Charles Coles, He Loved The Bank

Charlie Coles had many interests, but his two favorites were banking and local history. A man who rose from teller to  president of the Ridgefield Savings Bank (now the Fairfield County Bank), he had a love of and faith in banking that was demonstrated in many ways, but few quite as intensely as when he chewed out a Ridgefield Press editor for a half hour after the newspaper ran a humorous quotation over the front page flag, saying: “A penny saved is a penny getting smaller.”

He was fascinated by Ridgefield history and memorabilia, collecting and studying items ranging from candlesticks made here in the 1800s to hundreds of antique Ridgefield postcards. He was also a collector of and expert on antique clocks, many of which he had exhibited at the bank's several offices. 

Though many people thought of him as a native, Charles H. Coles Jr. was born in Oakville, Toronto, Ontario, in 1922. His parents, Charles Sr. and Elizabeth Evans Coles, were natives of England who immigrated to Canada and in 1925, moved to the United States. By 1928, they were in Ridgefield, where Charles Sr. became a gardener on the Maynard estate on High Ridge. Charles Jr. attended Ridgefield schools and graduated from Ridgefield High School in 1941. 

During his high school years, he was active in athletics, especially baseball, and earned the nickname of “Slugger Coles” because of his hitting abilities. He was a member of an RHS team that nearly won the state championship for little Ridgefield in 1940. 

Coles was a student at Danbury State Teachers College in 1943 when he joined the U.S. Army and was assigned to the 193rd tank battalion. Sent to New Hebrides in the Pacific, he took part in the invasion of Okinawa in April 1945. He was a tank machine gunner and driver.

On April 19, his unit lost 22 of its 30 tanks in the assault on Kakazu Ridge, the greatest tank loss of the campaign. Only an hour after Private Coles was transferred from a tank that morning, its entire five-member crew was killed. 

After the war Sgt. Coles served in the Army Reserves and was on active reserve status during the Korean War. 

Back home in 1946, he joined the Ridgefield Savings Bank as a teller and bookkeeper. He became assistant treasurer in 1956, an incorporator in 1958, a director in 1970, and president in 1971. He served as president, chairman of the board, and chief operating officer at various times through the 1970s until his retirement in 1987. He remained a director until 1993. 

Ridgefield Savings Bank became “the fastest-growing savings bank in the state” in the 1980s, Coles reported at the 1984 annual meeting. Under his leadership, the bank acquired land at the corner of Danbury and Farmingville Roads to build its new headquarters, now the main office of Fairfield County Bank. 

Over the years he completed the Graduate School of Banking at Rutgers University, and graduating from the American Institute of Banking (of which he was later a board member) and from various schools sponsored by the national Association of Mutual Savings Banks. He served as

president of the Fairfield County Bankers Association, was on the Conference of State Bank Supervisors in 1985, and had been a member of the Legislative Committee of the Savings Bank Association of Connecticut. 

“His whole life was the bank,” said Paul S. McNamara, longtime chairman of the Fairfield County Bank board of directors. “He loved the bank — he loved going to work. 

“Charlie really believed very strongly in the value of the customer,”  Mr. McNamara added. “His focus was always on the customer.” 

Coles had a way with not only money, but also words.  For a while in the 1950s, he was the part-time sports editor for The Ridgefield Press. 

In 1971, on the occasion of the bank’s 100th anniversary,  Coles teamed up with Karl Nash, editor and publisher of The Press, on a history of the Ridgefield Savings Bank.  Coles did the bulk of the research for the publication, which appeared as a special supplement to The Press and chronicled the history of the bank, its leaders, and the community they served. The 36-page section was based on many hours of interviews with longtime residents and from research into old documents, and included dozens of old photos of the town, many from  Coles’s postcard collection. 

Twenty years later,  Coles was one of the lead writers on another history section in The Press, describing the town’s participation in World War II. He spent months researching the 49 members of the Ridgefield High School Class of 1941 and their contributions to the war effort. His long article was entitled “Class of ’41: First to Go.” (Two classmates, George Vetter and Charles Cogswell, never returned.) 

Coles had a great interest in antiques and especially antique clocks, a subject on which he became known as a local expert. He was especially interested in Ridgefield antiques and ephemera and had dealers all over the country helping him locate Ridgefield-related items. In 1983, for the town's 275th anniversary celebration, he put together a large display of old postcards, which he exhibited at the bank’s Main Street office. 

He loved athletics. In the late 1940s and 1950s, Coles played softball in leagues in Westchester and Ridgefield. In his first game in the newly formed Townies Softball League in Ridgefield in 1953, he hit a home run and pitched Hyde’s Liquors to a 10-6 win over Martin’s Jewelry Store. 

He also became active in youth sports. He was one of the organizers of Ridgefield Little League, and later served as its president. He managed Babe Ruth League baseball teams, had been a coach in the Red Raider football league, and managed boys teams in the Townies Basketball League. 

In 1999, the Ridgefield Old Timers honored him with its Civic Award, citing his “dedication and hard work  in the various youth programs... Charlie spent many hours helping young athletes improve their skills.”

Coles was also fond of golf and invariably had a set of clubs in his car trunk, along with some of his latest antiques acquisitions. 

He was active in Boy Scouts, serving as committee chairman of Troop 47. He had been a member of the Rotary Club for many years, an incorporator of the Ridgefield Boys’ Club, a treasurer of the Community Center, and treasurer for the local Red Cross. In 1967, he was given the Ridgefield Jaycees Distinguished Service Award. 

