Mary Hewitt Stebbins: 
A Poet Poe Liked

They say that fame is  fleeting. That was especially true in the era before the media became mass, and it seemed to be the case with Mary E. Hewitt, once called “one of the most charming of the ‘Poetesses of America.’” 

The poet and editor, who produced a half dozen books in the mid-19th Century and who counted Edgar Allen Poe among her friends, died virtually forgotten in a Ridgefield farmhouse. Forgotten, that is, except by a novelist editor of The Ridgefield Press.

“In character she is sincere, fervent, benevolent, with a heart full of the truest charity — sensitive to praise and to blame,” Poe described her in 1846. “In temperament, melancholy (although this is not precisely the term); in manner, subdued, gentle, yet with grace and dignity; converses impressively, earnestly, yet quietly and in a low tone. In person she is tall and slender, with black hair and large gray eyes; complexion also dark; the general expression of the countenance singularly interesting and agreeable.”

Mary Elizabeth Morse was born in 1807 in Malden, Mass. Her farming father, Joseph, died when she was a child and her mother, Betsey Moore, moved the family to Boston where Mary grew up. Little is known about her youth, but she must have received an excellent education and been exposed to people in the arts. In 1827, she married James Lang Hewitt, who was to become a prominent music publisher, and by 1829 they were living in New York City.

By the early 1840s, Mary Hewitt was writing poetry that was appearing in such magazines as The Knickerbocker, sometimes under the pseudonyms of “Ione” or “Jane.” Her first book, The Songs of Our Land, and Other Poems,  was published in 1845 by W.D. Ticknor, a major publisher of the era. The book consists mostly of her poems that had appeared in magazines. 

In a lengthy review of The Songs of Our Land appearing in Godey’s Lady’s Book magazine,  Edgar Allan Poe said her “compositions evince poetic fervor, classicism, and keen appreciation of both moral and physical beauty. No one of them, perhaps, can be judiciously commended as a whole; but no one of them is without merit.” He concluded that the writer has talent that needs to develop. “Mrs. Hewitt has, upon the whole, given indication rather than immediate evidence of poetic power. If not discouraged, she will undoubtedly achieve, hereafter, a very desirable triumph.”

Nine years later, her second collection, Poems, Sacred, Passionate, and Legendary appeared, but Poe was unable to review this book — he had died in 1849 at the age of 40. Her poems also appeared in several anthologies published in the 19th and 20th Centuries.

Hewitt was the editor of four books, often contributing prose pieces to each: The Gem of the Western World (1850), The Memorial: Written by Friends of the Late Mrs. Osgood (1851), Heroines of History (1852), and Lives of Illustrious Women of All Ages (1860). “Mrs. Osgood” was Frances Sargent Osgood (1811-1850), a close friend of both Poe and Hewitt.

James Hewitt died in 1853. Two years later, Mary Hewitt married widower Russell W. Stebbins Sr., a wealthy New York cotton merchant and native of Ridgefield, who was 14 years her senior. Mary continued to write and edit under the name of  Mary E. Hewitt.

 

Russell and Mary lived in New York City but Russell also had a farm on North Salem Road, inherited from Stebbins ancestors, that the couple used as a summer home. Russell Stebbins’s close relations with The South in connection with his cotton dealings may have prompted him to retire to the Ridgefield farm in 1861, the year the Civil War broke out.   According to Barbara Wardenburg, who once owned the farmhouse at 180 North Salem Road, the place dates back to the 1700s. A past owner may have been a Stebbins who was a Loyalist and fled during the Revolution, only to later return and reclaim the property.

Once Russell retired to Ridgefield, Mary seems to have retired from writing. No more books by her were published and no poems seemed to appear in magazines.

By 1870, the household included Mary, then 64 years old; Russell, 78;  Delia Moore Osgood, 66, Mary’s widowed sister; Carlotta Moore, 25,  probably a niece; Delia Stebbins, 67, sister of Russell; and Abigail Stebbins, 57,  daughter of Russell by his first wife.  With five “senior citizens” in the household, it’s not surprising they also had two young Irish maids plus a 19-year-old “laborer” to help out.

