Frederic and Mary Lewis: 

The Showplace on West Lane

Ridgefield had many great homes early in the 20th Century, but few surpassed Frederic and Mary Lewis’s “Upagenstit,” an estate that town historian Dick Venus called “one of our nation’s showplaces.”

At one time this 100-acre spread on West Lane employed nearly 100 people. The house had more than 40 rooms, and the estate was equipped with an indoor swimming pool, immense greenhouses, and a dozen other buildings. Many houses were provided for workers – most still exist along West Lane, Olmstead Lane and on Lewis Drive. At one point, Mr. Lewis’s private physician lived in one of them and his personal chef in another..

His home was so big that, with little modification, it became a college in the 1940s. 

Frederic Elliott Lewis was born in 1859 into a wealthy New York City family. He grew up in Manhattan and at a young age, began working for National City Bank, where his grandfather,  Moses Taylor — one of the richest men in the 19th Century — was president (National City Bank is today’s CitiBank). Lewis was eventually elected vice president of the bank.

However, poor health forced Lewis to leave his banking career at a relatively young age, and he spent time traveling in Europe,  resting in Florida, overseeing his investments, and generally

enjoying life. He was fond of yachting and at one point owned three steam-powered vessels, one of which was 70 feet long.

Mary Alice Russell was born in 1862 in Middletown, Conn., also to a very wealthy family,  involved in international trade. She and Frederic were married in 1887 and had three sons: Reginald, who later had a gentleman’s farm on South Salem Road near the New York line, but eventually moved to an estate in Norfolk, Conn.; Wadsworth, who built an estate on Great Hill Road (and has been profiled in Who Was Who); and a third son, Frederic, who died when he was 11. 

Frederic and Mary lived in Manhattan and maintained a summer home in Tarrytown for many

years, but in 1907, they decided to move farther from the city. They bought Henry B. Anderson’s estate on West Lane, west of High Ridge. The Lewises began making vast changes to the place, replacing Anderson’s house with a castle-like mansion and adding more land and many more buildings to what was eventually a 100 acre.

In 1934, The New York Times reported that the Lewises had spent nearly $2 million (some $54 million in today’s money) on the improvements at Upagenstit. They included:

• A network of paved roadways, lined with yellow brick gutters, at a time when none of the main roads in town were paved. Electric lighting was provided for many of the roads.
  
• Various barns and poultry houses for a stock that included Guernsey and Jersey cows, Berkshire pigs, and Plymouth Rock fowl.
  
• An ice house that could hold up to 3,000 cakes of ice, cut from their own pond and stored for the warm months. (A cake of ice could weigh more than 300 pounds; the foundation for the ice house was two feet deep and included a drainage system for melting ice.)
  
• Two tennis courts, one clay and the other grass.
  
• Specimen trees and shrubs from around the world — many of which are still part of the Ridgefield Manor.
  
• A stable that could handle 14 horses and a garage that could hold 15 cars.
  
• A fleet of automobiles that included Mary Lewis’s Rolls Royce that had flower vases on each side  furnished with fresh flowers each day; it featured a speaking tube through which she could converse with the chauffeur (their estate had three chauffeurs).
  
• 2,000 feet of finished stone wall, mostly along West Lane  and Golf Lane (and mostly still standing)
  
• A pond that still exists on western Lewis Drive (it later held the Ward Acres exotic waterfowl collection). A small octagon boathouse/bathhouse built by the pond was later moved to East Ridge to serve as part of the airplane-spotting facility during World War II. The building is now an office on Bailey Avenue.
  
• Last but not least, squirrel houses.  According to The Ridgefield Press in 1908, “Mr. Lewis’s favorite pets are the tame gray squirrels, having brought about 50 from Tarrytown. There are special houses for these sleek, interesting little fellows. When Mr. Lewis gives his call, he is surrounded almost at once by them.”
  

Former town historian Dick Venus described the house, which had more than 40 rooms. “The

front entrance was most impressive and was protected by a very large porte-cochere, over which there was a parapet that gave it the effect of a medieval castle — and a castle it was. The massive entrance hall was open to the third floor, on the style of the Capitol, except that it was not rotund. Mr. Lewis liked everything square.”

The house included a dairy room, which had a cream separator, a butter churn, a bottle washing machine, and a “gigantic ice cream freezer.” Milk was provided by the estates herd of cows to make butter, cream and ice cream. 