When he retired after 42 years with the bank, he received testimonials for his service to  community from many leaders, including President Ronald Reagan.

Coles died in 2003 at the age of 80.

“Something about Charlie that a lot of people are not aware of,”  Paul McNamara said after Coles had died. “He was very helpful to people in town in a very quiet way. If someone came to Charlie with a financial problem, he found a way to solve it. And he did that over and over again.”

D. Smith Sholes: 

A Man of Many Shirts

Catoonah Street today is a microcosm of Ridgefield, with everything from stores and offices to condos and large, single-family homes, not to mention a church, a post office, a cleaners, a restaurant, and a firehouse. But it once also had a shirt factory.

Yes, Ridgefield in the 19th Century was a center, albeit small, of the shirt-making industry, thanks to a man named D. Smith Sholes and his partner, Edward H. Smith, both leading citizens of the town.

David Smith Sholes was born in Ridgefield in 1830, son of a shoemaker who’d moved here from Vermont. He attended local schools including a private school taught by the Rev. David H. Short on Main Street, where Sholes acquired a love of reading. He later helped found a circulating library in Ridgefield that grew into today’s Ridgefield Library, of which he was once treasurer.

When he was 15, he became a clerk at Henry Smith’s store on Main Street but after a few years went to Bridgeport to learn bookkeeping. 

He returned to Ridgefield and, in partnership with Smith, operated the Ridgefield Shirt Factory, which had been founded in the 1840s by George Hunt. The factory was at first located in the Big Shop, a large building that stood where the First Congregational Church is now. (Moved around 1888 to the center of town, the Big Shop is now the home of Terra Sole and Luc’s restaurants, and other businesses off the Bailey Avenue parking lot.) The shirt factory later moved across the street to a building on what’s now an empty lot, and then to Catoonah Street on the site of the current Ridgefield Fire Department headquarters. 

“Colored shirts were a specialty of the factory, which employed as many as sixty persons at one time,” said historian Silvio Bedini. “The chief market was New York City.”

However, it appears many more Ridgefield Shirt “employees,”  mostly women but including a few men, worked from their homes. Sholes and Smith would provide them with packages of  shirt “components” and the women would sew them together in their spare time. The final product was prepared for sale and packaged at the factory. The New York Times reported in 1860 that there were 1,100 home-working women in the area, sewing for Ridgefield Shirt.

Sholes continued in the shirt-making business until around 1893 when, probably faced with competition from large-scale, mechanized clothing operations in New York City, the factory was closed.

In 1886 Sholes was elected treasurer of the Ridgefield Savings Bank, now Fairfield County Bank; he had been one of its incorporators when it was founded back in 1871. He eventually became the bank’s president.

“It was in the discharge of the duties of this important position that he achieved the most marked success of his life,” said The Ridgefield Press in Sholes’s 1907 obituary. “It was under his administration that the institution has grown from a small beginning to be the depository of nearly a million dollars of the savings of our frugal people, and its affairs have been so wisely managed by him that no person has ever yet lost a dollar by his imprudence or mismanagement.”

This profuse praise appeared in a newspaper whose company president was  D. Smith Sholes.

Possible pro-Sholes press prejudice aside, the man was clearly a respected and popular personality in town. An active Democrat, he was appointed Ridgefield’s postmaster in 1886 by President Grover Cleveland, also a Democrat. When Cleveland left office, so did Sholes, but when Cleveland returned for a second term, so did Sholes.

He was a town assessor, a registrar of voters for 17 years, the probate judge in 1870, a member of the Democratic State Central Committee for two terms,  treasurer of the Ridgefield Water Supply Company, and a clerk of St. Stephen’s Church for a quarter of a century. He also helped found the First National Bank of Ridgefield in 1900 and was its first cashier.

Seven years after he died in 1907, he was remembered on Old Home Day, July 4, 1914, when he was saluted as one of Ridgefield’s “sturdy citizens, whose place it seems impossible to fill …Many can testify to his kindness in hours of trouble.”

Charles S. Nash: 

The First Chief

Charles S. Nash, the town's leading carpenter and builder for many years, has had the unusual distinction of having his birth and very early life recorded in a diary that has been published in The Ridgefield Press and is available online. 

On Friday, Oct. 8, 1865, Jared Nash, his father, inauspiciously wrote in pencil in his diary: “Clear, some warmer. Dug potatoes in orchard. Went to P.O. Just at night Chas. S. Nash born.”

Later entries talk of “Charly” and the toys and shoes his father made for him, his sicknesses, and his first birthday and baptism. 

As a boy Charles Nash attended the old Flat Rock School on Wilton Road West and the West Lane School, now a museum on Route 35.

He learned the carpenter's trade from William H. Gilbert, and took over his business when Gilbert retired. William F. Hoyt joined him and as Nash and Hoyt, they did much of the building in Ridgefield during the first quarter of the 20th Century, including mansions like Casagmo. 

Unlike his diarist dad, who stuck to the farm, Charles Nash was very involved in the town. He was the first chief of the Ridgefield Volunteer Fire Department, helped organize the Boy Scouts here, and was a member of the Board of Burgesses that ran the old village borough. He later served on the Board of Finance, as a trustee of the Methodist Church, a director of the Ridgefield Savings Bank for many years, and vice president of the First National Bank and Trust Company. He ran for state representative on the Democratic ticket in 1906 and 1910.