Russell died in 1878 and is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn — the same cemetery where Mary’s first husband, James Hewitt, is interred. Mary, who died in 1894, is buried with neither spouse, but in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Mass., next to her sister Delia Moore Osgood. Nearby is the grave of Mary’s good friend, Frances Sargent Osgood, whose husband, artist Samuel Stillman Osgood, had painted a portrait of her now owned by the New-York Historical Society. (Osgood also painted Edgar Allen Poe. He was not closely related to Delia.)

By the time she died in her 87th year, Mary Moore Hewitt Stebbins had been all but forgotten in literary circles.  While her husband’s death 16 years earlier had gotten substantial mention in the New York press, including a 190-word obituary in The New York Times, Mary received only a 21-word notice in the New York Tribune, which mentioned nothing of her career as an editor and poet and cited only her function as a wife of Russell Stebbins. (Russell’s Times obituary said only that he was survived by an unnamed wife; his Tribune obituary did not even mention he had a wife.)

The Ridgefield Press  had barely covered Russell’s passing, giving him 40 words, but  the newspaper was effusive at Mary’s death, turning out more than 250 words about her. 

“There died in the northern part of Ridgefield Tuesday a very intellectual woman, one whose personality was stamped with the higher thought and whose character withal was sympathetic, full of love and tenderness,”  the account began.

“Mrs. Russell Stebbins died at her home in North Ridgefield at 4 o’clock Tuesday morning. She had been confined to her home but a week, but during the past two years since the death of her sister, a most lovable companion, Mrs. Delia M. Osgood, she had gradually declined.” 

After briefly describing the funeral at St. Stephen’s, The Press noted that Mrs. Stebbins would be buried in Mt. Auburn Cemetery “where her friend, the venerable poet-physician, Oliver Wendell Holmes, has also been laid this week.”

The obituary goes on to tell something of her life, noting that “Mrs. Stebbins had numerous warm friends high in art and literature, and her own writings in prose and verse were by no means of an inferior order. Her contributions to the better periodicals were choice gems at the time when Emerson, Whittier, Holmes, Hawthorne, and Lowell were making American literature of a superior standard. 

“Her life was thrown into a rare literary channel indeed. The atmosphere she breathed during her active life was one long day of higher pleasure. Her Songs of Our Land breathe a sentiment of earnestness, a desire to reach a higher plane of living. Innately refined, she craved those associations which could not fail to mellow her life into a very ideal of early existence...

“She is not dead. She lives in a realm unfettered by finite uncertainties. Let her past be an inspiration to those who read her beautiful words left on printed pages.”

The obituary was undoubtedly written by Press editor Edgar Bross who himself turned out two novels around this time, and who probably knew many of the local literati. 

• • • 

Thirty years after Mary Hewitt Stebbins died, a “holocaust of letters that had accumulated in the attic” of an old house took place on Governor Street. 

“As one heaped basket after another was carried down and its contents emptied upon the bonfire in the backyard, a bystander casually picked up a letter, and opening it looked at the signature, Sarah H. Whitman, then glancing over the pages saw references to Mr. Poe,” reported Edith Dickson of the Edgar Allan Poe Society in 1925.  Sarah Whitman was once slated to marry Poe, and the breakup of their engagement sparked lurid newspaper accounts of what had happened. In the rescued letter, Whitman debunks the sensational stories the media told, and relates what actually happened. Dated Oct. 4, 1850,  the letter was addressed to Whitman’s good friend, Mary E. Hewitt. 

So were several other letters rescued from the fire that are now in the archives of the Poe society in Baltimore. Who knows how many  priceless historical letters to Mary Hewitt were destroyed that day, but to offer a hint of their monetary value: An 1845 letter from Poe to Mary Hewitt — in which Poe admits he was an autograph collector — sold at an auction in 1972 for $3,300. That’s about $20,000 today.

Be careful what you burn.

Roger Kahn: 

A Boy Of Summer

Roger Kahn’s 1972 bestselling book about the Brooklyn Dodgers was so famous that when New York Governor George Pataki created a commission in 1997 to explore bringing the Dodgers back to Brooklyn, he named Kahn a member. 

