George Lounsbury:

The Plain and Simple

One doesn’t usually find a finely dressed gentleman — much less a state governor — leading a team of field oxen. The man photographed with a whip and a yoke is George E. Lounsbury, 58th governor of Connecticut (1899-1901), and the scene is his farm, The Hickories, in Farmingville, about 1900. 

Governor Lounsbury had lived on the Lounsbury Road farm since he was two years old and, though a Yale graduate and prominent businessman, retained it as his lifelong home. When he died in 1904, The Ridgefield Press observed, “Wealth and public position, when attained, often cause men to ignore those who have contributed to their success. Not so with him. He was fond of the plain, simple, unconventional customs of rural life and always kept himself in close touch with the rural people of the town.” 

In 1964, after the picture had appeared in The Press for a history feature, Katharine Bell Russell of Columbus, Ohio, formerly of Pin Pack Road, wrote the editors: “I was five years old and remember well when that picture was taken, as I was there. My grandmother was the widow of the Rev. John Swinburne Whedon, who died while he was minister of the Methodist Church in Ridgefield, and a year later she married Governor Lounsbury. That was in 1894. We spent all our summers at The Hickories from 1896 to 1915. The oxen were Bill and Star, and the white collie was Snowland.”

Today, The Hickories, owned by the Brewster family, is Ridgefield’s only working farm. In 1996, the town bought the development rights to 101 acres of its farmland.

George Edward Lounsbury was one of the town’s most influential citizens. In fact,  his Press obituary reported, “he wielded a greater influence over his fellow townsmen than any other single person.”  

He was born in Pound Ridge, N.Y., in 1838, but his parents moved to Farmingville two years 

later, and it was at the Farmingville Schoolhouse that he received his early education (around 1899, he donated a brand, new schoolhouse to the district; after it closed in 1940, it wassold and moved to North Salem, N.Y., where it served many years as an artist’s studio).

He graduated from Yale  in 1863 and from Berkeley Divinity School three years later. He began his career as an Episcopal priest, serving in a couple of Connecticut congregations, but because of throat problems, left the ministry and entered the family business,  operating shoe factories in Norwalk for the rest of his life. 

An active Republican, he was elected a state senator in 1895 and 1897, and governor from 1899 to 1901. (His brother, Phineas, had been governor 12 years earlier.)  He was a popular candidate; according to an 1899 history, the Republicans swept the state “with a majority which has been exceeded only twice in the history of that party.” 

He had a quiet two years in office. The Hartford Courant put it this way: “In looks, manner and oratory, there was a decided suggestion of the South in George E. Lounsbury...At the state house, he was a useful and ornamental senator, and if no hard problems came his way as governor, he at least performed the routine and ceremonial duties of the office with ease and a becoming dignity.”

After his retirement, he became president of the First National Bank here (an ancestor of the Wells Fargo branch on Main Street). 

“Although he was more than ordinarily successful and acquired wealth, position and prominence, he always retained an interest in the common people, with whom he mingled freely and in whose welfare he was deeply interested, as he often showed in many practical ways, unknown to the general public,” his obituary said. 

Fred Jones: 

Dog Detective

One day in the 1950s, Fred Jones’s telephone rang. He picked up the receiver and a very angry woman’s voice began demanding that he do something about the two peacocks fighting in her yard.

“Madam,” he replied patiently, “I am not the peacock warden. I am the dog warden.”

Though born in Canada in 1908, Fred B. Jones spent most of his life in Ridgefield. He was one of the town’s last old-time farmers,  caretaker of the working farm at the Brewster family estate, The Hickories, on Lounsbury Road for nearly 60 years. 

But he was also Ridgefield’s dog warden in the 1950s and 60s, and an expert lapidary. 

In 1960, The New York World Telegram and Sun called Jones “the best darned dog warden in Connecticut” and described how he tracked down the owners of a lost collie by contacting authorities in Long Island, Michigan and Florida, and mailing more than two dozen letters. 

The paper also told how one day, a Ridgebury recluse died while walking home from Danbury and his two dogs refused to let police or the medical examiner approach the body.   Jones talked to the snarling dogs, then walked into the dead man’s cabin. The dogs followed him and he locked them inside, telling authorities he had just employed some simple dog psychology.  (Jones and veterinarian Dr. Jordan Dann tried for six weeks to tame the dead man’s pets, but were unsuccessful and the dogs had to be put down.)

Perhaps it was more of that psychology — or just a good knowledge of the breed — that Jones employed when a wealthy guest at the Stonehenge Inn reported his two valuable beagles had run off. “Solving this case was child’s play for Fred Jones,” the New York newspaper said. “He knew beagles, so he went off into the Farmingville swamp and found the two dogs chasing rabbits.”