Nash was also very sharp. The Press once reported that while on the Board of Burgesses, “Mr. Nash figured out how to connect the sewer line for the new Bryon Park development into the borough’s main sewer system, rather than to build a new treatment plant. Mr. Nash was quite proud of that accomplishment because the skilled civil engineers who had been called in to study the problem said it couldn’t be done.”

He died in 1929 at the age of 64. Among the  pallbearers at his largely attended funeral was Francis D. Martin.

D. Smith Gage: 

Prosperous and Parsimonious

In the late 19th Century, everyone knew D. Smith Gage, a wealthy Ridgefield businessman. He owned, among other properties, the building at Main Street and Bailey Avenue that caught fire in December 1895,  starting an inferno that destroyed much of the business center of Ridgefield. 

Born in 1844, Gage began his career as a 17-year-old clerk at the Lewis H. Bailey’s “Old Hundred” store (now the Aldrich Museum offices). The store had been founded in 1785 by Lt. Joshua King, and for many years was the principal general store in town. 

Known as what we would today call a workaholic, Gage never took a single day of vacation while clerking at the store from 1861 to 1876.

Gage bought the general store in 1880 and, four years later, moved the business to a new, larger building at Main and Bailey. After that burned down, he rebuilt and continued in business until selling to D. F. Bedient, who’d been his clerk. (The former Bedient building is now the home of Books on the Common and other businesses.)

Over the years he also served as treasurer of the Ridgefield Savings Bank (now Fairfield County Bank), a town assessor, and a member of the Masons.

By the 20th Century, Mr. Gage had gone from a $40-a-year clerk to one of the town’s wealthiest local businessmen, owning much real estate. His wealth was due to both hard work and wise investments. An 1899 biographical sketch of Gage said he had “attained more than the ordinary measure of success in life, and by close application to business and a steady adherence to sound principles of honesty and integrity has placed himself in the ranks of the prosperous merchants of this county.”

In addition, The Ridgefield Press once observed, “he was regarded by villagers as somewhat addicted to parsimony.” So it came as no surprise to many when, on a frigid February day in 1923, he received delivery of a large load of coal at his Prospect Street home, was handed the bill by the driver, and dropped dead on the spot.

Peter Cornen: 

Oil in Them Thar Hills?

Oil wells on our ridges? If Peter Cornen had had his way more than a century ago, Ridgefield might have become a town dotted with derricks pumping black gold.

One of Ridgefield’s few millionaires in the 1800s, Cornen knew oil. He had made a fortune wildcatting in the western Pennsylvania oil fields where he and his Ridgefield partner, Henry I.

Beers, drilled one of the first hugely successful wells.

And he was certain Ridgefield was a gold mine of oil.

Peter P. Cornen was a storybook example of an adventurous, 19th Century, self-made man. Born in 1815 in New York City to a working-class family, Cornen attended city schools and started his career as a shipbuilder. By the 1840s he owned a Manhattan ship chandlery, a store that sold nautical items for vessels large and small, and had married Lydia Beers, a farmer’s daughter from Ridgefield. 

As a teenager in the 1840s, Lydia’s brother, Henry, went to work for Cornen. When the Gold Rush erupted in 1848, Cornen, then 33, decided that a life of adventure in and around the gold fields sounded more exciting — and profitable — than being a merchant in Manhattan. He sailed for California to make his fortune,  according to The Ridgefield Press, “round the Horn to San Francisco.” 

But it wasn’t gold that brought him success among the 49ers. For three years he “engaged in mercantile pursuits, his energy, perseverance and keen business foresight adding greatly to his accumulations, so that he ranked with the moneyed men of those days,” The Press  said. 

Soon after Cornen got established in California, he sent a message to Henry Beers, who was running his New York store, telling him to sell the business and urging he come to California. Beers did just that and he, too, made out well in retailing and real estate.

However, by the late 1850s, both men were back East, operating real estate and investment companies in New York. (Cornen sold Cornelius Vanderbilt much of the land on which Grand Central Terminal was built.) In the early 1860s, word was arriving of  new “gold,” this one liquid, in the hills of northwestern Pennsylvania. Back then, oil was in growing demand for producing lamp and stove fuels, lubricants and such (the first modern internal combustion engine was yet to be made). 

Cornen and Beers got together in 1862 and decided to give oil a try, becoming among the first wildcatters in America.

They spent time exploring the area around Oil City, Pa., and finally bought the Smith farm on the Cherry Run, about a mile north of Rouseville. “It was a common saying around Oil City at that time that ‘Those crazy Yankees will never get oil because they are going away from Oil Creek,’” said a local newspaper’s historian in 1922. The “Yankees” proved the locals wrong and drilled what some have called the first really successful well in the Pennsylvania fields. And they called it “Yankee.”

     In his 1893 book, “Sketches in Crude-Oil,” John P. McLaurin aid Yankee flowed “like Mount Vesuvius spilling lava.”  Later other wells on the farm, bearing such names as Auburn, Gromiger, Cattaraugus, Aazin, and Fry, added to the output. Cornen and Beers had paid $3,500 for the 50-acre farm (that had some years earlier been sold for “a yoke of oxen”); by the mid-1860s, they had turned down an offer of $4 million ($64 million in today’s dollars) for the property.