The Boys of Summer, which had led the New York Times bestseller list for weeks, told the story of the 1950s Dodgers. Called by James Michener “the finest American book on sports,” it sold hundreds of thousands of copies and is still in print. In 2002, it was ranked #2 on Sports Illustrated’s list of the best 100 sports books of all time  (A.J. Liebling’s The Sweet Science, about boxing, was #1.)

Roger Kahn was born in Brooklyn in 1927 to a trivia-loving father who provided questions for the radio quiz show, “Information Please,” and a baseball-hating mother who taught her son poetry and Shakespeare. Both were teachers.

In the early 1950s he quit New York University after three years to join The New York Herald Tribune as a copy boy (he admitted to Ridgefield Press reporter Linette Burton that he got the job “by using a clever device, which was: my father knew the managing editor.”). 

At the age of 24, he was assigned to cover the Dodgers. “It was a rich time in the game’s history, especially in New York, the undisputed center of the baseball universe, home to three teams and three perfervid fan bases,” said The New York Times.

He spent two years reporting on the Dodgers and was then assigned to cover New York Giants’ baseball.

In the mid-1950s, he left the Herald Tribune to work as a sports editor for Newsweek, and to freelance for Sports Illustrated, The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire.  By the 1960s he was writing books on religion and sociology, including The Passionate People: What It Means to Be A Jew in America. 

Then came The Boys of Summer, the first of what was to be many books about sports and sporting personalities, but clearly, the best of them all.  The Times called it “as influential a baseball book as has been written in the last 50 years,” but Sports Illustrated qualified that, terming it “A baseball book the same way ‘Moby-Dick’ is a fishing book.”

The Boys of Summer was coming out  just as Kahn was moving to 830 North Salem Road in 1971, and the promotional tours and interviews that the book prompted made writing tough. 

“Each day I keep kicking the wastebasket and beating my brains to get out one page a day,” he told Nelson Merrell of The Press in June 1972. 

During a long promotional-tour period, Kahn was twice interviewed on the TV show of future Ridgefielder Dick Cavett, but he most remembered being terrified by having to appear on Johnny Carson’s show, knowing that Carson liked clever “one-liners” from his guests. “Nervous as hell on the night of the show, I got called to go on,” he told Merrell. “After the introduction, I sat down and Carson asked, ‘How’s it feel to be an instant smash?’ Then I delivered my rehearsed reply, ‘Better than a shot in the mouth.’” 

While in Ridgefield he also did a stint as a visiting professor of creative writing at Colorado College. He moved back to the city around 1976.

Kahn went on to write more than 20 books — many still in print — including, 

• Rickey & Robinson: The True, Untold Story of the Integration of Baseball, an account of how his close friend, Jackie Robinson, got to be a Dodger.
• Memories of Summer: When Baseball Was an Art, and Writing About It a Game, with stories of his Depression-era childhood, his reporting career, and his personal acquaintances with many great ballplayers.
• October Men, about the 1978 Yankees championship season.
• The Head Game: Baseball Seen From the Pitcher’s Mound, examining the psychological battle between hitter and pitcher.
  
• Joe and Marilyn: A Memory of Love, about the marriage of Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe.
• Good Enough to Dream, covering the lives and hopes of players in the lower minor leagues 

Kahn died in February 2020 at the age of 92.

Over his years of covering the game, Roger Kahn made many friends among the old-time ballplayers but few were as close as Early Wynn, a hard-drinking, Hall of Fame pitcher who was a longtime Yankee nemesis.

In 1973 he told The Press’s Merrell that Wynn was a good writer who did a regular column for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Editors at the Saturday Evening Post wanted Kahn to get his friend to write an article about the 1959 World Series between Chicago White Sox and the Los Angeles Dodgers (in which Wynn was 1-1). They offered Wynn $1,250.

Wynn did the piece but when the Post editors insisted on his rewriting it, the pitcher balked and told Kahn he wanted $1,500.

“I called the editors, told them Wynn wanted more money, and got him $2,000,” Kahn said. “He’s bought my drinks ever since.”

Adolf Gund: 

Ridgefield’s Geppetto

To Ridgefielders in the 1930s, the old man with the German accent might have been Geppetto. Working in his shop in the barn behind his house on North Salem Road, the   white-haired retiree created marvelous stuffed animals, many with innovative moving parts. People came from far and wide to acquire his creature creations, made mostly because he loved to make them.