The laundry room was 40 by 30 feet in size. “It had the usual apparatus one would expect to

find in a laundry, but one thing made it unique,” Venus said. “It had a clothes drier and this was many years before the sophisticated, automatic driers of today. This drier was of simple design, but it did the job.”

The place was heated by two enormous furnaces, and had bins that could hold more than 60 tons of coal.

Dick Venus reported that every morning Mr. and Mrs. Lewis would go for a walk around their estate. While walking, Frederic “whistled constantly, in order that the people working on the estate would know that they were coming. He did not mind if they sat down again after he and Mrs. Lewis had passed by, but felt that they should give the appearance of being industrious while they were passing.”

 The whistling was especially important to the workers in the cow barn. “One of their duties each morning was to listen for Mr. Lewis’s familiar whistle,” Venus said. “The whistle was their signal to unroll a large red rubber carpet that covered the platform between the cows from one door to the other. After the Lewises had passed through the barn, the carpet was rolled up to await the next visit.”

The Encyclopedia of Biography, published in 1922, described Frederic Lewis as one who

“interested himself keenly in many subjects.” He was a “man of great influence in many departments of  [New York] city’s life, and he won and kept a host of friends who valued keenly his lovable and kindly personality and admired highly his sterling and virtuous character. His influence was always directed toward good ends, and his was one of those rare figures of which it may truly be said, ‘that the world is better off for their having lived.’ ”

He was also a generous man. “He was a friend of the worthy needy and he freely, but absolutely anonymously, has contributed largely to the relief of the distressed,” said The Press when he died in 1919 at the age of 60. “The extend of his philanthropic work will never be known as he never spoke of it and would not permit others to mention it. Many a worthy case that received timely help will never know the identity of their benefactor.”

Venus described him as “a very jovial individual, but for all his good nature, he was known to possess a vocabulary that would match that of a longshoreman, and when he felt that it fitted the occasion, he did not hesitate to use it.”

Frederic Lewis was not much involved in Ridgefield’s business and social life, though he did lend his banking expertise to the First National Bank of Ridgefield, where he served as a director (the bank, through many mergers, is now Wells Fargo). 

Mary Lewis was more involved in the town. She was responsible for a work of art that visitors

to St. Stephen’s Church have admired for a century: The large stained-glass chancel window entitled “Christ Blessing the Children.” According to research done by parishioner James Carone, Mrs. Lewis commissioned the window in 1916, shortly after the church was completed, in memory of her mother, Clara Russell Bacon. Later, her father’s name, Samuel Wadsworth Russell, was added to the memorial. The window was fashioned by J&R Lamb Studio, America’s oldest continuously operated stained-glass company; it was founded in 1857, long before Tiffany’s, and is still producing stained glass works today.

Mary Lewis was also involved in the operations at St. Stephen’s, including helping get the parish out of a financial problem caused by a church treasurer who embezzled a sizable amount of money earmarked for the new building. She and her husband also contributed $19,000 of the $25,000 cost of the new church rectory ($19,000 then would be around $425,000 today).

Mary Lewis served as the first president of the Ridgefield Chapter of the American Red Cross, founded at the start of World War I, and held that post many years. She was vice president of the District Nursing Association (now Ridgefield Visiting Nurse Association) for 31 years. 

Not surprisingly, Mary Lewis was a charter member of the Ridgefield Garden Club and involved in the club’s efforts to beautify the town. After all, she oversaw vast Upagenstit gardens and

mammoth greenhouses, working with estate superintendent John W. “Jack” Smith (see his Who Was Who profile). The Lewis estate produced many exhibits for New York City flower shows and won many awards, particularly for orchids. (As an interesting aside, Jack Smith’s obituary appeared in The New York Times. Frederic Lewis’s did not.)

With the Depression causing the family to scale down, Mary Lewis sold Upagenstit in 1934 to bridge expert Ely Culbertson and moved to Norfolk to live with her son, Reginald. She died in 1950 at the age of 87. 

In the early 1940s, the estate became Gray Court Junior College, a school for women. The college opened in September 1941 with about 100 students and 15 faculty members and lasted until around 1945. The greenhouses were used for classrooms and the glass walls were praised in a college brochure for having the “obvious” advantages “to sight and health.” One section of greenhouses was called “Crystal Hall.”

