Konrad Bercovici: 
Gypsies and Gusto

Konrad Bercovici, a self-styled “gypsy,” was a popular American writer and journalist whose friends included Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. His successful lawsuit against Charlie Chaplin generated many a headline three quarters of a century ago.

Although his home was literally on the state line along West Lane in Lewisboro, N.Y., Bercovici always considered himself a Ridgefielder. In fact, his mailing address was Ridgefield because the Ridgefield Post Office delivered his mail.

A native of Romania, Konrad Bercovici was born in 1882 to an intellectual Jewish couple who taught their children Greek, French, and German as well as Romanian. At a young age he became fascinated with the Roma — what he always called gypsies. “He spent much of his youth among the tents of gypsies who poured into Romania from the borders of Hungary, listening to their songs and learning their language,” said the New York Times.

When he was 11, his father was killed in an anti-Jewish riot and the family soon moved  to Paris where they began socializing with the literary community. He studied the organ under Charles-Marie Widor — the man who taught Albert Schweitzer — and was soon proficient enough that he gave a recital at the Cathedral of Notre Dame. 

While still a teenager, he began to write professionally, often about the Roma. He sold short stories for $5 each, while also working at a variety of jobs, including painting the frame of the Eiffel Tower.

He met his wife, Naomi, a sculptor, in Paris. The couple moved to New York City in 1904. There, to earn a living while pursuing his interest in writing, Konrad shoveled snow from the city streets, played piano in silent picture theaters, sold artificial flowers, and worked in sweatshops.

His first book, Crimes of Charities, appeared in 1917 and criticized what he considered the indifference of organized charities to the people they were supposed to be helping. 

The same year, he joined the staff of the New York World, writing sports stories and features, and three years later moved to the New York Evening Post, covering stories in many parts of the world. At the same time he continued turning out short stories for literary magazines.

During the 1920s he also wrote a dozen books of fiction and non-fiction, soon gaining an international reputation as a lively and interesting author. He became one of the Algonquin Table “regulars” that included  Irving Berlin, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, and Alexander Woollcott. Among his circle of friends were such artists, writers, actors, and musicians  as Melvyn Douglas, Diego Rivera,  F. Scott Fitzgerald,  Paul Robeson, Ernest Hemingway, Wilhelm Van Loon, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Gershwin brothers. A  portrait of him sketched by the young Amadeo Modigliani is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Over his long life, he produced around 40 books, many of them about the Roma — his Story of the Gypsies has been considered a standard work on the subject. However, he also wrote fiction and non-fiction on historical figures, including That Royal Lover, about Romania’s King Caroll, and Savage Prodigal, a biography of the French poet Rimbaud.

The Bercovicis moved to West Lane around 1930, but also maintained a residence in New York City. Among his local friends was author Margaret “Peggy” Shane of North Salem Road, mother of Betty Grace Nash, longtime managing editor of The Ridgefield Press and wife of publisher  Karl Nash.

Karl Nash was well acquainted with Bercovici whom he described as “a frequent speaker at service club meetings over the years, tackling his subjects with a gusto that marked his writings.” In one talk that Nash covered in June 1945, Bercovici told the Ridgefield Lions that he favored imprisoning the entire nation of Germany for the war and its atrocities.  “There is no reasonable argument why a whole nation that has proven itself asocial should not be treated by the civilized nations of the world as an asocial individual is treated by society,” Bercovici told the club. “The crime committed by a thousand or a million or ten million is not less a crime because it has been committed by a mass.”

Some of Bercovici’s books became movies, including The Volga Boatman (1926), produced by Cecil B. DeMille. He himself worked as a screenwriter  for several years in Hollywood where he became friends with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin. It was Chaplin’s hit The Great Dictator (1940) that was the subject of a 1947 lawsuit in which Bercovici  sued Chaplin, charging that he plagiarized material that Bercovici had written.

 

Bercovici was represented  by attorney Louis Nizer. In his book My Life in Court, Nizer explained that “The claim was that Chaplin had approached Bercovici to produce one of his gypsy stories as a motion picture and in the course of those friendly negotiations, Bercovici gave him an outline of ‘The Great Dictator’ story about a barber who looks like Hitler and is confused with him.” The case was settled, with Chaplin paying Bercovici $95,000 ($1.1 million in 2020). but with Chaplin also gaining rights to a couple Bercovici books that he could turn into movies.

In his autobiography, Chaplin insisted that he had been the sole writer of The Great Dictator’s script. He came to a settlement, though, because of his “unpopularity in the States at that moment and being under such court pressure, [he] was terrified, not knowing what to expect next.” 

