J. Mortimer Woodcock: 

The Forester Who Led Ridgefield
While most people today would assume a nature center named Woodcock celebrates the native bird, they would be wrong. The facility is in fact named for J. Mortimer Woodcock, a soft-spoken, cigar-smoking first selectman whose unusual vision led to the creation of the Woodcock Nature Center on the Ridgefield-Wilton border. Both the center and a local road recall his four-year tenure.

A forester by training and nurseryman by vocation, “Woody” Woodcock once led the huge Outpost Nurseries that provided the plantings for two World’s Fairs, and for many parks, estates and corporate headquarters in the Northeast. But he was better known as the town’s chief executive from 1967 to 1971, a period of unprecedented school construction resulting from record population growth.

Joseph Mortimer Woodcock was born on Bastille Day, July 14, 1904, in Fredonia, N.Y. In 1924, probably influenced by his years of childhood camping in Canada with the Boy Scouts, he enrolled in the College of Forestry at Syracuse University. He spent summers until graduation  as an instructor and guide at a lakeside camp for girls in the Canadian wilderness where, at night, he would often sleep in his canoe, letting it drift across the lake wherever the breeze took it.

In the early 1930s, Woodcock was a head forester with the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Depression-era service that undertook many public conservation and recreation projects.

In 1933, he came to Ridgefield to take a job with the Conley family’s Outpost Nurseries. Outpost, which claimed to be the world’s largest supplier to landscaping plants, covered nearly 2,000 acres of Ridgefield and Danbury, including most of the Limestone and much of the Farmingville Districts.

He soon became manager of Outpost and, in 1944, purchased the firm, which became Woodcock Nurseries. Early on he owned 10 acres and leased 1,000 acres for his stock.

Working for Outpost or running his own company, Woodcock was involved in landscaping portions of the 1939-40 and the 1964-65 World’s Fairs, both in New York; many fully grown trees were supplied to each. Outpost and Woodcock also did plantings for the National Art Gallery in Washington; parks along Riverside Drive and elsewhere in New York City; parts of the campuses of Harvard, Yale and Williams colleges; the grounds of Narragansett and Monmouth Raceways; and the estates of such notables as songwriter Cole Porter, explorer Lowell Thomas, columnist Walter Winchell, actor Robert Montgomery, the William F. Buckley family, New York Gov. Thomas E. Dewey, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

During World War II, he helped manage a special saw mill at Outpost that produced long, wooden keels for PT boats. The mill was located on Route 7 between Route 35 and Haviland Road, and employed many Jamaican workers brought up from the island because of labor shortages here. Woodcock also supervised the felling of huge trees at Roosevelt’s estate at Hyde Park; the trees were trucked to Ridgefield to be milled into keels.

After the war Woodcock became more interested in the community and its government. A

Republican, he was elected a member of the GOP Town Committee in the 1950s and eventually became its chairman. He also served on the Board of Finance, the Parks Commission, and on committees studying school sites and the possibility of using an incinerator instead of a town dump.

In 1967, when Leo F. Carroll announced he was retiring after 10 years as first selectman, Woodcock was nominated to run on the Republican ticket. He easily defeated Democrat Otto H. Jespersen and won re-election two years later.

It was a time of considerable stress as the local government struggled with the pressures of a population explosion in which Ridgefield grew from a sleepy town of 8,600 in 1960 to a bustling bedroom community of 18,000 in 1970. The town had just finished building East Ridge Junior High School (now the middle school), construction of Scotland School was nearing completion, Branchville School was underway, and the town still needed a bigger high school and yet another elementary school.

During the Woodcock administration, townspeople battled for a year over what to do about the burgeoning high school enrollment — either expand the old high school on East Ridge or build a new 1,800-student school on land the town bought a few years earlier on North Salem Road. In a 1968 referendum at which more than 3,000 people voted, the North Salem Road site won by a margin of a mere 63 votes.

Around the same time, the town voted without much fuss to build Barlow Mountain School.  (However, after another blistering battle in early 1970s, voters defeated a plan to build a seventh elementary school on West Mountain.)

Woodcock took such controversies in stride and never seemed rattled or upset — not even when the Planning and Zoning Commission threatened to arrest him. The zoners served him with a “cease and desist order” for storing highway department snow removal equipment at a town-owned barn in Ridgebury, charging it violated zoning regulations. If he didn’t comply, the order said, the commission would have him arrested.

“Let them arrest me!” he said with a laugh to a young reporter in his office as he lit one of his ever-present cigars. “Now wouldn’t that make a great story for your paper!”

In the end the commission backed off on its threat.