By 1949, the place had turned into the Ridgefield Lodge and Health Resort, aimed at elderly visitors, and was becoming a source of considerable controversy. First, the Zoning Commission got after the operators, alleging that they were running an illegal home for the aged, rather than a resort or hotel. Then, when the operation became the “Ridgefield Country Club,” the New York state insurance commissioner maintained that the corporation that owned the place was using it as a secret Communist Party headquarters for underground “indoctrination” and “propaganda.”

Finally, a developer named Harold F. Benel bought the place in 1954, tore down the house and created a subdivision of 46 one-acre lots on 66 acres. He called it The Ridgefield Manor Estates and used Lewis’s driveways for Manor Road and Lewis Drive, adding Fairfield Court. 

As for why the Lewises named their estate Upagenstit — “up against it” — no one is certain.

Wadsworth R. Lewis: 

Millions in Gifts

Countless thousands of Ridgefield people have benefited from the “Lewis Fund,” but few have known who “Lewis” was. 

Since it began distributing money in 1950, the Wadsworth R. Lewis Fund has given local charitable, educational or religious organizations more than $3.4 million. In today’s money, if inflation were calculated into those gifts, that’s more than $15 million in help.

Waddy Lewis would be pleased.

Born in Tarrytown, N.Y., in 1889, Wadsworth Russell Lewis was a son of Frederic E. and Mary Lewis. Around 1908 his parents bought the West Lane estate of Henry B. Anderson and began turning the 100-acre spread into one of the grandest of country homes of the era. Called Upagenstit, the estate is now the Ridgefield Manor, including Lewis Drive and Manor Road.

“Waddy,” as he was called, grew up in New York City and at Upagenstit. As a young man, he apparently led a life of leisure; at the age of 27, when he registered for the draft on June 5, 1917 in Ridgefield, he listed “none” as his occupation. But as World War I loomed on the horizon, he donated his yacht to the U.S. Navy to use to patrol New York Harbor. Soon thereafter, when he joined the Navy himself, he was put in command of his former vessel which patrolled New York Harbor. He later served in Washington as a lieutenant in the Censoring Department of the War College.

After the war, Lewis spent more time in Ridgefield. According to town historian Dick Venus, he enjoyed local sports and in the 1920s, even sponsored a Ridgefield baseball team, buying the uniforms and equipment, and paying some semi-pro players to beef up the squad. They came known as “Waddy’s All-Stars.”

Venus tells the story of one game at the old high school field on East Ridge at which Lewis, in an effort to please the crowd, offered $5 for each home run hit by a member of the Ridgefield team. “The offer was only a few minutes old when a conference with the opposing pitcher was held behind the old grandstand,” Venus said. “The result was an eruption such as has seldom been seen on any ballfield. Baseballs began to rain on Governor Street and some even reached the lawn of the state police barracks (now the Ridgefield Police headquarters). 

“They were not fooling Waddy — he was well aware that he was being taken. However, he enjoyed the demonstration as much as the players and the fans, and he had a broad smile as each crack of the bat sent the ball soaring in the air.”

It wasn’t just athletes that Lewis helped out. In the late 1930s, he came to the rescue of The Ridgefield Press which, a couple years earlier, been purchased by the brothers Karl and John Nash.

John, a longtime friend of Lewis, explained what happened: “My brother and I had the Ridgefield Press and in the early days, we were really struggling. The previous owner of the building sold it to us with a mortgage of $9,000. Rather unexpectedly one day, they approached us and wanted us to close out the mortgage.

“We, of course, didn’t have the money. We managed to negotiate them down to $3,000, but we didn’t have that either.

“Somehow, Waddy heard about it, probably through our mutual friend, Joe Donnelly, who was the attorney on the original deal. One day he showed up with a chauffeur-driven Lincoln, and told us that he was going to take care of the problem. He drove us down to New York to his bank. He asked the bank manager to arrange a loan at a favorable rate for his friends. The bank manager said, ‘Of course, Mr. Lewis. Would a rate of 2% be okay?’ That solved the problem for us and saved the paper.”

In 1934, Mary Lewis, by then a widow, sold Upagenstit. Waddy Lewis, however, enjoyed Ridgefield so much that he decided to build his own estate here in 1939, located between Limestone and Great Hill Roads. He called the place Taghkanick, an Indian word that some have translated as “wild place” and others, as a “clearing in a forest.”

