Ephemera

 Among the 14,000 or 15,000 tons of trash Ridgefielders send to the transfer station each year may be a few pounds of valuables.

Mostly they are just pieces of paper, but they are also the stuff of the adage, “one man's junk is another man’s treasure.”

They wouldn’t fetch big prices, these treasures; they are valued for something more than money.

They are the ephemera of a community, found among the left-behinds of people who have died, the no-longer-wanteds of people who are moving away, or the spring cleanings of people “tired of all that junk in the attic.”

Ephemera is a funny word whose etymology explains why these pieces of history are so often doomed. It’s from the Greek, meaning “short-lived.”

“Broadly speaking,” says one authority on ephemera, “the word ... is used to denote the transient, everyday items of paper (mostly printed) that are manufactured specifically to use and throw away.”

The Ridgefield Press, for instance, would be ephemera. You read it, you toss it. However, it is a history of the town so steps have been taken to preserve its pages. However, so much else ephemeral but interesting about a community like Ridgefield is truly short-lived.

One of my favorite examples of unusual ephemera is a stained, mouse-chewed scrap of paper found in the attic of our 18th Century house soon after we moved in 45 years ago. It is a page of a pupil’s writing notebook from about 1850. 

On the page was a handwriting lesson of a boy named David Olmstead, who had lived in the house. Over and over, sentences were repeated to practice script so neat it would put to shame 90% of today’s adults.

At the bottom of one page was what remained of his signature, “David Olmsted Book, age 12.” 

A remarkable feature of this practice session was that at one point David was writing his name, over and over, following an example that his teacher had apparently written down. Midway through the exercise, David changes the spelling from Olmsted to Olmstead — from the old way the name was spelled to the more modern version — and then he returns to Olmsted. Had the teacher mistakenly written his name the old way and he had obediently copied the teacher’s version, slipping once because his own family used the new version?

Even without this oddity of aberration, the scrap was interesting in itself. Here was a piece of a child’s life in the middle 1800s. It became all the more interesting when research revealed that David  died only five years later, at the age of 17. He was probably the victim of one of those ailments that today are cured with a few pills but a century and a half ago, killed you.

We framed the scraps of David Olmstead’s writing paper. It’s hanging on a wall of the house he was growing up in when the likes of James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore were President.

No doubt, David didn’t think much of this piece of paper when he was alive. It was just a homework assignment. Perhaps after he died his parents stashed it in the attic as a little thing to remember him by.

To us, however, it is a touch with the past, a visible sign that there was life — even death — occurring in our home long before even our own great grandparents were around.

I would love to have a photograph of what people who lived in our house looked like long ago. No doubt, pictures once existed. And no doubt, they were thrown away by people who thought they were worthless.

I would love to see a century-old picture of the road on which we live. Undoubtedly, many were taken. They, too, are probably gone.

I would love to read letters, written about the neighborhood by people who lived next door or down the street 100 or 200 years ago. But who saves letters that long?

These would all be glimpses of history — close-to-home history. They’d help us understand our predecessors in a more personal, more close-to-the-heart way.

Fortunately, a group of Ridgefielders has recognized that much that is valuable historically was being tossed when it should be saved —  for historians, for genealogists, for anyone who values the past.

The Ridgefield Historical Society is not only collecting but cataloguing ephemera and other historical materials dealing with Ridgefield.

So don’t toss old or “oldish” photos of town, letters your Ridgefield grandmother wrote, diaries, or even pamphlets or local advertising brochures from “the old days.” Offer them to the society.  Your junk may well be truly junk; but some could be treasures for the future. Let the society archivists decide.

And speaking of letters, many Ridgefielders will soon receive one from the Ridgefield Historical Society, seeking a donation to help support the society’s work. Please read its message and, if you can, chip in toward this wonderful organization’s efforts to not only preserve the past, but teach the present about our fine old town and its rich history.

Kathryn Venus Rosa: 

Pioneering Preservationist

“I have a fierce sense of protection for our historic past,” said Kathryn Venus Rosa in a 1996 Press interview. “I’d like to be remembered as someone who committed herself to the preservation of our past for future generations, someone who felt it was a privilege to live in a town as beautiful as Ridgefield.”

