1963.

She was a liberal Democrat who won the 1973 election alongside First Selectman Louis J. Fossi, also a Democrat, but more of a conservative. Despite Ridgefield’s heavy Republican majority, the two Democrats controlled the board, holding two of its then three seats.

“Lou is a native, a very popular guy,” Moorhead said, explaining the win years later. “Also, there was Watergate and the beginning of the women’s movement.”

Moorhead was re-elected four times, holding her seat until 1983 when she retired. As a selectman, she was an especially strong advocate for creation of the Housing Authority that eventually built the Ballard Green senior housing project.

“There were few believers in the Housing Authority in those early days,”  Fossi told Moorhead in front of more than 200 people who gathered for her retirement party in 1984. “But you acted out of concern for people who are less fortunate than most of us.”

Fossi and Moorhead often disagreed on issues, and votes sometimes found her in the minority, despite party affiliations.

“It’s better to be ahead of the times than behind them, and Lillian, you were ahead of them,” said Judge Romeo G. Petroni, a lifelong Republican, at the retirement dinner. “You have your principles and you stood behind them, even when Lou didn’t understand.”

Moorhead later served many years on the Housing Authority she helped to create. She was also on the Youth Commission, was a trustee of Danbury Hospital, and was a board member of the NAACP, and Regional Y. She was a founding member of the Women’s Political Caucus, which was active here in the 1970s and 80s, and which successfully pressed for the conversion of the Boys Club into a Boys and Girls Club. She also belonged to Friends of the Library, Meals on Wheels and the League of Women Voters.

Professionally, she tried on several different career hats, last of which was as a Realtor. She was well-regarded at that: In 1984, Governor William O’Neill appointed her a member of the Connecticut Real Estate Commission.

When she was moving to Martha’s Vineyard in 1991, she told a Press interviewer, “I used to be a newcomer. Now I’m a townie. It happened in the blink of an eye.”

A 1984 Press editorial said of Moorhead: “One of the most independent thinkers among recent selectmen, she was not afraid to stand up for positions that may have been unpopular with the administration and even with her party. Yet always her positions were enlightened ones, well-considered and with the community’s best interest  in mind.”

When Moorhead died of cancer in 1997 at the age of 65, her daughter, Sarah, observed, “My mom was one of those individuals who truly touched the souls of everyone who was lucky enough to have met her. She embraced life with such determination and zest and tried to impart that to others.”

Louise Peck: 

Conservationist & Philanthropist

One day in the early 1990s, two teenagers received $3,000 checks in the mail from a woman they’d never met. The boys’ parents had casually known Louise Peck for 25 years. Peck later told the parents she had seen the boys walking to school for many years, admired the fact that they walked instead of taking the bus, and wanted to help with their college educations. 

It was just one small example of the kindness – often unexpected or unusually generous – of a woman who gave away literally millions of dollars.

She did so quietly;  Peck was much better known as a vocal conservationist, who fought for land preservation long before it was popular. She spoke at meetings, wrote letters, served on the Conservation Commission for 11 years, was a supervisor of the Fairfield County Soil and Water Conservation District, and belonged to the conservation committee of the Ridgefield Garden Club for years. 

She sometimes got in trouble. In 1980, Peck was nearly take to court for libel after she wrote a fiery letter criticizing Casagmo/Fox Hill developer David Paul and his plans to build more condominiums on Danbury Road. 

But she was not afraid of being on the hot seat. In the early 1950s, when whites belonging to black organizations were unusual, Peck was very active in the newly formed Ridgefield Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. That was during the heyday of Senator Joseph McCarthy, and she was ridiculed for her work. As she said  years later, “I was called a communist by some of the supporters of that sickly man. That was because I was an officer of the NAACP at the time.”

Louise D. Peck was born in 1919  in New York City where she grew up and graduated from Barnard College of Columbia University. Her major in English served her during World War II when she was in the Women’s Army Corps. An instructor stationed in Goldsboro, N.C., from 1943 to 1945, she taught sometimes illiterate recruits to get their English up to at least sixth grade levels.

It was during her Army years that she met Grace Woodruff, who was to become her lifelong companion. “Woody,” who died in 1994, shared Peck’s desire to find a place in the country and the two came here in 1946, eventually buying a home on North Salem Road — which they called “Woodpecker Hill,” an amalgam of their names and their interest in birds. 

During the 1950s they operated a music store on Main Street, selling records, radio, sheet music, and some instruments.

Besides conservation work, Peck served on the library board, was a director of the Ridgefield Symphony Orchestra, and a founder of the NAACP chapter here. 

A poet, her work was published in such magazines as Harper’s, and in The New York Times, for which she also wrote gardening and natural history articles. For many years she and Woodruff raised sheep at Woodpecker Hill, a fact reflected in the title of her book, “Lambing and Other Poems,” published in 1979.

Peck donated 10 acres at Turtle Pond and later most of her own homestead on North Salem Road to the Land Conservancy of Ridgefield. 

She not only fought for, but also lived conservation. Although she was well-to-do, she owned a small house and drove just about the tiniest, most economical cars she could find. Her own property was a wildlife refuge, full of fields with bluebird boxes and edged with plantings that were food and habitat for birds and other creatures.