He also found a famous dog.  Morgan, a basset hound that had wandered away from its

owner, TV and movie producer Dick Gordon, was well known to television viewers in the 1950s, appearing regularly on the Garry Moore Show and in several sitcoms.  (In 1973, the Altman Department Store Christmas catalogue in New York featured a “Huggable Morgan” stuffed animal complete with a squeaker nose.)

Roaming and usually unlicensed dogs were a serious problem in the mid-20th Century, when there were still farms with livestock that could be attacked. Jones was tough about licensing dogs, so much so in 1954 that he conducted door-to-door surveys of the town to make sure dogs were licensed. 

In 1959, when roaming packs of dogs were attacking livestock and wildlife, he pointed out, under state law, that the town has to pay for chickens, sheep and rabbits that had been killed by stray dogs.

In 1961, the town was having problems with dog packs killing deer, which back then were relatively few in number to start with. Jones warned the public in February of that year that he had the right under law to shoot and kill dogs that were attacking deer.

Under Jones’s guidance in 1954, the town built its first dog pound to hold strays the warden had captured. It had six runs. First Selectman Leo F. Carroll said in 1959, when many of the state’s pounds were being criticized as cruel canine prisons, Ridgefield’s pound has “heat, light, meals, and each guest has his own private runway where he takes his exercise at his leisure.” 

Sometimes even high-class impoundment did not sit well with locals, however. In 1957, Police Chief John F. Haight reported that some local children broke into the pound and “liberated” a beagle that had escaped from its Danbury owners.  Chief Haight said the children felt sad for the dog being locked up, but warned that “sometimes vicious dogs are kept at the pound, and any child gaining entrance to the building via a window might run the risk of being badly mauled or bitten.”

By the early 1960s, the pound was overcrowded and was housing two dogs per run. It wasn’t until 1973 that the town tore down the 1954 shelter and built a new 14-run building. By then Jones had retired.

 Especially later in his life, Jones became well known an expert lapidary, a person who cuts and polishes gemstones. And to get the gemstones, he had rocks. Lots of them. “The quantity of rocks in and around the Lounsbury Road home of Mr. and Mrs. Fred  B. Jones might lead one to believe that the couple was planning to build a house of stone,” said a 1974 Ridgefield Press interview with Jones. “Not so. These are not ordinary rocks, they’re semi-precious stones in the rough.”

“A rock hound, Mr. Jones is hooked on the beauty which can be wrought from rough stones.”

  By the 1970s, he and his late wife, Ruth, were traveling 25,000 miles a year, acquiring and selling rocks in a business called as Fred’s Gem Den. 

Fred Jones died in 1999 at the age of 91.

Over his years in office as dog warden, Jones put in some long hours and was on call 24/7. Once he told a woman whose dog had run off to be sure to let him know if it returned. Two days later, his phone rang. “I wanted you to know that Rover just came home,” the woman reported. 

It was 2:30 in the morning.

The Steele Family: 

Early Black Ridgefielders 

Although a few black slaves and freemen had lived in Ridgefield in the 18th and early 19th Centuries,  the first home-owning black family to settle here may have been the Steeles of Farmingville.

According to research done by Keith Jones for his book, “The Farms of Farmingville,” in 1865 Isaac Hart Steele of North Salem, N.Y., paid $300 to William Lee for a small, already antique house on two acres along what is now Limekiln Road. Located  just south of Poplar Road, the house still stands today.

Jones says there were indications the Steele family may have been living there as early as 1859. That is when his daughter, Mary E. Steele, was born to his first wife, Sarah A. Steele. Sarah died in 1862 at the age of 32, and by 1865 when the the house purchase took place, Isaac was married to Catherine “Katie” Pines Steele.

Isaac Hart Steele’s home sat on two acres of limestone ledge, making it unsuitable for farming, Jones said. To earn an income, Steele worked on neighboring farms, including that of Azariah Smith. Apparently his abilities at farming gained a reputation for excellence because Steele was hired to oversee the fields on Gov. George E. Lounsbury’s large farm, The Hickories. 

His wife,  Katie, may have worked as a member of the household staff at The Hickories, Jone said. Her step-daughter, Mary, may also have worked for the governor; when she died in 1933, her occupation was listed as “servant” in the town’s death records.

Mary E. Steele was born in 1859, possibly in the Limekiln Road house, and attended school in the old Farmingville Schoolhouse near the site of today’s Farmingville School.

She told an interviewer in the 1920s  that her ancestors had lived in the North Salem area since the 1700s, and recalled hearing her great-grandmother tell of attending a gathering in North Salem during the Revolution when General Washington and General Lafayette and their staffs stopped for refreshments on their way to Hartford. Aunt Sibby Sickle had also been present when the French Army under General Rochambeau passed through North Salem and Ridgebury. 