Lewis’s parents were always interested in the welfare of the people in their town. That sense of community was especially strong in their son and particularly as he grew older, he became more interested in the “serious” side of community life. He became a member of the Board of Education, served on the Draft Board, and during World War II, the Ration Board. He was on the building committee that renovated the town hall around 1940.

He was also an award-winning grower of orchids, helped along by the premier orchid expert, John W. “Jack” Smith, who was his estate superintendent (also profiled in Who Was Who). 

Lewis was also an avid golfer and among his many friends on the local links was Alex Santini, a well-known Ridgefield caterer, chef and restaurateur. At some point Lewis gave Santini a putter. But it was no ordinary putter and Santini was no ordinary player. According to Dick Venus, “it was an exceptionally large putter and weighed considerably more than the ordinary club.” Santini used it not only for putting, but for driving, pitching and chipping. “Compensating somehow for its flat face, Alex was able to tee off and send the ball great distances,” Venus said. With that one putter, “he was able to beat other good golfers who used a complete set of clubs.”

In 1941, Lewis became ill for several months. While he recovered he was noticeably more frail. On Nov. 3, 1942, shortly after returning home from a meeting of the local Draft Board, he suffered a heart attack and died; he was only 53.  

Lewis had established the fund in his will, stating that grants should benefit non-profits “which are conducted in whole or in part for the benefit or use of the residents of Ridgefield and its vicinity.” However, he stipulated that it not begin functioning until his mother had died — the cost of her care would apparently affect the amount of the fund. Mary Lewis died in 1950.

And it was in 1950 that the Lewis Fund made its first grants, totaling $15,000 — that’s equal to about $152,000 in today’s dollars. By 1983, the annual grants had risen to $59,000 ($144,000 in today’s dollars). 

In 2015, grants totalling $116,000 were made to some 45 organizations.

Thus, the grants today amount to about eight times more than when they began. Yet, thanks to inflation, their buying power is noticeably less.

Waddy Lewis’s Taghkanick later became the home of Henry and Clare Boothe Luce, and then of the rare-book dealer, Hans Peter Kraus (all three of whom are profiled here in the Who Was Who series). The house is still in use today, though much of the estate’s land has been subdivided in recent years.

John W. Smith: 

The Orchid Man

The many estates that were established around the turn of the 20th Century brought   hundreds of workers to Ridgefield — maids, cooks, butlers, chauffeurs, farmers,  groundskeepers, gardeners, and others. Many found Ridgefield to their liking, wound up settling here and became strong participants in the community.

One of those was Jack Smith, an estate superintendent who was among the best gardeners and also among the most active contributors to his town. His orchids won many national awards and Smith himself was involved in several national horticultural organizations.

A native of England, John W. Smith was born in 1883 in Harrogate. He came to this country in 1910 to work as a gardener at Upagenstit, the West Lane estate of Frederic E. Lewis. After a stint aboard a destroyer in the U.S. Navy during World War I, he returned to Upagenstit and became its superintendent.

It was at the Lewis estate that Smith developed an interest in orchids. Mr. and Mrs. Lewis’s vast greenhouses provided plenty of space for experimenting with a variety of species, and his specialty became the cymbidium. 

Town Historian Richard E. Venus said the Upagenstit greenhouses “would match the conservatory in New York’s Botanical Gardens.” He reported that “it was said that John W. Smith…was the one who discovered the secret of growing orchids in this country. Jack isolated the orchid

plants in a corner of the greenhouse where the humidity was high. Then, instead of just applying water directly to the plants, he sprayed the water into the air around the plants and let them soak it up….That fine greenhouse produced some of the most beautiful orchids ever grown.”

Smith’s orchids won many awards at the National Flower Show in New York. He was especially known for a variety called Cymbidium Lewis. 

As Smith’s reputation became national, he was asked to judge flower shows all over the United States. He was named to the Hortus Committee of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, helping supervise the planting of flower beds on the fair’s grounds. 

He was president of the Ridgefield Horticultural Society, then a sizable and active organization, as well as a member of the New York Horticultural Society and the National Orchid Society.

When the Lewis estate was sold to Ely Culbertson (profiled in Who Was Who), Smith moved his orchids to Pinchbeck’s Nurseries for a while until he built a special greenhouse at his Barry Avenue home to house them. 

He became superintendent for the estate of Wadsworth R. Lewis, Frederic’s son, on Great Hill Road (later the home of Henry and Clare Boothe Luce).