A founder of the Keeler Tavern Museum and longtime chairman of the Historic District Commission, Kitty Rosa lived not only for history, but in history: Her house was built in the 1700s by the Olmsted family, among the founders of the town.

She was born in Ridgefield in 1921, daughter of Jack and Marion Travis Venus. Her dad, one of nine children born to Mary and Charles Venus, owned Venus Oil Company and Limestone Service Station on Danbury Road. As a child, she loved walking along the Main Street and she especially enjoyed going to antiques auctions with her mother.

She graduated from Ridgefield High School on East Ridge and was voted “best socializer” in her class. After graduating from Merrill Business School, she worked in finance. Her interest in business and antiques merged when she started the Village Trader in a 3,000-square-foot building on Prospect Street, across from what’s now the Prospector. Her husband, Paul, attended auctions on weekends to ensure the shop had a wide variety of antiques and collectibles.

Mrs. Rosa soon became a leading voice for the cause of historic preservation. In 1965, when the private home once known as the Keeler Tavern came on the market, she helped form a small group that eventually included her two mentors, Francis Martin and Preston Bassett, with the goal of purchasing the home for $85,000, then a considerable sum. The result is the Keeler Tavern Museum, for which Mrs. Rosa worked tirelessly, serving many years as president.

“Kitty’s love of history was in full bloom at this incredible pre-Revolutionary home and she donned her period costume regularly as a tour guide for visitors who shared her enthusiasm for its history,” said her daughter, Elizabeth Beresford.

In 1970 she was appointed to the Historic District Commission, the agency that oversees the preservation of properties on southern Main Street, eastern West Lane, and southern High Ridge. She spent 40 years on the commission and was its chair from 1973 to 1999.

Mrs. Rosa was among the team that saved the Scott House on Catoonah Street by raising over half a million dollars to dismantle the historic building board by board and reconstruct it on Sunset Lane. It  opened there in 2002 as the Ridgefield Historical Society.

“Through many conversations with Kitty, her love of Ridgefield, and the work she did to preserve its history and beauty, was always foremost in her mind,” said Town Historian Kay Ables. “Kitty gave so much of herself in every job she undertook.

“In the early days of the historical society, when money was being raised to reconstruct the building, Kitty worked tirelessly with Jeanne Timpanelli and Dave Scott to choose the furniture, select the proper lighting, the paint, which has become Kitty’s green, and so many other details. Kitty was on our original board,” Ms. Ables said.  

She also helped in the project to launch Ridgefield’s performing arts center, The Ridgefield Playhouse, to host concerts, plays, dance recitals, and movies in the old RHS auditorium, which had been designed by Cass Gilbert Jr.

“Kitty was extremely proud of this living legacy, the culmination of all her efforts to make Ridgefield one of the finest communities in the land,” her daughter said.

She and her husband Paul — a former Ridgefield selectman — were honored as the Kiwanis Club’s Citizens of the Year in 1997. 

In 2000, Mrs. Rosa received the Harlan H. Griswold Award, the state’s highest award for historic preservation. At the presentation, John W. Shannahan, director of the Connecticut Historical Commission, said Mrs. Rosa is “the woman who, perhaps more than any other individual, has been directly responsible for protecting the historical and architectural integrity of this extraordinary, yet most livable, community.”

She died in 2014 in California, where she was living with her daughter. She was 92.   

Jean and Harrison Horblit:

Philanthropic Collectors

Jean and Harrison Horblit were collectors and philanthropists who made often incalculably valuable contributions to many organizations — including those interested in the history and conservation of Ridgefield. 

A widely known and respected collector of antique books and manuscripts, Harrison D. Horblit was born in Boston in 1912, graduated from Harvard in 1933 and became a textile executive. But his avocation as a collector made him known around the world. His specialty was antique books and manuscripts related to the history of science, mathematics and navigation, and his own book, “One Hundred Books Famous in Science,” is still considered a bible in its field. 

Much of his collection of rare books and manuscripts, including many items from the 1400s and 1500s, was donated to Harvard's Houghton Library.  

