Charles Roswell Bacon: 

An Unappreciated Artist

Among the thousands of gravestones in the Ridgefield Cemetery off North Salem Road is one lying on the ground. It’s hard to tell whether the stone was once upright and fell over, or was placed flat when it was new. But slowly the surrounding sod has been covering the face so that it is becoming harder and harder to read.

The disappearing gravestone is perhaps symbolic of the life and death of Charles   Roswell Bacon, a promising American artist and father of noted American author and illustrator Peggy Bacon. The son of a man who drank himself to death, Bacon lost two sons in infancy, struggled with poverty as he sought success as a painter and, depressed over the lack of recognition for his work, killed himself.

Born in New York City in 1867 to a middle-class family, Charles Roswell Bacon knew hard times from a very young age. His father, after the failure of his business as a marble importer, drank

himself to death when Charles was only six years old, and Bacon left public school at the age of 10 to help support his family. However, he showed an early talent for painting, and was able to study at the Art Students’ League in Manhattan. There he met his future wife, Elizabeth Chase, a miniaturist who came from Kentucky.

The artistic pair studied for a year in Paris, including spending time with Claude Monet at Giverny. They returned to the United States and wound up in Ridgefield where they were married  in 1892 and, to support themselves, took jobs managing a new resort hotel here. 

The Inn, built in 1891-92 on the eastern side of southern Main Street,  operated only during

the warmer months, giving both Bacons a chance to paint and travel in the off-season. They continued to operate the hotel into the early 1900s.

Their daughter, Margaret Frances “Peggy” Bacon, was born there in 1895. Two sons born later died in infancy, and are buried in Ridgefield Cemetery.

The three Bacons became a tight-knit family, one that Peggy Bacon remembered with fondness.

“I had the most charming and amusing parents,” she said in a 1973 interview. “We led a very close life together. There was a great deal of reading aloud. They were both very well read.”

“Mother and Father were never affluent. That’s putting it mildly,” Peggy told a Smithsonian Institution interviewer. “As I recall, all my life we had an extraordinary amount of amenities and delicacies even, and delights considering that they were poverty-stricken. The food was marvelous, very gourmet food. And there were quantities of books, endless books arriving. And a great deal of charm. 

“They were people of taste. Father was very well-read in French. He spoke French so well

that French people mistook him for a Frenchman. And yet he had no schooling from the age of ten.”

When the Inn was closed off-season, “We spent certain winters in New York when I was a child,” Peggy Bacon said. “He took me around to galleries. Then we lived in France for a couple of years, at Montreaux-sur-Mer in Picardy. It was absolutely delightful….It was a lovely life, really. Well, Father was very gregarious.”

Peggy herself was largely home-schooled as a child. Because they were always struggling to earn enough money to live on, the Bacons were unable to send Peggy to the equivalent of high school. Seeing this, two family friends in Ridgefield paid to send Peggy to a boarding school, Kent Place School in Summit, N.J. 

Perhaps it was at this time that Charles composed the poem and drew the self-portrait and sketch of Peggy that is now in the Smithsonian Institution’s collection. He wrote:

“What is it that this Daddy wants?

“Perhaps a drink o’water!

“O! No. He is so sad because

“He wants his Little Daughter.”

At the turn of the 20th Century, Charles Bacon was gaining some notoriety. He had exhibitions at the Fulton Gallery and at the Milch Gallery in New York. His works were also in the famous Armory Show in Manhattan in the early 1910s. 

However, by 1913 when he and Elizabeth had a home in South Salem and he had a studio   in Manhattan, he was becoming increasingly depressed. And on Friday, Oct. 10, he went to his studio, apparently finished a landscape he had been painting, wrote a two-sentence will, and turned on the gas jets in the room. He was found dead by a janitor the next day.

The New York Times had never covered Bacon’s work until he died. Like a yellow tabloid, it then did the 725-word story about the discovery of his body, under the headline, “Find Artist Dead A Suicide by Gas.”

The story reported police finding a note, composed to be his will. “I leave to my beloved wife everything of which I die possessed — pictures, frames, clothes, everything. Intending this night to commit suicide, I cannot have this witnessed, but it should carry conviction with it.”