Bercovici died in 1961 at the age of 80, leaving four children including journalist Rion Bercovici, artist Mirel Bercovici, and author Revolte “Rada” Bercovici.

Lillian Loomis Dempsey: 

The Heiress of Northoline

A color postcard from around 1910 depicts “Northoline,” the then-new West Lane mansion of Lillian Loomis Dempsey. Recently widowed, Mrs. Dempsey had built the house after receiving a huge and somewhat controversial inheritance that made headlines from Georgia to New York.

 Lillian Dempsey was the wife of Thomas C. Dempsey, who had  died July 4, 1899, in Asbury Park, N.J. A few months later, on Sept. 25, 1899, The Baltimore Sun reported that “active negotiations have been pending for several weeks to prevent a threatened controversy” over Thomas Dempsey’s estate. 

That estate, according to The Sun and other newspapers, was said to be worth $1 million — equal to about $30 million in today’s currency.

“While Mr. Dempsey, who was 85 years old, was in bed three days before his death, he executed his will, by the provisions of which the bulk of his fortune goes to his widow, Lillian Loomis Dempsey, whom it appointed executrix,” the Sun continued, then adding, “She is about 32 years old and had formerly been the companion of one of his daughters by his first wife.”

In his will, Thomas left nothing to that daughter, Nellie, who was married to Richard Needham, a wealthy merchant from Columbus, Ga. He also ignored his son, Wilson P. Dempsey, who was an “inmate of a sanitarium” near Baltimore, The Sun said.

“Mr. Dempsey was a retired dry goods merchant of a Southern family, having his residence in Macon, Ga. He owned valuable real estate in that city and an old homestead in Ireland. The rest of his estate is comprised of securities, the exact amount of which is not known.”

Dempsey had lived most of the year in New York City and elsewhere in the North. “He was a member of the Roman Catholic Church and made liberal gifts to charity,” The Sun said. “There was much astonishment when it was ascertained that he had made no charitable bequests.”

While the will had been offered for probate in Macon, no formal objection had yet been filed, the newspaper said, adding, however, that “Mrs. Needham is much dissatisfied with its provisions, as she thinks she is entitled to a share of her father’s fortune. She has threatened to make a contest in behalf of herself and her brother.”

Who were this wealthy 85-year-old man and his 32-year-old wife?

A native of Ireland (he was not from a “Southern family,” as the Sun suggested), Thomas Charles Dempsey had been born in 1814 and came to the United States as a young man. He became a citizen in 1842 in Savannah, and was soon living in Macon where he amassed his fortune as a retailer and investor in real estate. Around the beginning of the Civil War, he married Marie Lumpkin. Wilson was born in 1863 and Ann Ellen, called “Nellie,” was born in 1871. His wife died in 1885.

Lillian Loomis Wickes was born in 1867 in Macon. While in school there, she became friends with Nellie Dempsey. At some point the widowed Thomas Dempsey began noticing this companion of his daughter and by the early 1890s, he had proposed to her. They were married around 1893, when he was about 79 and she was 27.

One wonders how Nellie Dempsey felt, seeing her old schoolmate become her stepmother. 

The next year, Lillian and Thomas had a daughter, Marie Monica. In 1896, Thomas Charles Jr. arrived, and on June 6, 1899 — a month before his father’s death — Norbert Anthony was born.

According to subsequent newspaper accounts, including an article in The New York Times, Mrs. Dempsey hired a New York City lawyer named Robert O’Bryne to handle the dispute over the will. In the end, Nellie and her institutionalized brother got $250,000, leaving around $750,000 for the widow Dempsey. That today would be about $7.5 million for Nellie and Wilson, and  $22.5 million for Lillian.

Attorney O’Bryne claimed a lot of credit for the settlement, but it is quite possible that Lillian Dempsey felt an obligation to her old friend and his brother — her stepchildren — and that Nellie, hardly poverty-stricken, realized that she would never get much more than that, especially considering that her dad had fathered  three children with Lillian — all of them then under 10 years old.

As one dispute ended, another began. Attorney O’Boyle filed suit in a New York City court in July 1900, claiming he had not been paid for his services. He maintained “he was the one who kept down a contest over Mr. Dempsey’s will, and for his services he was entitled to $24,000,” The Macon Telegraph reported.  

It added, “The widow vigorously denied owing him any money. She said she had never employed him, but had paid him for all he had done. He is insisting that what he did was worth the $24,000 additional.”

That $24,000 would be about $731,000 today.

The case went to a referee who apparently worked things out without publicity.