After his death, Jean Horblit catalogued and then gave his large collection of 19th Century photographs, including 3,141 daguerreotypes and 3,100 paper prints from as early as 1839, to Houghton where it is now The Harrison D. Horblit Collection of Early Photography. 

Mr. Horblit was also interested in local history. In 1973, when a group of Ridgefielders tried to buy a 1780 English print of the Battle of Ridgefield at a Sotheby's auction, they quickly ran out of money. Mr. Horblit stepped in and eventually paid $16,000 for an item Sotheby's had valued at under $2,500. “This print belongs in Ridgefield if it belongs anywhere,” Mr. Horblit said at the time. 

Three months after his death in 1988, Mrs. Horblit donated the print to the Keeler Tavern Museum. 

Jean Mermin Horblit was born in 1910 in New Haven, where she grew up and was the 1927 Connecticut High School shorthand champion. She studied at Columbia University and became the head of fabric designs for a division of Marshall Field & Company. It was there that she met her husband; they were married in 1952.

She was a collector of antique Japanese woodblock prints, illustrated books and maps known as Ukiyo-e or “images of a floating world,” which cover scenes from everyday life of the people. Her prints and books have been exhibited at the Hammond Museum, Princeton University, and Katonah Gallery, and a rare 17th Century map of Tokaido was shown at the New York Museum of Natural History. 

She also donated pieces of their collections to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

Mrs. Horblit had been a major benefactor of the new Ridgefield Historical Society and its efforts to restore the Scott House as its headquarters.

She also donated 22 acres of her estate bordering Round Pond to the Land Conservancy of Ridgefield.

The Horblit home itself, a magnificent English Georgian-style mansion that had been meticulously maintained by Mrs. Horblit, is an important piece of Ridgefield history. Built in 1930 from limestone imported from France, “Oreneca” was all but abandoned by its owner, Philip D. Wagoner, after the death of his wife a few years later. When the Horblits bought the place in 1965, the property was so overgrown they did not know the house overlooked nearby Round Pond. 

Avid yachters, Jean and Harrison Horblit sailed the Maine Coast for two months every summer for many years. Jean Horblit moved to Stonington in 2004 and died in 2009 at the age of 98.

Dom D’Addario: 

A Very Good Citizen

Few people have spent more time helping their community — and their country — than Dom D’Addario.

Born in Branchville in 1925, Dominic A. “Dom” D’Addario attended the one-room Branchville Schoolhouse, still standing on lower Old Branchville Road. He began working at the age of 11 — pumping gas at a filling station in Branchville — to help support his family.

He graduated from Ridgefield High School in 1943 and immediately entered the U.S. Army Air Force. He started out a bombardier, but was then sent to navigation school, and he eventually wound up training navigators who guided World War II bombers.

After the war he remained active in the U.S Air Force Reserves for many years, finally retiring as a lieutenant colonel.

     Mr. D’Addario enrolled at the University of Connecticut on the GI Bill — “there was no way my parents could afford to send me to college,” he said in a 2004 interview.  “They had enough to do to put food on the table.”

     He studied engineering, and while still a student, met and married Mary Hrabcsak of Danbury.

     He worked as an engineer at Barden Corp. in Danbury. He also designed kitchens for Rucon Custom Kitchens in Danbury, and headed a furniture company.

In Ridgefield, Mr. D’Addario became interested in town government in the 1980s. Nearly always in company with his wife Mary, he not only attended major town meetings and public hearings but was a regular in the audience of nearly all Police Commission, Board of Selectmen and Planning and Zoning Commission meetings — week in and week out, for years.

In the 1990s, he was a founder and for many years chairman of the Independent Party of Ridgefield, which ran and endorsed candidates for town offices.

For all his interest in public affairs, Mr. D’Addario was noted for not making politics personal, always expressing his opinions respectfully, and remaining friendly with many people on both sides of different issues whether he agreed with them or not.

“He was always a gentleman,” First Selectman Rudy Marconi once said.

Perhaps it was most appropriate that he was a member of the town Ethics Committee for many years.

Both he and his wife were justices of the peace, and officiated at many marriages.