The man was Adolf Gund, who years earlier had founded the Gund Manufacturing Company, “creator of novelties” that included some of the earliest Teddy Bears.

Today Gund stuffed toys are sold around the world, both new and as antique collectibles, thanks to a man who loved making things for children but who had none of his own.

 Adolf Gund was born in 1869 in the Bavaria section of southern Germany, and came to the United States in 1894. Four years later in New Jersey, he married Luise Bigler, a fellow immigrant from Germany. 

That same year, Gund established a small toy company in Norwalk, Conn. Probably to get closer to more potential customers, he soon moved the operation to Manhattan where it was incorporated as the Gund Manufacturing Company. 

There he continued to design toys, especially plush animals, sometimes with fairly elaborate moving parts for which he obtained several patents. Some could walk, some could dance. One could jump, thanks to a spring mechanism, “bringing it to life.” He also patented a large-sized duck that children could ride on; as the wheels moved, the duck’s bill opened and closed.

Gund was not only an innovator in the toy world, but a strong believer safety. One historian says he created some of the early safety standards for toys.

In the early 1900s,  along with Steiff, he was also among the first to produce Teddy Bears, capitalizing on a much publicized incident in which President Theodore Roosevelt was reported to have refused to kill a captured bear. Gund Teddy Bears are still being made today.

In the 1920s, Gund hired a Russian immigrant named Jacob Swedlin, teaching him to become a cutter and pattern-maker in his small factory. He liked Swedlin and eventually taught him the business operations of the company. In 1925, when he decided to retire, Gund sold his company

to Swedlin for a mere $1,500 — about $22,000 today. Perhaps the low price reflected their friendship and also Gund’s requirement that the company always bear his name. To this day, after being led by three generations of the Swedlin family and now owned by Enesco, a European conglomerate, the brand name is still Gund. And the motto for many years has been “Gotta Getta Gund.”

Soon after he retired, Gund moved to the country, buying a farmhouse in 1927 at the corner of North Salem Road and Wooster Street. Why here? He probably knew Ridgefield from his days in Norwalk, but he also had another connection: His half brother, Fritz Gund, a book-binder by trade, died here in 1915. He is buried in Ridgefield Cemetery.

Though retired, he continued to make toys in a workshop he set up in a barn on his property. These one-of-a-kind creations were sold to people who admired his work and didn’t mind driving hundreds of miles for a hand-made Gund. The barn he worked in was later converted into a house.

Although much of his Adolf’s life was spent creating stuffed toys that entertained youngsters, he and Luise had no children. In 1936, Luise died at the age of 64. She is buried in Fairlawn Cemetery. Two weeks after her death, Gund sold his house and moved back New York City where he died in 1945 at the age of 75.

Most Ridgefielders — then and now — were unaware the toymaker had lived here, probably because he and his wife were a quiet couple who kept to themselves. But as a young man, town historian Richard E. Venus knew of him.

“Adolf was a master toy maker and  used the barn on this property for his shop,” he wrote in a Dick’s Dispatch column in The Ridgefield Press. “He enjoyed such a reputation as a fine toy maker that people traveled great distances to purchase his handiwork.”

But even in 1982, when he wrote his column, Dick Venus didn’t realize that the very private Adolf Gund was the man behind a thriving company that has brought smiles to the faces of hundreds of thousands of children who’ve loved his stuffed toys for more than a century.

Eugene O’Neill: 

Under the Elms

Eugene O'Neill often seemed an unhappy man. But America's only Nobel Prize-winning playwright may have been particularly unhappy in Ridgefield. He disliked the cold winters, perhaps felt the town was not close enough to the sea, and seemed to dislike what he considered a gloomy house. And he may even have imagined ghosts watching him here. 

What's more, his marriage was in the process of breaking up when he lived in town.

Nonetheless,  O'Neill used Brook Farm on North Salem Road and its environs as the inspiration for the setting of one of his best plays, “Desire Under the Elms,” and he wrote at least five other plays while here (“All God's Chillun Got Wings,” “Marco Millions,” “The Great God Brown,” “Lazarus Laughed,” and “Strange Interlude”). 