Woodcock was probably the last of the old-time first selectmen who seemed more a neighbor than an official. His office was on the first floor of the town hall, near the front door, and to make himself accessible, he often left his door to the hallway wide open so that anyone needing help could walk right in — no appointment or secretary needed.

He believed in customer service and satisfaction — the customer being the voter. In 1971

when a resident wrote complaining about some regulation at Martin Park, Woodcock replied in a letter that began diplomatically: “I am always glad to receive a letter questioning our town regulations. As a member of our town, you have every right to question town rules which affect you.”

He would often deal with complaints himself rather than pass them on. One afternoon after a big snowstorm, he got a call from an irate citizen, complaining that the town plow crew had moved his mailbox to the opposite side of the road. Woodcock didn’t think that was likely, and he drove to the scene to find out what had happened. It turned out that a young highway department driver, new to the job, could not see exactly where the pavement was and wound up   plowing a path across the complainant’s front lawn, thinking it was the road. 

It was the “highway” that had moved, not the mailbox.

There were limits to how far he would go, however. One night at home, he received a call from a woman who demanded that he send someone to remove a dead cat from the roadside in front of her house. Woodcock said it would be rather expensive to call out a town crewman and pay him the union-required time-and-a-half for a minimum of four hours, and that the dead cat  would be removed first thing in the morning. The woman continued to demand immediate action, but finally slammed down the phone. 

The next morning a road crewman could not find the cat. That night, as Woodcock was presiding over a Board of Finance meeting, in came the complaining woman, carrying  a cloth bag. She dropped the bag on the table in front of Woodcock. 

“There’s your cat,” she said. She turned around and walked out.

During the Woodcock administration, the town made one of its most useful purchases: the 26-acre Holy Ghost Novitiate on Prospect Ridge. The main building became the school board headquarters for many years and is now the congregate housing for the elderly. The novitiate land is now used for town playing fields, for affordable housing, and for a dog park, and the outbuildings today house the Ridgefield Guild of Artists, the Ridgefield Theater Barn, and the Marine Corps League.

 Perhaps Woodcock’s least expensive acquisition was the one for which he will be remembered longest. During his administration, the state was buying up large tracts of land for the Norwalk River Flood Control Project. One section contained more than 140 acres and a house on the Ridgefield-Wilton line. Despite the fact that all but a small portion of this property was in the town of Wilton, Woodcock arranged to have the Town of Ridgefield lease it at $1 a year from the state to establish a nature center. It was probably one of the few times in Connecticut history that one town leased parkland in another.

At his retirement dinner as first selectman in 1971, it was announced that the new operation had been named the Woodcock Nature Center in his honor.

In 1989, when he was 85, he paid his last visit to the then-thriving nature center and expressed pleasure at how well it was doing. “I only wish I was 40 years younger and could be helping you,” he said. “It makes me glad to see somebody interested in the same thing I was and doing something with it.”

Woodcock was also deeply involved in other aspects of the community. In 1942, he joined the recently created Ridgefield Rotary Club; he became its seventh president five years later. He was named Rotary Citizen of the Year in 1966.

Though he and his wife had no children, he was active in programs that helped young people. He was treasurer of the Ridgefield Boys’ Club, a director of the Branchville Fresh Air Association which brought city kids to Ridgefield in the summer, and served as a director of the Great Pond Holding Corporation, predecessor of Martin Park, providing Ridgefielders with their first public first beach. 

He also served on the board of the Ridgefield Savings Bank, now Fairfield County Bank, and was a director of the First Congregational Church. He volunteered with the Keeler Tavern, Danbury Hospital and the Ridgefield Cemetery Association, and was active in local and regional Masonic organizations.

Three years after he retired from office, Marcelino Lavin subdivided some land off Barry Avenue and named the dead-end road serving it “Woodcock Lane” in honor of the former first selectman. It is one of only three roads in town named specifically for Ridgefield chief executives; the others are Tanton Hill Road, honoring Harvey Tanton — who himself voted to approve the name (Tanton also worked for Outpost Nurseries), and Hull Place, named for Harry E. Hull.

Woodcock and his wife, the former Anne Pomroy, lived for many years on Farmingville Road in a house that stood behind the Shell gas station (where  a car wash now operates). They later moved to Huckleberry Lane. He died in January 1993 at the age of 88 and she, seven months later. They had marked their 60th wedding anniversary in 1991.

Among the speakers at his 1971 retirement dinner was Connecticut Gov. Thomas Meskill. The governor helped present Woodcock with a clock, engraved, “To a grand guy who contributed unselfishly and faithfully so others may enjoy Ridgefield’s future.”