“He was one of the favorite JPs to do ceremonies, and he was always there, if they wanted to be married that afternoon, or the next day, or the next month,” said Town Clerk Barbara Serfilippi.

“Mary and I do that together,” Mr. D’Addario said. “The ceremony is only 15 minutes long, but we try to stretch it out with readings.”

He had also been active in the Laszig Fund, which provides grants that help the elderly,  the Ridgefield Historical Society, and in St. Nicholas Byzantine Catholic Church in Danbury, where he had been a trustee and served on many committees.

And if all that wasn’t enough, he had also donated more than 22 gallons of his blood to the local Red Cross Bloodmobiles.

Mr. D’Addario died in 2012 at the age of 87. Mary D’Addario died in 2016; she was 95 years old.

In 2001, the D’Addarios were both honored as “Citizens of the Year” by the Ridgefield Police Benevolent Association and the Ridgefield Police Union. “Dom and Mary D’Addario are more involved and personally invested in our community than just about anyone else in Ridgefield, and have been for decades,” the police said at the time.

Joseph Hartmann: 

Artist and Historian on Glass

Joseph Hartmann may have thought himself an artist, but it’s doubtful he considered himself a historian. Yet, the photographs he took of Ridgefield and its people from the 1890s through the 1930s

are a graphic history of the town in one of its most fascinating periods.

Pictures of rich and poor, young and old, luxurious mansions and dusty workshops, are included in the 6,000 negatives he left behind. Almost all the negatives are on glass plates — he worked most of his years with a large-sized camera in the days before “film” was available. For each photograph, a glass negative had to be inserted into the back of the camera. He stuck with glass well into the 1920s, switching to a plastic negative late in his career.

A son of a physician, Josef Hartmann was born in 1867 in a German village not far from Munich, a great artistic center. He studied photography in Italy and was accomplished at his art when he came to the United States with his father in 1888.

Around 1890, he set up a studio in the top floor of the Bedient building at Main Street and Bailey Avenue — it burned down in the great fire of 1895, but he moved into its replacement soon afterwards. Over the years that followed, he took thousands of portraits in that studio. He also photographed weddings, civic and social groups, babies, musicians, insides and outsides of houses, cars, gardens, pets, and even bodies in caskets. 

“His work, characterized by the use of natural light and perfection of pose and detail, clearly

shows the influence of the Munich painting school,” said a 1981 article in Antiques Weekly.

His later work was influenced by Frederic Remington and Frederick Dielman, noted American artists who lived in Ridgefield and were friends of Hartmann. 

“His photographs … are marked by richness and depth of tone, marvelous resolution and perfection of composition,” the article said. 

In 1898, Hartmann married Amalie L. Diedrich (1867-1943), who had been working as a German teacher for the children of the Rufus King family on King Lane. They had three children,

including Elsa Hartmann, who became a longtime teacher at Ridgefield High School.

Hartmann was a longtime member of the choir of St. Stephen’s Church. 

Hartmann, who lived  on Catoonah Street just west of the post office, retired in 1938 due to

declining health, and died in 1942.

For many years after his death, his glass negatives sat in boxes in an unheated barn next to the Hartmann homestead on Catoonah Street, two doors west of the post office (next to the Cumming house that’s about to be torn down). 

In 1950, daughter Elsa donated the collection to The Ridgefield Press, hoping that they would

be cared for and that their images would be published in the newspaper.

“I personally carried the boxes of plates out of the barn cellar and took them by car, first to a garage at my house, then to The Press office,” recalled Press publisher Karl S. Nash in 1990. He did

not point out that the boxes were exceedingly heavy since they were packed tightly with big, glass plates.

For more than a decade, the boxes of negatives remained stored in the newsroom of The Press. Many were turned into prints that appeared in The Ridgefield Press, especially in the long-running

“Old Ridgefield” series that attempted to get many identified. The Press was assisted by The Hartmann Society, formed in the early 1980s by Barbara Wardenburg and others to both preserve and identify the pictures.

The Press in 1990 donated the collection to the Keeler Tavern Museum, which with the help of

the Hartmann Society and others, set about not only getting modern negatives and prints made from each plate, but also figuring out the people and places depicted. Committees of oldtimers worked for years to identify as many pictures as possible.

