Harry Thomas: 

The Village Smithy

Harry Thomas was a taste of the past in modern Ridgefield. As late as 1970, he could be seen at the forge behind his Catoonah Street house, fashioning things of iron. For Mr. Thomas was among the last of a profession that was once common and essential to any community: the blacksmith. 

Harry Marvin Thomas was born here in 1884, a fifth generation descendant of Benjamin Stebbins, who built a house on Main Street in 1714 that became a hospital in the Battle of Ridgefield and stood where Casagmo is now. 

At 16, he began his apprenticeship, and became probably the town’s leading blacksmith through the end of the age of the horse. In a pinch he could shoe and harness a horse in seven minutes. 

Harry Thomas was a man of strength, not just in his arms, but legs – he thought nothing of walking to Norwalk or to Brewster and back, and did it often. 

In 1927, he built the house still standing between the firehouse and post office, and his blacksmith shop out back, also still standing. 

When the automobile took over from the horse, he went to work for Gilbert and Bennett in Georgetown, but on retirement, fired up the forge again for fun and for special projects that still required a blacksmith’s skill. 

In a 1962 interview,  Thomas bemoaned the fact so many of his old friends had died. “They understood me, they knew what I meant,” he said. “People don’t understand each other now. They’re always fighting.”

Thomas died in 1973 at the age of 88.

Delight Benedict: 

Teaching the ABCs

Hundreds of teachers in Ridgefield have been remembered in dozens of ways, but few have got quite the strange notoriety of a woman named Delight Benedict — or, as Samuel G. Goodrich called her, “Aunt Delight Benedict.”

Delight Benedict taught at the West Lane Schoolhouse, which is today a historical museum at the intersection of Route 35, West Lane, and South Salem Road (it’s open the last Sunday of the month in warm months). 

Benedict gained a good degree of posthumous fame in the 19th Century when  Goodrich, who wrote more than 100 books under the name of Peter Parley, described her in his 1856 autobiography, "Recollections of A Lifetime":

     “I was about six years old when I first went to school,” Goodrich wrote. “My teacher was Aunt Delight, that is, Delight Benedict, a maiden lady of 50, short and bent, of sallow complexion and solemn aspect.

     “I remember the first day with perfect distinctness. I went alone — for I was familiar with the road, it being that which passed by our old house. I carried a little basket, with bread and butter within, for my dinner, the same being covered over with a white cloth. ...

     “I think we had 17 scholars — boys and girls — mostly of my own age... 

     “The school being organized, we were all seated upon benches, made of what were called slabs — that is, boards having the exterior or rounded part of the log on one side: As they were useless for other purposes, these were converted into school-benches, the rounded part down. They had each four supports, consisting of straddling wooden legs, set into auger-holes. Our own legs swayed in the air, for they were too short to touch the floor. 

     “Oh, what an awe fell over men, when we were all seated and silence reigned around!

“The children were called up, one by one, to Aunt Delight, who sat on a low chair, and required each, as a preliminary, to make his manners, consisting of a small sudden nod or jerk of the head. She then placed the spelling-book — which was Dilworth's — before the pupil, and with a buckhandled penknife pointed, one by one, to the letters of the alphabet, saying, ‘What's that?’

“If the child knew his letters, the ‘what's that?’ very soon ran on thus:

" 'What's that?'

" 'A.'

" ''Stha-a-t?'

" 'B.'

" ''Sna-a-a-t?"

" 'C.'

" ''Sna-a-a-t?'

" 'D.'

" ''Sna-a-a-t?'

" 'E.'" &c.

"I looked upon these operations with intense curiosity and no small respect, until my own turn came. I went up to the school-mistress with some emotion, and when she said, rather spitefully, as I

thought, ‘Make your obeisance!’ my little intellects all fled away, and I did nothing.

“Having waited a second, gazing at me with indignation, she laid her hand on the top of my head, and gave it a jerk which made my teeth clash.

“I believe I bit my tongue a little; at all events, my sense of dignity was offended, and when she pointed to A, and asked what it was, it swam before me dim and hazy, and as big as a full moon. She repeated the question, but I was doggedly silent. Again, a third time, she said, ‘What's that?’ 