Meanwhile, Lillian Dempsey, who had been living in New York City, decided she would like a country house and somehow came upon a tract of West Lane farmland on a small ridge overlooking South Salem. The land was owned by John Brophy, who, like her husband, was a native of Ireland. Brophy had for many years been a  U.S. customs official at the Port of New York, a job in which he dealt with many influential people. It’s possible he and Thomas Dempsey had known each other and that Brophy offered the land to his widow.

She bought the property in 1901 and built her 22-room house. It is not known how much  she used Northoline, but she probably was in New York City and Macon much of the year. She apparently lived a quiet life, and her name no longer appears in newspaper articles. She was not active in the social world nor did she seem to become involved in any philanthropy. She was living in Macon in 1930, but by 1940 when she was 73, she shared a home in Scituate, Mass., with her two sisters. She died in 1946 in Cambridge, Mass., and is buried in Macon.

Her house is at 209 West Lane, a little south of Silver Spring Road and a bit north of the New York line — presumably the inspiration for its name, though it’s really more west than north of the state line. It later had a less controversial but far more famous owner:  Metropolitan opera star Geraldine Farrar, who bought the place in 1924, renaming it “Fairhaven.” Here, though retired from the stage, she entertained many international celebrities in the arts, especially the world of music.

Now surrounded by trees and shrubs, the house still stands, though at last look, it was painted white.

Fixing A Fractured Fountain

The Cass Gilbert Fountain has often been damaged by errant autos, but the winter of 1975-76 was a particularly rough time for the venerable and vulnerable monument. During the five months from November 1975 until March 1976, it was struck by cars at least three times.

The most serious crash occurred in December when the fountain was hit by a car that then left the scene. The driver was later  arrested and his insurance company made to pay for repairs.

Here, in late March 1976, we see Primo Polverari of Stonecrest Road, left, with his son, Bill, working on fixing the fractured fountain. Hidden behind the fountain is another helper, Jimmy Vozzo. They had relaid the base, which holds water, and patched it with a special mixture of white cement and marble dust.

One of the region’s top stonemasons, Primo Polverari believed the marble from which the fountain was fashioned came from Italy. One large slab was split in two in an accident that occurred many years earlier, but otherwise the stonework was in pretty good shape, he said.

Poverari felt strongly that the fountain should be protected, either by some form of durable fencing, or by moving it to another site, as had been suggested often in the past — especially by the the State Highway Department, which hates that intersection.

Dave Hebert, then the superintendent of Parks and Recreation which takes care of the fountain, agreed that something needed to be done to protect the monument. “I don’t think it can take much more pounding,” he told The Ridgefield Press.

However, Hebert felt that if a fence were erected, it should be of a low and attractive design. “I don’t want anything to take away from the appearance of the fountain,” he said.

Hebert asked the Planning and Zoning Commission’s Architectural Advisory Committee to suggest a fence design, possibly a post-and chain arrangement. Most of the cars that manage to hit the structure aren’t traveling very fast, so a low fence should stop most vehicles, he felt.

Someone had suggested to Hebert that the fountain be raised up on a mound of earth so that cars would strike the mound and not the stone. The superintendent felt that would be too expensive, but in fact two decades later — after a drunken driver shattered the fountain in 2003 with a Hummer — it was indeed raised a bit.

However, what has probably helped more than anything is the additional placement of planters holding shrubs around the base of the fountain. Between the concrete walls of the planters and the dirt packed inside, a pretty effective set of bumpers has been created.  Several of the planters have been smashed in accidents, but each time, they managed to keep the cars — in one case, a truck — from hitting the fountain.

Primo Polverari retired a few years later from fountain work; he died in 1996. Much of the repair work in the 1980s and 90s and early 2000s was done or overseen by Dr. Robert Mead, a dentist who lived just north of the Keeler Tavern. He often used some dental techniques to fix the marble. 

The fountain was erected in 1915-16, a gift of noted architect Cass Gilbert who lived in what is now the Keeler Tavern Museum. 

Appropriately, in 2016, the museum bought Dr. Mead’s brick house to use as its administrative headquarters. That building had been erected in 1936-37 by Julia Gilbert, Cass’s widow,  as a monument and museum to her husband’s works.  It proved too small to handle the mass of papers and pictures that Gilbert left, so the museum was sold as a residence, eventually becoming the home and office of dentist Mead, who thus had more than a passing interest in the well-being of Gilbert’s great gift to the town.

West Lane Inn, ca. 1912

First off, let’s clear up possible confusion. Today’s West Lane Inn is not yesterday’s West Lane Inn. The original hostelry of that name, shown here, is right across the road from today’s inn and looks much the same today as it does in these two postcard views — with one big exception: The main staircase is now in the center of the porch instead of at the northeastern corner, as shown here. 