     Cornen eventually returned to New York business world and was prominent in financial circles. He “made and lost several fortunes,” a Press feature said in 1887. The Panic of 1873   “swallowed a great share of his large fortune,” The Press later said. “Thereafter he engaged in enterprises on a smaller scale, including real estate here and there, but remained a wealthy man all his life. “Those who know him well say that in spite of reverses, he is still able to draw his check for half a million dollars, and as he is a man of quiet tastes, this sum will probably be sufficient to keep the wolf from his door as long as he lives,” The Press said in 1887.

Drawn by his wife’s roots in the town, Cornen had come to Ridgefield in 1854 and built a Spanish-style house on the corner of Danbury and Farmingville Roads. He eventually amassed hundreds of acres surrounding it and was much praised for planting scores of maples along Danbury Road, which became informally known as Cornen Avenue.  

Peter’s son, Cyrus A. Cornen Sr., lived there, describing it in 1911 as “a house large enough for a moderate-sized hotel, with 11 feet 6 inches ceilings on the first floor with 11 windows, each of which can be made a door if you wish it; with cultivated sugar maples of some 45 years’ growth on either side of a wide highway for over three quarters of a mile and … a cultivated sugar maple orchard of some 250 trees of the same growth.” The estate included “a trout stream running through

this 300-acre property where my two sons from the banks of this same property last season caught six trout that weighed seven pounds and seven ounces.”

Because of a great fear of fire,  Peter Cornen had lined the insides of the walls of his house with brick for better protection. The house eventually became part the Outpost Nurseries property in the 1930’s and, having fallen into disuse, was torn down about 1942.  (Karl S. Nash, publisher of the Ridgefield Press, said the house-wreckers had no idea that the walls were brick-filled when they started dismantling the building, a project that consequently took much longer than expected.)  

In 1976, the Ridgefield Savings Bank – which Cornen had helped establish – purchased the site of this house and some years later, built its headquarters there. 

In 1887, The New York Times carried a story reporting that “Ridgefield, the home of Gov. Lounsbury and a favorite summer resort for wealthy New-Yorkers, is agitated over discoveries and statements made by Peter P. Cornen, a wealthy citizen, who has had years of experience in the Pennsylvania oil fields and who, after months of prospecting, is led to believe that the little town is situated over an oil field of considerable magnitude.”

The Times said that Cornen was “so positive that oil can be had in Ridgefield by simply boring in the earth for it that he is willing and even anxious to be one of a company to erect the necessary machinery and sink a well. A score or more of the wealthiest citizens are deeply interested….”

Cornen based his views on what today would be some pretty weird science. The Press said he cited  “the volcanic formation of the country, and then he notes the abundance of oil producing trees and plants. Butternut, hickory and walnut trees fill the forest, and their fruit, as we all know, abounds in oil. As no traces of oil have ever been found in raindrops, it is plain that the oils of the walnut, the butternut and the hickory nut are drawn from the soil, and if there is oil in the soil, it can probably be gotten out.”

But what probably really sparked his interest in prospecting was his friend, Aaron W. Lee, who had a big farm in Farmingville.  “Two years ago,” The Press said, “Aaron Lee dug a well near his barn to supply water for his stock. Water was found at the depth of about eight or ten feet, but the cattle would not drink it. It had an oily appearance and a disagreeable smell. Mr. Cornen says the well diggers encountered a small pocket of natural gas, and that where there is gas, there is oil.”

Cornen proposed organizing a joint stock company, the Ridgefield Oil and Gas Heating and Lighting Company, to do the drilling, requiring a shaft some 2,000 feet deep.

Cornen, the Press added, “very truly says that no man can look at the earth and tell what lies beneath, but from what he knows about Ridgefield and the country for ten miles around, he is satisfied that oil can be found there in paying quantities.”

A Cornen fan, Press Editor E.C. Bross added, “There are those who fear that the discovery of oil will forever ruin Ridgefield as a fashionable summer resort, but the operators have made a solemn promise to locate the wells at such a distance from the fashionable center that the clothing of the summer resident shall not be soiled nor her delicate nostrils be in the least offended.”

Articles of incorporation were approved at a meeting Nov. 20, 1887. The committee of backers read like a who’s who of Ridgefield businessmen and included L. H. Bailey, owner of the Bailey Inn and developer of Bailey Avenue; Hiram K. Scott, who owned the predecessor of Bissell’s Pharmacy and was town clerk and probate judge; D. Smith Sholes, wealthy Main Street merchant; Isaac Osborne, who operated what’s now Ridgefield Supply; and Aaron Lee, Farmingville farmer and first selectman. 

However, by March 1888, The Press was reporting that “a New York paper this week prints the localities where natural gas is found, but makes no mention of Ridgefield.”   And after that, mention of the oil drilling scheme dried up in the newspaper and by March 1891, Cornen had suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. Two years later he was dead.

If exploratory drilling ever took place, it was undoubtedly unsuccessful. But it’s also possible that people concerned about the effects of having oil fields in Ridgefield — which had been promoting its clean, quiet, and unpolluted hills as a refuge from the dirty, noisy, and noxious city — may have quietly gained an upper hand and quashed the project. 

Perhaps, too, folks decided that Cornen was a bit too odd to trust. He was, after all, “a man of marked eccentricities,” said his nationally published obituary. “Whether upon stock exchange or in the legislature, he appeared in clothes which had seen years of service. When he had millions invested in railroads, he preferred to walk rather than ride in the cars, and frequently tramped nine miles from Ridgefield to Danbury.”