While his wife and daughter were shocked at the suicide, there had been signs that the artist was troubled.

“Mr. Bacon had been despondent for some time over the lack of recognition of his work by the public and critics,” The Times reported his brother-in-law, J.W. Colt, as saying.

Three months later, the newspaper carried a brief story about the sale of his studio full of paintings at the Anderson Galleries. The entire collection brought $4,255 — more than $100,000 in today’s dollars, with the biggest sale being $435 ($10,800 in 2018).

Today, a fact that might surprise the painter, Bacon’s works sell for as much as $7,000 at at auctions. Some, however, fetch only a few hundred dollars.

Elizabeth continued to live in the 18th Century farmhouse at the corner of Spring Street and Boutonville Road in South Salem, and by the 1930s was operating an antiques business. A barn on her property was used as an office by both the local visiting nurses and as the performance venue for an active South Salem theater group. However, in the 1950s the barn was purchased and moved to Route 35 where it became the dining room — and probably the namesake — of the popular restaurant called The Hayloft.

Bacon was not only a painter, but a poet, whose work appeared in magazines and newspapers at the turn of the 20th Century. Probably his best-known poem was published in The Century magazine in 1901 and was reprinted in newspapers across the country. It was a somewhat dark work that ended, unlike his life, on a note of hope:  

UNDER THE SUN

The men who have gone before us

Have sung the songs we sing; 

The words of our clamorous chorus,

They were heard of the ancient king.

The chords of the lyre that thrill us,

They were struck in the years gone by,

And the arrows of death that kill us

Are found where our fathers lie.

The vanity sung of the Preacher

Is vanity still to-day;

The moan of the stricken creature

Has rung in the woods alway.

But the songs are worth resinging, 

With the change of no single note.

And the spoken words are ringing

As they rang in the years remote.

There is no new road to follow, Love!

Nor need there ever be,

For the old, with its hill and hollow, Love,

is enough for you and me.

Frederic Fayerweather: 

The Man from Tiffany’s

On Oct. 5, 1914, at 6 a.m., a dapper little man with a long waxed moustache and wearing spats entered the Ridgefield Town Hall. Municipal elections back then were in October, and the town had just bought a modern replacement for the paper ballot system that been used for two centuries. It cost $600 — about $15,000 today.

Frederic Fayerweather  became the first person in Ridgefield to cast a ballot using voting machine.

But that was hardly the Ridgefield native’s most notable achievement. A bachelor and lifelong resident who commuted to the city,  Fayerweather was one of the top talents at Tiffany Studios in New York. He oversaw projects throughout the country for Louis Comfort Tiffany and was an expert on the design and use of stained glass windows for churches.

An unusual piece of Fayerweather-designed religious art is viewed by hundreds of Ridgefield church-goers each week.

Frederic Moore Fayerweather was born in the Florida District of Ridgefield in 1860, the only child of John and Catherine Moore Fayerweather. His father, a teacher,  played the organ at the Methodist Church in Georgetown — and, in fact, he helped the Georgetown Methodists acquire the organ, making it one of the few churches in the area at the time with a musical instrument.

His parents died when he was young and Frederic was brought up by two maiden aunts, “the Misses Morris.”

He attended the old red-brick Florida Schoolhouse and in his late teens became a teacher, instructing classes at the Ridgebury and Limestone Schools. 

By his early 20s he was working in New York City and at 22, joined Tiffany Studios, which specialized in art decorations, especially stained glass windows. He became head of the monumental department, and was considered an expert in color harmony and in the design of stained-glass windows.

The New York Times reported that “Mr. Fayerweather was chosen frequently by Mr. Tiffany to go to distant parts of the country to decorate homes and offices with the studios’ products, which included Tiffany Favrile glass, devised by Mr. Tiffany, as well as bronze objects, furniture, clocks and goblets. He was an expert on stained glass windows for churches and often supervised the design of these windows.”

Fayerweather worked for Tiffany for more than 40 years. For all that time, he made his home in Ridgefield and commuted by rail — from the 1880s until his retirement in 1931.