After her death in 1999 at the age of 79, it was revealed that she had bequeathed more than three million dollars to such organizations as the Ridgefield Library, Keeler Tavern Museum, and the Ridgefield Symphony Orchestra.

“Although Louise was outspoken when it came to many issues, her donations to civic, charitable, conservation, and arts organizations were done without fanfare, without the desire or need for recognition,” said one speaker at her memorial service. “There were no testimonial dinners, no awards, no hoop-la. Louise stood out as a model of modesty. She did good because she wanted to do good, not for any reward or recognition she would receive in return. She did good because it was the right thing to do.”

The Rev. William Webb:  

Fighting Racists and Racism

The Rev. William Webb’s first realization that American society had different things in store for white men than it did for black men came when he was in high school in New York, where he was born in 1916.

“My cousin and I were sitting around the kitchen table talking about what we wanted to be when we got out of high school,” Webb told The Ridgefield Press in 1972. “My cousin said that he wanted to be a rural postman. I said I wanted to be an accountant.

“My father, who had heard us talking, said, ‘Where have you ever seen a black accountant?’”

That incident led him to become more aware of the condition of African-Americans  around him. Frustrated at the inequities in society, he decided to end his education after graduating from high school, and look for a job.

It was 1934, the height of  the Depression, and jobs weren’t easy to find. Webb wound up working on a poultry farm in Ridgefield, a black man in a community that has always been almost solely white.

“Most of the blacks then either worked in the service field or for the town,” Webb said. “There was no real middle class here. Nobody then would think of renting to black people. All were quartered in private homes.”

In the 1940s, one family — the Louis Browns, who had rented a house on southern Main Street for years — managed to buy that house from S.S. Denton; they were believed to be the first black homeowners in Ridgefield. (Webb and his wife, Delita, were said to be the third black, home-owning family when they bought their home on Knollwood Drive in 1966, just 50 years ago.)

Webb said Denton also owned Bailey Avenue properties that he rented to black families, giving them a chance to live here. “It was independence in a sense; the rents were within reach of the people.” 

However, racism was evident in many other cases. “One light-skinned Negro woman moved into a vacant apartment on Main Street,” Webb recalled. “Several days later, the landlord found out she wasn’t white and asked her to move out, which she did.”

There were cases of blacks’ answering ads for rents, showing up and being told the place was already rented when it wasn’t.

“It is these kinds of barriers and handicaps that can become crippling over a period of years, not to mention disheartening,” Webb said.

In 1951 those barriers and attitudes sparked Webb and a group of Ridgefielders, both black and white,  to found the Ridgefield Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an organization that remained active for many years — with Webb often serving as president.

One of the NAACP’s first efforts was to seek an end to local minstrel shows in which whites comically portrayed blacks. Advertising posters for the events, done by local school children, were very offensive to the black community. 

“They depicted blacks with all the exaggerated and stereotypical black features,”  Webb said. 

It was so bad that “black women would avoid the center of town during this time of year because of the embarrassment.” 

Over the years the NAACP and Webb quietly handled cases of discrimination and abuse provoked by race. One of the saddest cases he cited involved a black man who was indirectly accused of making immoral advances to a white girl at a popular village store called Bongo’s. The charge was not made by the girl, but by a racist-minded employee of the store who saw the two laughing and conversing, Webb said. The employee filed a complaint with the police who arrested and fingerprinted the man. 

Later the black man was subjected to cursing and intimidation as he’d walked to work — all for a fictitious crime, Webb said. 

The case was thrown out of court.

One racial incident Webb addressed gained national attention. On Christmas Eve in 1978, a cross was burned on the front lawn of an interracial couple who lived on Old Sib Road. Webb and the local and state NAACP pressed police for action, and three weeks later, five young men, aged 15 to 20, were charged with third degree criminal mischief and disorderly conduct. Webb spoke at the Ridgefield police press conference and while he praised the arrests, he felt the misdemeanor charges — determined by the court prosecutor, not the police — were “rather light” for a deed so vile. (The ringleader of the group was later convicted in both state and federal court cases, and spent time in jail.)

Webb eventually became active in the state NAACP and served for a while as its president.

In 1969, he was ordained a minister, and over the years served African Methodist Episcopal congregations in Danbury, Waterbury, Bridgeport, Norwalk, and Branford, all while still living on Knollwood Road. 

In Ridgefield he was also active in leading efforts to bring affordable housing to town;  he often spoke at meetings to promote the need for lower-cost apartments. He served in the Ridgefield Clergy Association and on the board of directors of Danbury Hospital. A World War II veteran, he belonged to the American Legion and VFW posts. 

What’s more, according to the testimony of people who knew him, Webb may have been one of the finest barbecue chefs in Ridgefield in the 20th Century.

He died in 1991 at the age of 75.

In all his handling of racial cases, Webb said he tried to deal directly with people and not through other agents or agencies. “It’s my way of life,” he said. “I try to understand a person’s character. If I know someone’s character, then I know how to handle the matter.”