And when he was selling the place, he had doubts about abandoning its beauty.

A native of New York City, Eugene Gladstone O’Neill was born in 1888, the son of an actor, and lived his first seven years mostly in hotels and on trains. He was expelled from Princeton, studied briefly at Harvard, and held many jobs — including a stint as a newspaper reporter. 

He began to write plays in 1913 and by 1920 he had won his first Pulitzer Prize for “Beyond the Horizon.”

O’Neill bought Brook Farm in 1922 and lived here with his second wife, Agnes, and son Shane. 

“His settling at Brook Farm realized an ambition never really achieved by his father — to own and live in a gracious homestead in which one’s children, and perhaps one's children's children, would grow up,” wrote Croswell Bowen in “The Curse of the Misbegotten.”   “Agnes would have preferred a smaller place, but O'Neill always insisted he must have a big house. He felt that at Brook Farm he could at last ‘belong.’”

Silvio Bedini, the Smithsonian historian, grew up nearby and, as a boy, played with Shane O’Neill, whom he found both lonely and spoiled. To Silvio and his brother Ferdinand Bedini, Eugene O'Neill was a stern, brooding, almost superhuman presence in and about the house. 

Indeed, the playwright suffered from loneliness, depression and alcoholism (biographer Bowen describes a famous binge in Brook Farm's cellar after O'Neill broke open a barrel of hard cider with poet Hart Crane and critic Malcolm Cowley. At one point, as the playwright poured pitchers of cider, poet Crane, waving a dead cigar, gave a recital as the equally drunk Crowley served as an audience).

O'Neill scholars and biographers say he was unhappy at the house, possibly because of the cold, perhaps because it was not near the sea. At one point, biographer Louis Sheaffer said, O'Neill believed “someone was peering over his shoulder as he wrote, and one night he thought he heard footsteps outside, going round and round the house.” 

Nonetheless, in the trees and the stone walls he found inspiration that he employed in “Desire Under the Elms.” 

In 1925, while he was living here, his daughter was born in Bermuda; when she was 18, Oona O'Neill married the much-older, comedian-director Charlie Chaplin, prompting an angry O’Neill to disown his daughter — they never saw each other again. Oona remained devoted to Chaplin until his death in 1977. She died in 1991. 

By 1926, O'Neill was using Brook Farm only occasionally, but in a letter to his wife written in September 1927 shortly before he sold the place, he wrote: “Going to Ridgefield made me sad. It's so beautiful right now, and I couldn't help feeling more keenly than ever that that's where our family ought to be. I have half a mind to open (the house) myself, except that it would be so lonely all by myself.” 

Soon after he divorced his wife and married actress Carlotta Monterey.

O'Neill went on to live in many other places here and abroad, win the Nobel Prize in 1936, and begin a long decline in health from a neurological disorder that ended in his death in 1953. 

But though his output had dwindled in his last 20 years, one of his most important works, the autobiographical “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” was completed near his death and published in 1956, earning his fourth Pulitzer Prize. The only other individual to win that many Pulitzers was poet Robert Frost.

Michael Chekhov: 

An Actor’s Actor

Ridgefield has had its place in theatrical history. Since 2009, the town has had an annual Chekhov Festival, featuring professional performances of plays both new and old. But the Chekhov honored is not the Russian playwright.

Mikhail “Michael” Alexandrovich Chekhov, nephew of Anton Chekhov, was born in Russia in 1891 and by the age of 21 was already a noted actor in his homeland. By 1923, he was a director at the Moscow Art Theatre, but his innovative methods eventually led the Communists to label him “alien and reactionary” and a “sick artist.” So Michael Chekhov emigrated to Germany and then England, establishing a well-respected method of training actors. In 1939, as war was breaking out, he moved his Chekhov Theatre Studio from England to the old Ridgefield School for Boys at the north end of Lake Mamanasco on North Salem Road.

A brochure published in 1940 described the studio as “both a school for the theatre and the theatre itself.” Students learned acting techniques and also staged public performances, often including their teacher. 