In an obituary, The Ridgefield Press described him late in his life: “Always immaculately dressed, Mr. Fayerweather, until recent weeks, belied his age. His step was brisk and his carriage erect and imposing.”

Like his father Fayerweather was deeply interested in religion and especially its rituals. Unlike his Methodist father, Frederic was an Episcopalian and, in fact, a pillar of St. Stephen’s Church where he was a vestryman for many years. He sang tenor in the choir, then became the choirmaster and choir director.  One of his last duties was to arrange the music for the church service that occurred just before his death.

When he died in 1941 at the age of 80, he left most of his estate to St. Stephen’s, including creating a fund to pay the salaries of a quartet of men and women singers. He also wanted the church to spend at least $1,200 annually for an organist — that’s about $20,000 in today’s money. 

Fayerweather, who was described by The Times as “an Episcopal ritualist,” also left the parish a reredos — a huge ornamental screen designed to be situated behind the altar — that he and W. Kerr Rainsford, architect of St. Stephen’s church, designed together.  However, reported Robert S. Haight in his history of St. Stephen’s, “many felt it detracted from the natural beauty and simplicity of the altar and chancel. The reredos was removed in 1965 and was for some time stored in the basement of the church. Ultimately it was given to the First Congregational Church where it did enhance the beauty of the chancel.”

Rob Kinnaird, a historian of St. Stephen’s, reports that the Rev. Aaron Manderbach, rector of the church, had an expert in Episcopal church architecture look at the reredos. He found it not in keeping with St. Stephen’s Georgian style. That, “along with the church’s program to move the altar forward so the celebrant faced the worshipers, contributed to the eventual dismantling of the reredos,” Kinnaird said.

The Congregationalists apparently also found the Fayerweather reredos too elaborate and perhaps overpowering and it reportedly found a new home in a church in another community.

John T. Orrico: 

A Distinguished Hero

John Orrico’s Ridgefield High School yearbook said his ambition was “to become a pilot.” Orrico became a pilot, and he used his skills in the most dangerous place in the most dangerous way: He commanded an attack gunship in the Vietnam War.

    Born in Stamford in 1948, John Thomas Orrico grew up in Ridgefield, one of three sons of Fred and Helen Casey Orrico, who ran the popular King Neptune Restaurant on Route 7 for many years (Helen had been a sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps while Fred was a Navy seaman aboard the battleship Missouri when the Japanese signed their surrender on its deck).

    At Ridgefield High School, where he graduated in 1966, John Orrico played football and golf, was in the band, and helped in the library. He attended The Citadel before enlisting in the U.S. Army in 1968 where he underwent helicopter pilot training and was commissioned a warrant officer. 

He was sent to Vietnam in August 1969 to pilot Huey UH-1C attack helicopters. The UH-1C,  fitted with machine guns and rocket packs, was used to support ground troops in combat.

Piloting one of these helicopters in Vietnam was incredibly dangerous. Of the 696 UH-1Cs

that the Army used in combat, 415 were destroyed, according to military historian Gary Roush. A total of 167 of their pilots and 158 crew were killed. 

Of all 7,000 different models of UH-1 Huey helicopters flown in Vietnam, 3,300 were destroyed, and 1,074 of their pilots died. 

Within a year of his arrival in Vietnam, Orrico had earned the Bronze Star, the Army Commendation Medal, and the Air Medal. But his highest award, the Distinguished Flying Cross, was received Aug. 28, 1970 “for heroism in action while engaged in aerial flight in connection with military operations against a hostile force.”

However, it was not a hostile force but a helicopter that killed CWO Orrico two months later.

According to Army records, on Nov. 2, 1970, at 6:50 a.m,  Orrico took off with a crew of three from a base at Rach Gia near the very southern end of Vietnam, and was heading for the Rach Soi Airfield for refueling. After making a right turn and leveling off at 500 feet, “the main rotor system separated from the aircraft,” which then crashed and exploded, killing all four men.

Orrico was due to come home the next month.

The 22-year-old soldier was buried with full military honors at St. Mary’s Cemetery. 

He was the third and last Ridgefielder to lose his life in the Vietnam War.

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.