Town Historian Richard E. Venus knew Mary Steele in her later years. She was “a nice little old lady that everyone thought the world of,” he recalled in 1983. “She was a very pleasant and cultured person.

“Mary did a lot of walking and always dressed in a black dress with large white collar and a black straw hat with a white band. If she happened to be going by at meal time, she was always invited in to eat with the family.”

Venus said Mary Steele “told wonderful stories. She was a great storyteller and a most interesting person to listen to.”

The Steele family belonged to St. Stephen’s Church.

Katie Steele died in 1889. Three years later, Isaac Hart Steele sold the Farmingville property for $712, more than twice what he paid, and bought a place on Danbury Road near where Adam Broderick is now. He lived there for a while, eventually returning to North Salem, where he died in 1921 at the age of 87. 

Mary remained in Ridgefield, living in an apartment over a store on Main Street, a little north of where Books on the Common is now. In January 1932, she was asleep when a fire broke out in a nearby apartment. She was rescued by firefighters. 

She died nearly two years later, in December 1933, at the age of 75.

Mary, along with father Isaac, mother Sarah and step-mother Katie, are buried with other members of the Steele family in the historic June Cemetery on June Road in North Salem.

The old Steele homestead on Limekiln Road included a barn, now converted into a house, that stands only a couple of feet from the edge of the road’s pavement  — perhaps closer to a road than any house in town. Keith Jones reported that he was told by a former owner that a mid-1980s town road crew worker was “reluctant to enter the building, reciting local tradition that the attic was haunted by the ghost of an old, white-haired man who could be seen hovering behind [the] gable window. 

“Perhaps, the attic ghost — if there really is one — is the heart-broken spirit of Hart Steele in search of his wife, Catherine, both of whom barely scratched a living from this small, limestone infested property,” Keith Jones wrote.

Dr. Blandina Worcester Brewster: 

Early Woman Physician

A respected physician when relatively few women were practicing medicine, Dr. Blandina Worcester was “one of the pioneer women doctors of this country, her example having inspired other women to enter the profession,” The Ridgefield Press reported in 1984 when she died at the age of 82. 

Dr. Worcester was not only a leading pediatrician in New York City, but also a professor of pediatrics at a top university. 

What’s more, she and her husband established a family that 80 years later, is a significant part of Ridgefield’s life.

A native of Geneva, N.Y., Dr. Worcester was born in 1902, graduated from Radcliffe College in 1923, and from Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1927. During her internship at Johns Hopkins, she worked with the Frontier Nursing Service in rural Kentucky, riding to her patients on horseback. 

She established a practice of pediatrics in New York City in the 1930s, was on the attending staff at Bellevue Hospital’s Children’s Medical Service from 1933 until 1968, was medical director at The New York Infirmary for many years, and was a professor of clinical pediatrics at New York University’s Medical School for 38 years. 

In 1935, she married Carroll H. Brewster, a lawyer and partner of Davis Polk in New York City, and a year later, the couple bought the Farmingville farm that had been “The Hickories,” the home of George H. Lounsbury (also profiled in Who Was Who), governor of Connecticut. When the Brewsters bought the place, it had recently been used as a private girls school.

Dr. Worcester — she used that name throughout her career — lived in New York and spent summers and weekends here until her retirement in 1971, after which she moved fulltime to Ridgefield. 

She was a voracious reader but in her last few years, became nearly blind. Nonetheless, she continued to play bridge with some of her many Ridgefield friends.

Dr. Worcester was also a woman of scholarship and a keen mind, and both of her two sons became leaders in academia. When he retired in 1999, the Rev. John Gurdon Brewster had been Episcopal chaplain at Cornell University for 34 years — a position he held longer than any other university Episcopal chaplain in the country. He is also a sculptor and his work is in many collections, including Union Theological Center and The Vatican.

Carroll Worcester Brewster, a Yale Law School graduate, was a dean at Dartmouth, and then president of Hollins College. He was later president of Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, his mother’s birthplace (she was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters there in 1983).  

In 1966, Carroll Brewster became a member of the Ridgefield Conservation Commission. He resigned in 1969 to pursue careers that included legal counsel to the government of Sudan, as well as college leadership. On his retirement, he returned to Ridgefield and rejoined the Conservation Commission in 2000 and is still serving today — a half century after he began the job.

Carroll Brewster lives on the family farm, whose development rights the family deeded to the town in 1996, preserving more than 100 acres in Farmingville. 

His daughter, Dina, resurrected The Hickories as an organic farm in the early 2000s, and continues to run the operation, now the largest and one of the last working farms in Ridgefield.