While here, Mr. Chekhov made his first appearance in an English-speaking role on the public stage—a Russian War Relief benefit program in the old high school auditorium on East Ridge, where he performed in each of the three short plays presented. 

The studio had its first major production in the fall of 1939, staging Anton Chekhov’s “The Possessed,” at the Lyceum Theater on Broadway. “It has a genius of theatricalism,” wrote Brooks

Atkinson in The New York Times. Burns Mantle of The New York Daily News said, “Michael Chekhov, working from Moscow Art Theatre standards, has created a series of amazingly picturesque scenes and groupings and taught his players a great deal about acting and concentration in character portraiture….They have evidently given much study to body control and facial expression, and there is not a mumbler among them—which could profitably be noted by many Broadway players and their directors.”

Students at the Chekhov Theatre Studio were offered a wide range of courses that included speech formation, eurhythmy (expressive movement), stage design and lighting, makeup, improvisations, and even fencing.

By 1945 Mr. Chekhov had decided to move to Hollywood, where he not only taught and but also acted in films— his portrayal of the psychoanalyst in Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound won him an Academy Award nomination. 

Among his students were Marilyn Monroe, Jack Palance, Anthony Quinn, Yul Brynner, Gregory Peck, and Akim Tamiroff.  

He died in 1955, but his school lives on as the acclaimed Chekhov Theatre Ensemble in New York City.

The site of Chekhov’s school later became the farm of Francis D. Martin. A portion of the main building is now a house while much of the rest of the school property is now occupied by modern homes. However, the stage on which Michael Chekhov made his American debut is still alive and well—the home of the Ridgefield Playhouse. —from “Ridgefield Chronicles”

Silvio Bedini: 

Ridgefield’s Reviewer

How did a veteran of Army intelligence who had been writing for comic books and helping run the family contracting business wind up a Smithsonian Institution curator and author of many volumes of history?

“One day, I bought a clock, the first clock I had ever owned in my life,” Silvio A. Bedini told me in 1989. It was no ordinary clock, however. Uncovered in a  crate filled with mouse nests in North Salem, N.Y., the timepiece turned out to be a priceless “Silent Night Clock,” with a quiet mechanism invented in 1656 for Pope Alexander VII “because he was an insomniac.” 

That North Salem antique inspired him to study and write about ancient clockmakers. His reputation as a specialist in the field became so widespread that the Smithsonian wooed him for five years before, in 1961, Mr. Bedini went to Washington to become a curator. “From the first day I was there, I felt that’s where I should have been all my life,” he said.  

Mr. Bedini’s interest in history started much earlier than the clock purchase, however. He was born in 1917 on North Salem Road and as a boy, he would walk to town along that road, wondering at the historical markers along the way (it was the route of the Battle of Ridgefield). His real awakening came when a librarian allowed him to visit the dank, dusty historical room in the Ridgefield Library basement where, among other things, he could view—but not touch—the sword of Sgt. Jeremiah Keeler, presented to him by the Marquis de Lafayette for heroic service in the Revolution. “It was a special treat to be allowed into the library’s ‘Holy of Holies,’ even under the librarian’s watchful eye,” he said. “I never forgot what I had seen and could recall details of the weapon for years to come. I doubt that many Ridgefielders were even aware of the room’s existence.”

During World War II, he left college to volunteer for the Army Air Corps, but wound up in G-2 intelligence at Fort Hunt, Va., a facility so secret it was blown up as the war ended. After his discharge, he returned to the family business, wrote for children’s magazines and comic books, and did freelance research for the Encyclopedia Americana and The Book of Knowledge. 

In 1958, he was asked to write a ‘brochure’ about the history of Ridgefield for the town’s 250th anniversary. In only three months under his extensive, painstaking research, the brochure turned into Ridgefield in Review, 411 pages long and the only modern history of the town. After joining the Smithsonian, his talent for careful research and his interest in the “little men” of early science led to write some 20 books of history dealing mostly with such subjects as clockmakers, navigators, mapmakers, surveyors, and “tinkers,” but including a Renaissance pope and his elephant. He won many awards for his work including, in 2000, the Leonardo da Vinci Medal, “the highest recognition from the Society of the History of Technology.” 