On other fronts, Cornen was an active participant in the Ridgefield community. A Democrat, he served as a state senator in 1867 and in 1871 he was elected to the House of Representatives. That fall he was elected first selectman and served one term. 

Cornen was one of the original directors of the Ridgefield and New York Railroad Company, which had proposed and started building a rail line from Titicus into Westchester County to meet the main line at Port Chester. That plan was abandoned after the Danbury and Norwalk Rail Road built the branch line into town in 1870. 

A more successful venture was his participation in the founding in 1871 of the Ridgefield Savings Bank, which today has grown into the large Fairfield County Bank.

He was also a member of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church and the Odd Fellows Lodge. 

Cornen died in 1893 at the age of 79 and is buried in Ridgefield Cemetery in a gated family

plot over which looms perhaps the tallest gravestone in town.

At his death The Press said: “Mr. Cornen, in business, through often indulging in transactions involving millions, was governed by none but the most honorable motives. His judgment was considered sound and his opinion once given was seldom erroneous.” The obituary never mentioned the oil scheme that was big news only six years earlier.

Perhaps “an oil field of considerable magnitude” does exist beneath Ridgefield, but it’s pretty certain it will remain there, untapped.

Arthur J. Carnall: 

A Shropshire Lad

Arthur J. Carnall was a boy of nine, fresh off the boat from England, when he arrived in Ridgefield in 1904. He made the town his home for the next 67 years and helped change the face and function of the community in many ways. 

A native of Shropshire, England, Arthur James Carnall was born in 1895. His family sailed to Boston and immediately came to Ridgefield; they chose the town on the recommendation of William Harrison Bradley of Ridgefield, who was then serving with the American consulate in England and lived across the road from the Carnalls. 

He graduated from the old Center School on Bailey Avenue and attended a preparatory school in Virginia. (His sister, Marjorie Agnes Carnall, married John W. “Jack” Smith, the well-known Ridgefield orchid grower and estate superintendent, who was also born in England and who is also profiled in Who Was Who). 

During World War I, Arthur Carnall served in the U.S. Navy.

In 1922, he joined the real estate and insurance business of Thaddeus Crane, located about where Dr. George Amatuzzi’s office is on Main Street. Crane (who will be profiled in a future “Who Was Who”) died in a spectacular car-vs.-train accident in 1928 and two years later, Carnall took over the business, renaming it A.J. Carnall Inc. It became Ridgefield’s largest insurance business and, in 1965, moved into the second floor of a new office building at the corner of Main and Catoonah Streets — what became popularly known as “the Carnall Building.”

Throughout his life here, Carnall was involved in efforts to improve the community.  “Mr. Carnall’s love of Ridgefield and devotion to its welfare marked his public life,” The Ridgefield Press said when he died. 

One of his first big projects was amassing 270 acres in the late 1920s to create the Silver Spring Country Club, which opened in 1932. Throughout his life he was an active member of the club and at his death in 1972, was its treasurer and a governor. He was, needless to say, an ardent golfer, but was also a good one, winning a number of tournaments in the region over the years.

In the late 1930s, he almost single-handedly conducted a bond-selling drive that, in 1940, created Ridgefield’s first movie theater, the Ridgefield Playhouse, on the site of today’s Prospector Theater. Before then, Ridgefielders had to travel to one of three theaters in Danbury to see a movie. The Playhouse was also used for various stage productions.

A few years later his enthusiasm and salesmanship resulted in the town’s buying the Lounsbury block, now Veterans Park, along with its mansion, now the Community Center. He also helped organize the Community Center operations.

He also dabbled in development – the “car” of Marcardon Avenue is he, partners with Francis D. Martin and Joseph H. Donnelly (Martin, then also a boy, was one of the first people Carnell met when he came to Ridgefield in 1904, and they became lifelong friends.

For 15 years starting in 1941, Carnall was the town tax collector. He was a founder of the Lions Club and of the Danbury and Ridgefield Boards of Realtors, belonged to the Ridgefield Grange and Danbury Elks, was on the Wadsworth R. Lewis Fund advisory committee, and volunteered on countless boards and committees — including serving on the Ration Board during World War II.

He and and Agnes Kelly were married in 1930 and lived on Gilbert Street for their entire   life together. Both took pride in their beautiful gardens. He was 76 years old when he died at his winter home in Florida in 1972. She died in 1996 at the age of 92 in Florida where she had moved after her husband’s death.

In 1999, Ridgefield Bank, now Fairfield County Bank, bought A.J. Carnall Inc., and 10 years later renamed it Fairfield County Bank Insurance Services. It still operates out of the “Carnall Building.” Carnall, incidentally, had held several offices in the old Ridgefield Savings Bank, predecessor of Fairfield County Bank, starting as an incorporator in 1941 and ending as vice president at the time of his death.

Daniel Adams: 

‘True Father of Baseball’

In 1857, Dr. Daniel Adams sat down, picked up a pen and wrote a document called  “Laws of Base Ball.” Nearly 150 years later, those long-forgotten sheets of paper sold at an auction for $3.3

million and added significant evidence to the belief that Doc Adams was, more than most early players, the man behind of modern-day baseball. The sale also set a new record for the highest-priced document in baseball history.