“I replied. ‘Why don’t you tell what it is? I didn’t come here to learn you your letters!’”

Goodrich said he himself had no recollection  of his confrontation with his teacher, but he said that “Aunt Delight affirmed it to be a fact.”

That same night Benedict paid a visit to the home of Goodrich’s parents. She “recounted to their astonished ears this, my awful contempt of authority. My father, after hearing the story, got up and went away; but my mother, who was a careful disciplinarian, told me not to do so again! 

“I always had a suspicion that both of them smiled on one side of their faces, even while they seemed to sympathize with the old petticoat and pen-knife pedagogue, on the other; still I do not affirm it; for I am bound to say, of both my parents, that I never knew them, even in trifles, say one thing while they meant another.”

Goodrich’s father was the Rev. S. G. Goodrich, minister of the First Congregational Church, and his mother, Elizabeth Ely Goodrich, was a member of a prominent family in Connecticut.

Delight Benedict was born in Ridgefield in 1759, only a few years after the first West Lane schoolhouse was built. She was one of six children of John and Esther Stebbins Benedict. John

Benedict was a well-educated Ridgefielder, a 1747 graduate of Yale and a deacon of the Congregational Church. (Rev. Goodrich was a fellow Yalie.)  His wife was a member of one of the founding families of the town.

Delight Benedict was one of the very few teachers that Goodrich mentions in his 1,100-page, two-volume “Recollections of A Lifetime,” and he always paints a cold, unflattering picture of the woman. “She, not being a beauty, was never married, and hence, having no children of her own, she combed and crammed the heads of other people’s children,” he writes at one point. “In this way she was eminently useful in her day and generation.”

Delight Benedict’s five siblings all lived longer lives than she did. Even both of her parents survived her when she died in 1812 at the age of 51.

Goodrich was not a fan of the system that provided his earliest education — he may have learned more from his sophisticated parents than he did at West Lane schoolhouse — and he credited much of his best education to reading. What’s more, it was probably to counteract the kind of cold, boring schoolhouse instruction often provided in the 18th and 19th Centuries that prompted him to produce more than 100 books, most of them aimed at children and many of them designed to be textbooks. Instead of dispensing cold, hard facts, the pages of Peter Parley books talked directly to the children in a friendly fashion, and featured many illustrations to arouse their interest and explain their subjects.

Perhaps it was Aunt Delight’s uninspiring ways that helped inspire Goodrich to make learning fun. 

George M. Olcott: 

The Man from Casagmo

George Olcott left Ridgefield with a strange legacy: A stone wall, a barn and a name, plus the destruction of a treasured historical building.

Olcott came to Ridgefield in 1892, buying the ancient Stebbins farm at the north end of Main Street. The house, built in 1727, had stood in the midst of the Battle of Ridgefield in April 1777 and served as a hospital for the wounded. “For many generations tourists came to see the bullet-scarred walls and the bloodstained floors of the west room, which were reminders of the conflict which took place around it,” historian Silvio Bedini wrote.

However, Olcott tore down the house, saving only the front door, and replaced it with an Italianate mansion. He called the place Casagmo, a word created from his initials, GMO, and “casa,” the Italian word for house.

And 75 years later,  a wrecking ball laid waste to Casagmo.

George Mann Olcott was born in 1835, in Brooklyn, N.Y. His father, Charles Mann Olcott, was a

founder of Olcott & McKesson, a drug firm that, after Charles’s death, became McKesson & Robbins, a name that lasted into the 1960s for a company that is today the McKesson Corporation, a pharmaceutical distributor and health care systems conglomerate that had $122 billion in sales in 2012.

    Young George attended Columbia College Grammar School. “However,” wrote his daughter, Mary, in a family history, “a youthful delight in caricature terminated his school life, for the headmaster … failed to appreciate a portrait of himself done by the young Mr. Olcott, and a caning was ordered. The boy’s father gave him his choice, either to undergo the caning or leave school. George M. Olcott left school and entered the world of business, where he achieved notable success.”