“I never watched a clock in my life, but now that I’m not going anyplace, I’ve got a beautiful one to watch,” he said.

When he visited the nature center in 1989, Woody Woodcock gave his last press interview. As he chatted, he was holding his legendary cigar, although both his doctor and Anne had long ago forbidden his smoking. 

“I haven’t lit one in years,” he said with a big smile. “I just need something to play with.”  

Col. Louis D. Conley:

The Man from Outpost

Col. Louis D. Conley built an empire like no other Ridgefield has seen. At the height of the operation of Outpost Nurseries and Outpost Farm, he owned some 2,000 acres — nearly one tenth of the town’s area. He had a large home that became a famous restaurant, maintained a sizable farm with its own electricity, had the largest kennel in New England, and established a popular inn frequented by movie stars and even a first lady. 

And thousands of trees he planted still beautify the town.

He was, as his Ridgefield Press obituary observed, a “man of large affairs.”

Louis Daniel Conley was born in 1874 in New York City, where he grew up and attended St. Francis Xavier College (now Xavier High School) in Manhattan. He and his two brothers took over their grandfather’s Conley Tinfoil Company, considered a major U.S. industry at the time. He married Elise Ehret, daughter of beer baron George Ehret of the once thriving Ehret Breweries.

In the early 1900s, Conley became active in the military, serving in New York’s “Fighting

69th” and rising to the rank of colonel, in command of the entire regiment. However, in 1916, when the 69th was sent to Texas to Pancho Villa who was raiding border towns, Army surgeons found Conley had a heart ailment and ordered that he be relieved from duty. The colonel appealed, but President Woodrow Wilson sustained the surgeons’ opinion.

Around 1914, apparently wearying of the hot, fetid summers in New York City, Conley acquired a large tract of farmland along Bennett’s Farm Road west of Route 7 and erected his 34-room mansion atop the hill as an “outpost” from city life.

“It was the most beautiful place in the state of Connecticut,” said Julius Tulipani, who came to work as superintendent at Outpost Farm in 1919. “And it was the most difficult to run.”

Tulipani first met the colonel when he did some contracting work on the estate. Then only 20 years old, Tulipani had almost single-handedly constructed a 40-foot-high water tower that could hold 90,000 gallons. (The tower stood off Great Hill Road until 1974 when a pair of youthful arsonists who had been on a rampage burned it down in a spectacular, nighttime blaze.)

Outpost Farm was a self-sufficient operation in those days. Water came from springs across

Route 7, and was pumped up the hill into the tank to serve the house and barns. Conley even had his own electrical generating plant (the generator had two 4,500-pound flywheels) that supplied all of the electricity for Outpost until sometime in the 1920s when utility lines replaced it.

To back up the power plant, Conley purchased a giant, wind-powered  generator with a flywheel some 36 feet across. Manufactured by a Canadian outfit, only two or three of the devices ever operated in the United States, Tulipani said. A 1926 Ridgefield Press article called it “the second largest windmill in the world.”

Running Outpost required many skills, Tulipani recalled in 1973 when he was 82. Besides fields of rye, oats, corn, and 10 acres of lawn to care for, there were thoroughbred Guernseys and their products. When the colonel wintered in Manhattan, he’d have the fresh milk and butter, packed in ice, sent almost daily to the city on the 7:32 train out of Ridgefield.

Pigs were bred on the farm — 40 to 50 of them a year —  but like the other farm products, were used only for the estate and never sold. Tulipani also oversaw the raising of sheep, chickens, pheasant, and even quail for the Conley food supply. He also had charge of the work and riding horses.

Conley was always a large-scale employer. In the early days of Outpost Farm, five families lived on the estate, tending to the farm and grounds. Among them were names later commonplace in Ridgefield: Marinelli, Cassavechia, Servadio, Baldaserini and, of course, Tulipani.

In the house the colonel employed a staff of at least seven women, including a cook, kitchen maid, waitress, parlor maid, chambermaid, laundress, and nurse for his four children. He also had one or two chauffeurs and a private secretary.

Tulipani described  Conley as tall and “quite a man. They were a nice family, a good-living family.”

“They were very nice people, lovely people,” agreed Bill Oliverson, who tended to the Conley dairy operation. “They were very good to the workers.”

With the invention of cellophane sometime around 1920, the future of tinfoil began to dim. Conley sold off his interest in the company and retired. But one day soon after, he was chatting with his friend, Max Schling, head of a well-known seed producing firm on Long Island (and whose name was used in the title of an Ogden Nash poem). Schling had visited Outpost and was struck by the land, then almost all fields. He suggested that Conley put some trees on it.  