Though he retired in 1987 as deputy director of Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, Mr. Bedini continued to research and write books, uncovering new information on old subjects. “This is what I enjoy most,” he said, “the historical detective work.” 

He died in 2007 at the age of 90.  

Lewis June: 

Circus’s Advance Brigade

Early in the morning of Aug. 29, 1877, during a powerful thunderstorm, a Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific railroad train was rolling along the tracks near Altoona, Iowa, on its way to Des Moines. The train pulled a mail car, three passenger cars, and a sleeper as well as a brand new Barnum and Bailey advertising car, used to promote the coming appearances of the circus. 

Aboard that car was Lewis June of Ridgefield, a circus executive, along with other circus employees.

As the train approached the swollen Four Mile Creek at around 30 mph, the engineer had no idea that the raging waters had washed out the bridge. The rails were still intact, but the stone trestle beneath them had collapsed.

The engine and all the cars, except the sleeper, plunged 20 feet down into the stream, whose channel was 20 feet deep. Eighteen people were killed, including seven aboard the Barnum and Bailey car, and an escapee from a mental asylum — the worst railway accident in central Iowa history.

It was a wild night for a man who had spent his life in wild world of circuses.

Like many other survivors, June helped rescue the injured and trapped. A New York Times account of the wreck described the scene:

“A horrific rain was falling in torrents, accompanied by wind, lightning, and thunder. The crash put out the lights, and the scene of terror which ensued may be imagined. 

“The men who were not injured, and could get out, went to work at once to rescue the living and wounded. They had to go a mile to a farm house to get axes to chop them out, but they worked heroically, and by daylight had most of the wounded rescued. 

“There were many pitiful scenes and tender incidents. One mother was killed while sitting between two children, who escaped unhurt. One little girl, who had lain in the water for four hours with a heavy man lying dead beneath her body, was discovered to be breathing, and was rescued and restored, and now shows no signs of injury.”

Oddly enough, June had supported the idea of using a special train car to promote the impending arrival of the circus, and this was the first car Barnum and Bailey had commissioned. Circus promotion was, in fact, June’s specialty during his four-decade career. 

Lewis B. June was born in 1824 in North Salem, N.Y. He entered the circus world in his early 20s, serving as a cage driver for VanAmburgh’s circus. By 1851, he had become a partner with Ridgefield native Aaron Turner in the June and Turner Circus. An advertising promotion for that circus, no doubt penned by June, read: “Newly Equipped and Greatly Enlarged for the Traveling Campaign of 1851. Upwards of 80 Men and Horses Are Employed. This Monster Establishment Presents a Rare Opportunity for Wholesale Amusement and Character. A Few Hours Thus Innocently Spent Inevitably Serves to Resuscitate the Unbiased Mind from the Cares and Anxieties of a Business Life.”

“And that,” said circus historian George S. Cole, “was before circus press agents.”

In the following years he became a part owner of Franconi’s Hippodrome in New York City, the Big Bonanza, and various other circuses until 1876 when he joined Barnum and Bailey. For a while in the 1870s, that circus was officially known as “P. T. Barnum's Greatest Show On Earth; P. T. Barnum, John J. Nathans, George F. Bailey and Lewis June, proprietors.”

With all of these circuses, his specialty was promotion and he was always in charge of the “advance brigade,” as one circus historian put it. 

June married a member of the Scott family of the Scotland District in town, and soon moved

his home there. His first house burned down and in 1865 he built a handsome Victorian that still stands today and is on the National Register of Historic Places. It is one of the few “Second Empire” style homes in town.

“Circus horses were wintered in the large barns on the June farm on North Salem Road as well as the farm next door,” reports historian Silvio A. Bedini. “Local legend reports that a bear and giraffes were also quartered here at various times.”

By the mid-1880s, June was retired and living off his investments. An article on former leaders of the circus world that appeared in The Providence (R.I.) Sunday Telegraph in 1885 says June “takes it easy at Ridgefield, Conn., with nothing else to do but cut the coupons off his bonds and he has to have the shears sharpened pretty often, too, at that.”

He died in 1888 at the age of 63 and is buried in the June Cemetery on June Road in North Salem.