At age 16,  Olcott became a clerk in a wholesale drug firm. By 21, he was a partner in a drug and chemical importing company, soon called Dodge and Olcott, of which he eventually became president in 1904. His products were not all pharmaceuticals; a big portion of his business was the ingredients in perfumes and food flavorings. He retired when he went blind at the age of 78.

Dodge and Olcott continued in business until 1952, when the Fritzsche Brothers purchased the firm, eventually calling it Fritzche, Dodge & Olcott. In 1980, it was acquired by chemical giant, BASF, which 10 years later, sold it to Givaudan, an international flavor and fragrance company.

Olcott became involved in the local social and business life of the town, serving as president of the library association. He was a founder and second president of the First National Bank and Trust Company of Ridgefield (which through many mergers is now Wells Fargo). He also maintained a residence in New York City, and was on the boards of a half dozen banks and other institutions there.

A popular tale involving Olcott was related by Ridgefield Press publisher Karl Nash in 1975. “On

one occasion Mr. Olcott tangled with Samuel S. Denton, the coal and wood merchant who later owned much Ridgefield real estate [and is profiled in Who Was Who]. Denton had acquired the Paddock house, which stood just south of St. Stephen’s Church, and he started moving it up Main Street to a planned site north of Mr. Olcott’s property.

“When the house wouldn’t go between Mr. Olcott’s stone wall and the high bank on the other side of the street (now the Coffey homestead), Denton asked Olcott’s permission to remove a section of his wall temporarily to let the house pass through. Olcott refused.

“The house sat in the middle of the street for a time while Denton scratched his head for a solution. At length he decided to saw the house in half and move it in two sections instead of one. Mr. Olcott watched in amusement.”

Denton never put the two pieces together. Half of the Paddock house still stands, just north of the Casagmo northern boundary on Main Street. The other half, which was moved down around the corner onto Danbury Road, was later torn down to make way for a newer house, just opposite

Girolametti Court. And Olcott’s wall still stands today along the Main Street border of the Casagmo condominium complex.

After George Olcott died in 1917, daughter Mary lived at Casagmo until her death in 1962 at the age of 97 — a poet and genealogist, she was rather a grand dame in Ridgefield society.
According to the newsletter published for Casagmo residents, George Olcott was originally buried in Ridgefield, but his remains were eventually moved to a Brooklyn cemetery after Mary Olcott had a disagreement with the owners of the Ridgefield cemetery in which he was interred. 

As for the door to the historic Stebbins house, George Olcott had stuck it in the cellar of the

Casagmo mansion, where it sat for years. After the death of Mary Olcott, Ridgefield native

Robert A. Lee got to worrying about the future of the relic. He knew it was in the cellar and he doubted that Miss Olcott’s heirs would care about it. So Lee loaded it onto his car one day and took it to his family’s 18th Century homestead in Farmingville. There the door remained for several years until Lee finally decided to give it to the Ridgefield Library and Historical Association. Around 40 years ago, as it was moving its focus away from the historical side of its original mission, the library donated the door to the Keeler Tavern Museum, where it is today — on display for all to see, especially appropriate as the town is about to mark the 240th anniversary of the Battle of Ridgefield.

Mary Olcott’s heirs sold the property in the mid-1960s to Jerry Tuccio, the homebuilder, who

received the rezoning for the town’s first large-scale apartment development. However, Tuccio decided to stick to single-family homebuilding, and sold the rezoned land to David L. Paul, a New York attorney and apartment builder, who razed the mansion in 1968 after years of neglect and vandalism had taken their toll. Paul built 320 apartments. While virtually all evidence of the Casagmo estate was destroyed, Paul retained one major feature: The barn. He and his architect, Lee Harris Pomeroy, restored and remodeled the building into Casagmo’s community center.

Paul later also built Fox Hill on Danbury Road. There, at the recommendation of the Planning and Zoning Commission, he included condominiums. When these turned out to be quite popular, he converted Casagmo’s rentals to condos.

Many Casagmo roads bear names connected with the families that lived there, such as Stebbins Close, Olcott Way, Quincy Close, and Lawson Lane — the last two ancestors of the Olcotts.