The museum still holds the collection today.

Many of Hartmann’s pictures were used in the 1999 book, “Images of America: Ridgefield,” produced by the Ridgefield Archives Committee, a sort of successor of the Hartmann Society that has melded into the Ridgefield Historical Society. The book is still in print today.

Jeremy Wilmot: 

A Sense of Past and Place

Few people have served Ridgefield in more ways for more years than Jeremy Wilmot. A member of five town government agencies over her half century as a Ridgefielder, she was best known as a champion of historic preservation at a time when Ridgefield was losing some of its ancient  buildings and identity.

“By appearance or association, Ridgefield's architecture and local histories provide us with a sense of past and place,” Wilmot wrote in 1981. “Our landmarks root all of us to Ridgefield, no matter whether newcomer or native.”

Jeremy Griffiths Wilmot was born in New Jersey in 1929. Her family moved to Connecticut and she graduated from Greenwich High School in 1947, attended the Colorado School of Mines, and later finished her college education at Western Connecticut State University.

She moved to Ridgefield in 1955 and, along with raising a family, began her involvement with the community by joining the League of Women Voters and by penning letters to The Ridgefield Press on wide variety of issues.

As a member of the town’s first Charter Revision Commission in 1963, she got to know the inner workings of Ridgefield government. She later served on the Historic District Commission and on the Zoning Board of Appeals. In 1989, she was elected to the Planning and Zoning Commission, but in the 1990s, left to be elected a member of the Board of Selectmen.

Her most tangible legacy to the town was in historic preservation. In the 1970s, she was a founder of the Ridgefield Preservation Trust, an organization that eventually grew into the Ridgefield Historical Society. Calling herself a “field director and foot soldier,” she collaborated with fellow trust founder Madeline Corbin in researching and writing the voluminous Ridgefield Historic

Architectural Resources Survey, cataloguing the construction techniques, architectural style, and significant social history of some 600 of the town’s buildings.

The 1,500-page document was adopted as an official part of the town’s Plan of Conservation and Development, and is still used regularly by the town planning staff to make owners aware of their properties’ history.

“It wasn’t one of those programs that just died,” Wilmot said in a 1980 interview with The New York Times. “Instead it sensitized our people to the history of their houses.”

Her work in “sensitizing” people to Ridgefield’s history didn’t end there. She worked on setting up an early oral history program for the Keeler Tavern Preservation Society,  and organized a Catoonah Street Festival to celebrate that neighborhood’s varied mix of architectural styles; in the process, she helped produce a booklet describing the street’s history and buildings.

Her research and passion for preservation were involved in the efforts to save the Weir Farm as a national park and to renovate the old Ridgefield High School auditorium into today’s Ridgefield Playhouse.

Wilmot was also active in the Democratic Party, serving on the Democratic Town Committee and attending state conventions, often as a delegate and frequently challenging the party establishment on behalf of the liberal or peace wing of the party. She was also involved in the Ridgefield Women’s Political Caucus, a 1970s organization whose legal actions against the town led to the expansion of the Ridgefield Boys Club into the Ridgefield Boys and Girls Club.

For a time she made her skills available professionally as a “house detective,” researching for property owners the architecture and history of their homes. She also led workshops on how to research a property's past.

“When she wasn’t doing her research or running for office, she was in her flower garden,” said daughter, Jessica Wilmot. “This also was a love of hers, so much so that she took a job with the Parks and Recreation Commission solely to care for Ballard Park.” (Jessica, longtime owner of The Ancient Mariner, was one of her six children; another was the late Tony Wilmot, popular RHS baseball coach and restaurateur, who is also profiled here.)

Over her years in Ridgefield, she and her former husband, Clifford, owned several old homes, including one overlooking Lake Mamanasco at the end of Pond Road. She later moved to a large old house on Main Street near the fountain, and then to a historic house on upper Wilton Road West.

In the late 1990s she relocated to Lakeville for a decade or so, before returning to Ridgefield for her final years. She died in 2010 at the age of 80.