“He’s the true father of baseball and you’ve never heard of him,” said John Thorn, a noted baseball historian who was a consultant on the sale. 

In Ridgefield,  Daniel Adams was well known to most folk in the mid-19th Century as a prominent citizen who was the first president of the Ridgefield Savings Bank. The retired New York City physician came to town in 1865 and bought the former home of Col. Philip Burr Bradley — a house later owned by the Biglow and Ballard families that stood in what is now Ballard Park. 

By then, he had pretty much retired from the “national sport” he helped to establish. And few here knew of his prominence in fashioning the game.

Daniel Lucius Adams was born in a small town in New Hampshire in 1814. His father was a country doctor but unlike his Dartmouth graduate dad, Daniel went to Yale, Class of 1835. Three years later he earned his medical degree from Harvard and began practicing in New York City. 

There Dr. Adams’ interest in athletics was whetted by the formation of the New York Base Ball Club in 1840. Five years later, he joined the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, which is said to have played the first full game of baseball as we know it today, on June 19, 1846, at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, N.J., with a team called the New York Nine. Adams continued to play for the Knickerbockers well into his 40s. 

In “Total Baseball: The Ultimate Baseball Encyclopedia,” John Thorn has called Adams “first among the fathers of baseball.” He and other baseball historians credit Adams with setting up essentials of today’s game.

Adams was an early president of the Knickerbocker club, and served as its president six times between 1847 and 1861. While president he promoted rules changes that resulted in nine-man teams

and nine-inning games. He is said to have created the position of shortstop.

He headed the rules and regulations committee when the National Association of Base Ball Players was formed in 1858. Among the changes he instigated were that bases should be 90 feet apart.

A savvy businessman, he was also involved in manufacturing both baseballs and bats.

Adams retired as Knickerbocker president and as a physician before he moved to Ridgefield. A few years earlier, in 1861, he had married Cornelia A. Cook and the couple had four children while living here; the last, a son, Roger, was born in 1874 when Daniel was 60 years old.

Here he became active in all aspects of the community.

In 1870, he was elected a Ridgefield representative to the State House of Representatives. A year later, in 1871, he helped form and became the first president of the Ridgefield Savings Bank  — clearly it was a wise move, for the bank grew steadily and is now the Fairfield County Bank with $1.6 billion in assets. He led the bank from 1871 to 1879 and again, from 1884 to 1886. Adams’s picture hangs in the bank’s main office on Danbury Road.

In 1876 Adams served on the building committee that erected the new “town house,” a building we now call the town hall. Unfortunately but not surprisingly, the structure was built of wood, the material most buildings were made of then. Less than 20 years later, the town house burned to the ground in the great fire of 1895 that destroyed much of the village. Its replacement was fireproof brick.

In 1880, he was elected the first president of the Ridgefield Library.

Adams also helped form the Land Improvement Association of Ridgefield, serving as its

president. The 1877 Ridgefield Press article announcing the organization “did not state what improvements were to be made in Ridgefield lands,” wrote Karl S. Nash in a 1971 profile of Adams. (Nash was not a fan of baseball or other sports, and devoted relatively few words to Adams’s baseball past, but he did note that the Doc dug two cannonballs from a retaining wall on his Main Street property. “Presumably, they were fired at the Battle of Ridgefield on April 27, 1777,” Nash said.)

In 1971, one of those cannonballs was owned by Adams’s grandson, Daniel Putnam Adams, who happened to live in nearby Wilton. He himself was a retired banker, from New York City.

Doc Adams played his last formal round of “base ball” on Sept. 27, 1875, in an oldtimers game that was arranged by a longtime fellow Knickerbocker star, James Whyte Davis. However, he continued to play “backyard ball” with his sons even when he was in his 80s.

     In 1888, Adams, age 74, moved his family to New Haven, the city of his alma mater. There he died in 1899.

     Daniel Adams was an amazingly modest man who one baseball historian said “didn’t like to brag.” In 1881, Yale asked him for a biography for a historical record of the Class of 1835, and Adams wrote not a word about his leadership in creating the by-then popular sport of baseball. “The current of my life has been very quiet and uniform, neither distinguished by any great successes, or disturbed by serious reverses,” he said. “I have been content to consider myself one of the ordinary, every-day workers of the world, with no ambition to fill its high positions, and have no reason to complain of the results of my labor.”

Carleton A. Scofield: 

A Good Investment

Around 1925, a young man, fresh out of high school, went to work for The Ridgefield Press. Carleton Scofield assisted editor David W. Workman with writing news and setting the printing type by hand. Pretty soon, Scofield was doing much of the weekly’s work, especially when Workman was out fighting forest fires in his capacity of state fire warden or policing the town when he was on duty as a local constable.

The value of the energetic young Scofield was not lost on Samuel Keeler, then owner and publisher of The Press. Karl S. Nash, who would later own the paper, said Keeler saw Scofield “as good protection for his investment in the printing and publishing business.”

Scofield, however, had his eye on a better opportunity and applied for a teller’s job at the Ridgefield Savings Bank. Keeler, a bank director, did not want to lose a good printer and journalist, and opposed the hiring. “We can run the bank without him,” he confided in an associate.  “I’m not sure I can make a profit at the Press without him.”

The bank’s directors overruled Keeler, Scofield was hired, and eventually he became the eighth president of the institution, now the sizable Fairfield County Bank.