Smith was involved in the political and civic side of Ridgefield life. In 1947 and 1949, he ran for first selectman on the Republican ticket, but lost to his friend, Harry E. Hull, a Democrat. He did win a seat on the Board of Selectmen from 1949 to 1951. 

He was a member of the School Building Committee that built the 1939 addition to the old high school on East Ridge — an addition that included the auditorium that is now the Ridgefield Playhouse. He was an original member of the Park Commission, now the Parks and Recreation Commission, serving for 16 years. 

When the town bought the Ridgefield Community Center just after World War II, Smith spearheaded the drive for public support and he personally supervised the remodeling of the Lounsbury house. He later became president of the Community Center.

He was also active in the Rotary Club, the Masons, and the First Congregational Church where, at the alleys in the church’s clubhouse, he enjoyed bowling with the locals.

He died in 1959 at the age of 75.

Henry B. Anderson: 

A Man of Land and Utility

An 1895 fire destroyed most of Ridgefield’s business district. One of the big problems when the blaze broke out at corner of Main and Bailey was lack of water to fight it. 

That prompted villagers to create a water system that began operation in 1900. Spring fed and financially unstable, the system proved inadequate until Henry B. Anderson took over.

With his help, Ridgefield entered the 20th Century with both village water and electricity.

Henry Burrall Anderson was born in New York City in 1863. He graduated from Yale in 1885, went to Harvard Law, and wound up a top industrial attorney in Manhattan, with such clients as the New York Central Railway. He had many interests, including serving as president of the Automobile Club of America (succeeding Elbert Gary, the steel magnate for whom the Indiana city is named) and working with the Charity Organization Society, which tried to break the “cycle of poverty.”

In the late 1800s Anderson built a summer home off West Lane in Ridgefield, using it a few years before selling it to Frederic E. Lewis, who enlarged it into a castle-like structure he called Upagenstit; the estate is now the Ridgefield Manor subdivision.

Anderson built a second mansion on West Mountain, just across the line in Lewisboro, N.Y., overlooking Lakes Waccabuc, Oscaleta and Rippowam. Here he lived with his wife, the former Marie Larocque. However, when his wife died in 1903, he abandoned the house, which eventually fell into disrepair and was razed.

Meanwhile, over his years here Anderson had been acquiring land on West Mountain and Titicus Mountain, winding up with some 3,000 acres; at least 600 acres were in Ridgefield and the rest in North Salem and Lewisboro. 

Anderson hired Eldridge N. Bailey, later a first selectman, to supervise building a network of roads through his property, with the expectation someday of selling sites for fancy summer homes and woodland retreats. His partner in this enterprise was Ogden Mills, secretary of the treasury under President Hoover. 

He also established the Port of Missing Men, a resort/restaurant on Titicus Mountain in North Salem with a spectacular view of the countryside. 

Many Ridgefielders, especially Italian-Americans, were involved in building the roads and operating the Port of Missing Men.

With homes and so much land here, Anderson took more than a passing interest in the Ridgefield community and its welfare.

A small water company had been established, laid pipe, and started operating in 1900, but almost immediately began having difficulties supplying water. “It was not financially stable and had not the capital to prosper and give the town an adequate system,” The Ridgefield Press reported.

Two years later, when he saw the problems the town was having with getting decent water service, Anderson bought the Ridgefield Water Supply Company  and immediately set about improving it, primarily by buying Round Pond on West Mountain to use as its main water source and building a standpipe on Peaceable Ridge to maintain pressure.

The water supply needed electrical pumps so Anderson established the Ridgefield Electric Company to serve not only pumps, but also villagers’ homes and street lights.

Anderson sold his controlling interest in the water company in 1928, and through several subsequent sales, it is now part of the giant Aquarion corporation. The electrical company continued for some years under different ownership until it was absorbed by a regional power company.

During World War I, Anderson offered his yacht, Taniwha, to the Navy. It was commissioned the USS Taniwha and was a Naval vessel from from 1917 to 1919. Anderson was at first placed in command and assigned to patrol the New York Harbor area, but he later worked in the office of the Chief of Naval Operations in Washington until the war ended. 

In his later years, Anderson spent little time in Ridgefield, though he still owned much land here. He had homes on Park Avenue in New York and at Sands Point, Long Island, when he died in 1938 at the age of 75.