The colonel like the idea, began planting trees in 1923 and founded Outpost Nurseries. While the operation was started as a hobby, it wound up as a business — and a giant business at that.

During the 1920s Conley awed the small town of 3,500 people by buying up parcel after parcel of land, paying comparatively high prices. Before he was finished, he had acquired virtually every acre along both sides of Route 35 from just south of Copps Hill Plaza  north to the town line on Route 7 and onward into Danbury. His holdings also stretched through Farmingville to Route 7 and up into Ridgebury.

Conley’s control over the northeast portion of town, particularly Danbury Road, prompted some to call him “a one-man zoning commission,” for he prevented those properties from being developed for many years.   

Throughout most of this 2,000 acres, Conley and his successors planted hundreds of thousands of trees and shrubs. Although most were sold over the years, thousands still stand today in town. Roads recall the names of species of nursery stock Conley grew in their vicinity: Poplar Road, Birch Lane, Linden Road, Cherry Lane, Copper Beech Lane, Dogwood Drive, and Laurel Lane. And, of course, there is Nursery Road.

Outpost Nurseries also had a huge greenhouse where Copps Hill Plaza is today. Several hundred thousand seedlings were raised there each year.

Outpost  soon became one of the largest retail nursery businesses in the East. Among its many jobs between 1925 and World War II were the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, the 1939 New York

World’s Fair, the National Gallery of Art  in Washington, D.C., parks along Riverside Drive in New York City (for which trees were brought down the Hudson River on barges), Tryon Park in Manhattan, Parkchester in the Bronx (one of the first large-scale housing projects in New York City), colleges like Harvard, Yale, and Williams, Narragansett and Monmouth Raceways, and the estates of such people as songwriter Cole Porter, commentator Lowell Thomas, statesmen Franklin D. Roosevelt and Thomas E. Dewey, columnist Walter Winchell, actor Robert Montgomery, and the Buckleys at Sharon.

The business was doing so well that additional nurseries were established in Long Island, and in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina to grow trees and shrubs that couldn’t be raised in Ridgefield’s climate or soil. The company also maintained a Park Avenue office in New York City.

At the height its operation in the late 1920s and 1930s, the Outpost estate, farm and nurseries included between 30 and 40 houses in which employees lived; a 1926 Press article places the number of employees at between 30 and 60, depending on the season. Those numbers grew in the 1930s when Outpost became Ridgefield’s largest employer.

Besides supplying much food to its workers, Outpost also had its own garbage removal system and dump, and provided ice cut from Bennett’s Pond for the iceboxes.

But the nursery wasn’t the colonel’s only interest. In the 1920s, he built a kennel along

Danbury Road, right at the intersection of Routes 7 and 35. The 175-foot-long building was the largest kennel in New England. At one point the colonel had 20 Kerry blue terriers (his favorite — he was a pioneer in bringing the breed to America), 19 Sealyham terriers, 40 cocker spaniels, and 60 English setters in the kennel. After the colonel’s death, the building was acquired by Waldeck Kennels, which bred St. Bernards and cocker spaniels. Later the Coast Guard trained dogs there, and then the Gaines dog food company took it over as a research center. Finally, in the 1950s, the doghouse became a steakhouse, and then in the 1970s, the Red Lion. The Italian restaurant, with that odd hidden history, was torn down in 2006 to make way for apartments.

Just north of the old kennel site is a large stone and wood building, which served as Outpost’s

offices. It’s now part of Stonehouse Commons condominiums.

In 1928, Conley acquired a Danbury Road house that had been built around 1812 by a carpenter for his bride. Two years later and only two months before his death, the colonel opened The Outpost Inn on what is now the site of Fox Hill condominiums. He created the pond that still exists

there — calling it Willow Pond — on which thousands of Ridgefielders used to skate in winters from the 1930s until the 1960s.

Many celebrities visited the inn — most to dine and some to stay overnight. Among the diners was Eleanor Roosevelt, who drove herself there for lunch in 1940. It was also a popular dining spot for Ridgefielders, and several local organizations had their meetings there.

In 1983 letter to this writer, Elise Conley Cox, the colonel’s daughter, reminisced about the inn.

“I remember the Japanese room, with its imported silk panels; the blue crystal sconces in the

Sheraton dining room; the lovely entrance hall, with its graceful stairway.  Lily Pons had a beautiful dinner party there one evening — and wore a stunning gown!