He also became one of Ridgefield’s most active and involved citizens.

A native of Ridgefield, Carleton Avery Scofield was born in 1905 and graduated from Hamilton High School on Bailey Avenue in 1925. After four years at the Press, Scofield began his banking career. He studied at the American Institute of Banking, at the Graduate School of Banking at Rutgers, and at Columbia. He began as a teller in 1930, the year the Art Deco bank on Main Street was built. He was named an incorporator in 1933, a director in 1942, secretary and treasurer in 1946, and president in 1955 — a position he held until his retirement in 1972. He was chairman of the bank’s board until 1981.

He was also active in regional and national banking affairs, serving as an officer of the Mechanics Bank Association of America and president for four years of the Savings Bank Guarantee Fund of Connecticut, a predecessor of the FDIC.

Scofield was a prominent public official. In 1926 at the age of 21, he was first elected a justice of the peace, an office that then wielded some power in Connecticut. People who were arrested by constables, state police, or fish and game wardens were tried before a justice of the peace in the town hall. The arresting officers decided which justice to bring their case to, and some justices were more popular than others. Scofield was among the popular ones and got a good deal of the business, Nash reported.

When the state established the trial court system in 1941, Scofield was named a trial justice, presiding over Ridgefield’s court in town hall.  He held that post until 1961 when the local trial courts were merged into the circuit court system. However, he did quit briefly in 1960 when he became enraged over the fact that 10 boys who’d been “engaged in a gang fight at Lake Mamanasco” and two other boys caught stealing auto parts all got off in Town Court on legal technicalities. He called it a “circus-like treatment of justice,” but he soon returned to the job.

For 11 years, Scofield served on the Police Commission, including periods as its chairman. He was treasurer of the Connecticut Police Commissioners Association, a director of the Connecticut Public Expenditures Council and a member of Governor Thomas Meskill’s task force on housing.

Locally, he was a president of the Lions Club, secretary of the Ridgefield Library, treasurer of Ridgefield’s Salvation Army unit, an incorporator of the Boys Club, treasurer of the Fairfield County YMCA, and active in other organizations, including an antique car group. In 1930, he was a leader of one of Ridgefield’s first Boy Scout troops.

During the 1950s and 60s, he dabbled in real estate development in town. A bit of his name lives today in Scodon Drive, a road at the 57-lot Scodon development that he and savings bank lawyer Joseph H. Donnelly subdivided in 1958.

Banking was not only a business but a hobby. Scofield and his second wife, Irma, were widely known for their extensive collection of mechanical and cast-iron toy banks. By 1970, he had more than 250 mechanical models and 600 “still” banks — many were exhibited in the Ridgefield Savings Bank’s several offices. Some dated back to the 1700s.

Scofield died in 1983 at his retirement home in Florida. He was 78. 

Charles Ashbee: 
Ridgefield’s Santa
When Charley Ashbee died in 1962, the front page of the May 31 Ridgefield Press announced:

C.F. Ashbee,

Santa Claus,

Dies at 89

By then Ashbee, a retired insurance executive, had become a local legend.
“Mr. Ashbee spent nearly as much of his long life portraying Santa Claus and delighting the children of this town as he devoted to the insurance business,” the newspaper said in his obituary. “Donning a Santa Claus suit became a habit with Uncle Charley soon after he and Mrs. Ashbee settled here.”
Charles Francis Ashbee had been born in New York City in 1872, and moved to Wilton Road West around 1929. Soon after, he began his Santa services when he pinch-hit for someone who was unable to play the part at a church school party.
He took on other appearances and by the early 1930s had already become a fixture at Christmas celebrations on Main Street and with various organizations.
In the 1940s, Ridgefield Savings Bank (now Fairfield County Bank) had Charley visit each year. He also paid an annual outdoor visit to Ridgefield Hardware, thanks to owner, Ed Rabin. He often arrived in a sleigh driven by Bill Patton, whose farm was on Old South Salem Road. (In 1945, Ashbee kept his feet warm with a pair of German paratrooper boots, brought back from the just-ended war by Ed Rabin’s brother, Sidney.)
Over the more than 30 years he played the role, Ashbee wore out three Santa suits and three sets of wigs and whiskers.
“Charley got to be such an important part of the Christmas season that letters addressed to the man at the North Pole were rerouted to him,” reported Dick Venus, former postmaster who was also the first town historian. “He would never fail to visit the home of the little kid that wrote the letter.”

Venus added that, “in many cases, he was able to locate a toy that a youngster had asked for. When he did, he would take it along with him and leave it with the parents, to be put under the tree. Not only the kids, but grownups as well, thought that he was just the greatest.”
Among Ashbee’s off-season hobbies was autograph collecting, and he had the signatures of every president except George Washington. He also collected signatures of Civil War generals, and had all but J.E.B. Stuart and Stonewall Jackson.
For all the joy he gave children, Ashbee was named Rotary Citizen of the Year in 1960.
A year later, when he was about 88, Ashbee missed his first Christmas as Santa in three decades. He was seriously ill and confined to the Altnacraig nursing home on High Ridge. Scores of the town’s children went to the nursing home to visit him that Christmas season; some knew he was the person who had played Santa in the past while to others, he was just a nice man who needed cheering up.
He died in the spring.
Everett Lounsbury Jr., who developed Ashbee Lane off Route 7 in the 1960s, named the road the year after Charley Ashbee died. Lounsbury was undoubtedly a Santa fan, one of thousands in Ridgefield — like a young Rob Kinnaird who a couple of years ago recalled, “Mr. Ashbee was the Santa at the bank and at St. Stephen’s Christmas Party. The year he died, that Christmas, [St. Stephen’s Rector Aaron] Manderbach announced that Santa couldn’t make it that year, and there was no Santa at the bank.
“We were all okay with it, because Mr. Ashbee was Santa. It didn't seem right to have anyone else.
“I remember the year after, the bank got someone else but, by then, it made no difference to us, because we knew who the real Santa Claus was.”