“The antiques throughout were carefully chosen by my father, who loved scouting them out: The wall fountain, in the formal Linden tree garden, we found in Florence. Heavens only knows what happened to Bacchus and the other statues.

“When the swamp was drained and the Willow Pond formed, we had stately swans patrolling — and its rustic bridge was a copy of the one in Monet’s garden.”

As for Danbury Road, it was a “lovely winding maple-shaded road, wandering to the village — somewhat different now.”

Outpost Inn operated until the early 1960s when it became the Shapley School, a college preparatory school that lasted until around 1967. David Paul, developer of Casagmo, bought the 28-acre property and turned it into Fox Hill, the town’s first condominiums.

While Conley’s inn became a site for homes, his home became the site of an inn. In 1946, his Outpost Farm mansion was sold and converted into the Fox Hill Inn. Known for its fine dining and

spectacular views of the countryside, the inn drew many diners from New York City. In 1970, owner John Yervant accepted an offer from IBM to sell the property. The computer company wanted to use the site as school for its executives in a country-club setting. But IBM also wanted to be able to fly those executives in and out by helicopter, and the uproar over the potential aircraft noise prompted IBM to abandon its plans. Vandalized, decaying and a hazard, the Outpost/Fox Hill Inn mansion was torn down in 1975.

IBM held on to the Fox Hill land until the 1990s when it sold its holdings to a New Jersey developer called Eureka, which wanted to put multifamily housing there. After battling the developer for several years, the town acquired the Fox Hill Inn site and other former IBM land totaling 458 acres in 2001, and sold it to the state for Bennett’s Pond State Park two years later. (In 2017, Eureka still owned former Conley/IBM land on the south side of Bennett’s Farm Road, but no development has taken place there.)

Colonel Conley was active in various civic efforts. For many years he operated a camp at Outpost Farm  for underprivileged Catholic boys from the city. The camp took children for two-week sessions throughout the summer, had its own director and staff, and offered many activities, including swimming in a large pool.

 The colonel was a strong supporter of Boys Scouts, and contributed substantially to St. Mary Parish (more than 25 clergymen attended his funeral there). 

After Conley’s death, his family took over the nurseries operation.  

Conley and his companies left behind a legacy of the countless trees that still grow in the Farmingville, Limestone and Ridgebury districts on his old nursery land. But he also bought many people to Ridgefield who had worked for him or his family, including two nurserymen who became first selectmen — Harvey Tanton and J. Mortimer Woodcock. Others were also significant contributors to the community, among them Bill and Marywade Rodier, whose flower shop still exists today on Main Street — Bill was one of the five founders of the Ridgefield Symphony Orchestra in 1964.

     In 1942, Outpost Nurseries joined the war effort, setting up a large sawmill on Route 7 south of Little Pond (site of the old Benrus/Perkin-Elmer plants, now used for the Pond’s Edge medical offices). Another mill stood on the site of today’s Pamby Motors service center at Danbury and Copps Hills Roads. Outpost could cut huge logs for building Navy patrol vessels, minesweepers, PT boats, and other small craft that required structural wood instead of iron and steel. President Franklin Roosevelt supplied trees from the 1,500-acre Hyde Park estate for this effort — some of them may have come from Outpost originally. 

      Several hundred thousand board feet of oak for shipbuilding was cut from Hyde Park in 1942 alone. The trees had to be hauled 55 miles to Ridgefield where the wood was cut and then

distributed to several shipyards along the Atlantic Coast.

     After Conley died of meningitis on Sept. 7, 1930 at Outpost, many words of praise were written.  “The colonel has done much to beautify Ridgefield,” The Ridgefield Press said. “Attractive buildings have been created, and formerly where hundreds of waste acres had been allowed to run to scrub and wild grow, have been cultivated, grade and thousands of trees have been planted.”

His home, The Danbury Times said, was “one of the showplaces of the East.” The nursery became “a splendid public park, running for miles along both sides of roads between Danbury and Ridgefield.

“The instinct for beauty which Colonel Conley possessed ran peculiarly to the improvement

of the great outdoors. He had as well a sense of beauty in architecture, but chiefly he made the land which he owned flare into such satisfaction of eye and mind as artists desire.”

Praising the colonel’s revamping of miles of the Routes 7 and 35 corridor, The Danbury News added: “Thousands of people… who did not know this splendid man personally became familiar with his name through his work along this busy highway and came to respect and admire him through the exceptionally fine character of that work.”

In a 1973 letter, Elise Cox, his daughter and last surviving child, observed: “He loved Ridgefield and Outpost Farm, and constantly sought ways to make both more beautiful. His life was simply lived, with honor and integrity the measure of all his actions.”