Samuel Keeler: 

The Stern and Staunch Commuter

When he was 86 years old, Samuel Keeler was still commuting to his law office in New York City and was reputedly the oldest commuter on the New Haven line — both in age and length of endurance. He was still making the trip until a month before he died in 1932; he had started this daily journey back around 1870 and may have been among the first passengers on the Ridgefield to Branchville railroad spur that opened that year.

That’s more than 60 years of riding the rails to work in the era of the smoky, noisy steam locomotive. No wonder he looked so grumpy.

Although his business was in the city, “Lawyer Sam,” as he was called to distinguish him from grocer Sam (S.D.) Keeler, had a considerable influence on the town toward the end of the 19th Century and during the first third of the 20th.

“He was sharp, learned, without much humor, small of stature — but solid,” wrote longtime Ridgefield Press publisher Karl S. Nash in a 1971 profile of Keeler. Nash knew the man personally.

Born in 1845 in Wilton, Samuel Keeler had as one of his childhood teachers George E. Lounsbury, who later became governor and from whose brother he later acquired The Ridgefield Press. 

He began commuting to law work in the city soon after graduating from Yale in 1867, but eventually also became busy in Ridgefield, serving as a school board member for 20 years from 1892 until 1912, one of the burgesses of the borough, and a pillar of the First Congregational Church. 

In 1900, he was a founder of the First National Bank and Trust Company of Ridgefield (now Wells Fargo), and was later fifth president of the Ridgefield Savings Bank  (now Fairfield County Bank), serving from 1907 to his death. 

Early in the century, controlling interest in The Press was held by ex-Gov. Phineas Lounsbury, a staunch, tee-totaling Methodist who had ordered that no liquor advertising appear in the paper. One day, he picked up The Press and saw a liquor ad. Outraged, he immediately sold the newspaper to Keeler, “as staunch a Democrat as Mr. Lounsbury was a Republican,” Nash said years later. 

While he kept his feelings out of the news columns,  Keeler wasn’t afraid to take on Republicans editorially, and he fought a long battle with the administration over inequitable property assessments, going so far as to publish several pamphlets on the subject. He remained owner of the newspaper until his death, at which time The Press observed: “Mr. Keeler was a man who always minded his own business. In the wake of his course over the sea of life, there was no tacking or filling.”

John Brophy: 

Working His Way Up

America has been a land of opportunity for countless immigrants, among them John Brophy, who was born in Ireland in 1841, arrived in Ridgefield in 1850 at the age of nine, and by the turn of the 20th Century had become one of the town’s leading citizens who counted three U.S. presidents — Arthur, Grant and Garfield — among his acquaintances. 

His journey to America with his parents and his two sisters took seven weeks, including traveling to Liverpool, England, to board a transAtlantic ship. The family at first lived on the north side of the village, and Brophy’s first job was as a child after grammar school classes, grinding bark for hide tanning at Jabez Mix Gilbert’s tannery at Titicus. 

“This was not very remunerative,” he recalled in an interview, “but the boys used to pick up a few cents this way after school hours.”

The family moved to West Lane (the Brophy house still stands down the hill a bit just beyond and opposite the West Lane schoolhouse). As a teenager, Brophy drove a food market wagon, worked at the candlestick factory on Main Street, and later had a job at the Glenburg Mills and Chemical Works in Georgetown.

“In his youth,” The Press once said, “Mr. Brophy was studious, industrious and spent much of his leisure time in reading and improving his mind.” 

He went to work for Ridgefielder Henry Smith, who supplied blankets and linens for Pullman cars used throughout the eastern United States. That job required some traveling, during which Brophy came across new possibilities for employment. He soon became a U.S. customs inspector at the Port of New York, a job in which he dealt with many influential people. 

While living in New York, he met Susan McDermott and the two were married in 1870 in St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

After 16 years with the customs agency, Brophy returned to his hometown, where he became assessor and then first selectman for eight years between 1894 and 1901. The Press described his administration as “giving to that office a dignity and business administration which is rarely seen.” 

In 1903, the Republican was elected a Ridgefield representative to the state legislature and then became a Fairfield County commissioner for 12 years in the days when Connecticut still had county government. Meanwhile, he was also serving as a director or board member of both the Ridgefield Savings Bank and the First National Bank of Ridgefield, and was a charter member and first chancellor of the Knights of Columbus here. 

Brophy maintained that he knew Horace Greeley well, and was friends with many leading political figures of the age, including the three presidents, as well as Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Seward and Vice President Schuyler Colfax. He was also proud of noting that he had met Abraham Lincoln, as well as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the suffragists. 

In his 80s, Brophy had a pet parrot that could "whistle, sing and had a vocabulary of 100 words," The Press reported. 

He died in 1922 at the age of 81.