After its stint as an inn, the building was converted to apartments and was known as the Bluebird Apartments for many years — most of that time, it was owned by the Bacchiochi family. Today, it is still an apartment building. 

Why do we have two essentially identical pictures here? Well, in fact, they are the same picture by an unknown photographer (possibly Joseph Hartmann). But they are different in two ways (aside from the coloration).

Can you spot the differences? 

[Look and compare before reading further!] 

If you look at the top of the stairway on the monochrome picture, you will see an urn planter with a large arrangement of flowers and perhaps ferns. If you look at the color picture, only the base of the urn is there; the pot and flowers have vanished from the image. Also, some kind of overhead fixture, maybe a light, was removed at the same time.

Why black out the planter? It may have been a mistake on the part of the company that produced the color card, the German printer Newvochrome. However, it may also have been deliberate, either because the postcard publisher found the planter awkward where it was shown or because coloring it would have been too difficult. Cards like this were based on black-and-white pictures that were hand-colored for the lithographic engraving process.

Or it may be that the inn had stopped placing the planter there and asked that it be removed from the postcard.

The other difference between the two cards was in how the photo technicians treated the trees. On the color card some of the leafing was removed to show more of the blue sky, possibly to give a brighter aspect to the picture.

The color card was definitely in existence in 1913 because there is a dated message on the back with that year. When the monochrome version was produced is unknown. It may have been manufactured during World War I when access to German printing had ceased.

Cass Gilbert: 

A Most Remarkable Architect

In New York, his Woolworth Building — once the tallest building in the world — still graces the Manhattan skyline.  

In Washington, his Supreme Court building stands strong, despite battles over whom it houses. 

In Ridgefield, while it has too often fallen to the failings of drivers, his fountain has greeted visitors for more than a century.

Cass Gilbert, who bought the Keeler Tavern as his country home and gave us our fountain, was one of the most acclaimed architects of the 20th Century. He designed dozens of important buildings including the U.S. Custom House in New York, the state capitols of Minnesota, Arkansas

and West Virginia, the main libraries of St. Louis and Detroit, and parts of the campuses of the Universities of Texas and Minnesota.

A native of Zanesville, Ohio, Gilbert was born in 1859, and named for Lewis Cass, a U.S. senator from Michigan who served in the cabinets of Presidents Jackson and Buchanan, and was a distant relative of his surveyor father. 

Gilbert quit studies at Macalester College and at the age of 17 went to work for an architect in St. Paul, Minn., then spent 1878 studying at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After some time in Europe, he joined the prestigious New York firm of McKim, Mead, and White — White being the famous Stanford White, shot and killed by a jealous husband in 1906. 

By 1882 Gilbert had set up his own architectural business in St. Paul, Minn., with James Knox Taylor, a fellow student from MIT. They turned out many local houses, churches and commercial buildings as well as the Minnesota State Capitol. 

In 1880, while still in New York, he met his future wife, Julia Finch, a finishing school student. She was 18; he, 21. But it was not until 1886 when Julia was vacationing at Lake Minnetonka in Minnesota that they again met and struck up what became a serious relationship. He was living in St. Paul with his mother and she in Milwaukee with her parents, and most of their courting took place via the U.S. mail. They were married in 1887.

In 1899, Gilbert won a competition to design the U.S. Custom House in lower Manhattan — with a little help from his by-now former partner, James Taylor, who had become a federal Treasury Department design official; Taylor cast the deciding vote in Gilbert’s favor. Virtually an unknown on the national scene, Gilbert won out over many well-known firms and soon gained a wider reputation and many jobs in New York City, to which he moved in 1900. 

Among his New York City projects over the years were a tall neo-Gothic building at 90 West Street (heavily damaged on 9/11); the U.S. Courthouse at Foley Square; the New York Life Building; and many train stations on the Harlem branch of what is now Metro North.

In 1913, his most famous project, the Woolworth Building, opened in Manhattan. At 790 feet, it was the tallest building in the world at the time. One contemporary observer — a minister — called it Gilbert’s “Cathedral of Commerce.” 

With many more words and much more poetry, Paul Goldberger, the architectural critic of The New York Times, described it in 1981 as “one of the great icons of 20th Century architecture. It has a mix of delicacy and strength that is almost Mozartian, a sense of light, graceful detail applied to a firm and self-assured structure that no later building has ever quite equalled….It was pure, graceful composition — the serene ordering of well-proportioned parts.”

Although the Woolworth Building was one of Gilbert’s most famous accomplishments, he was not the first choice to design it. Frank W. Woolworth, owner of the huge chain of “dime stores,” first approached McKim, Mead, and White, where Gilbert had earlier worked. Among the staff architects there was Harris Hunnewell Murdock of Spring Valley Road in Ridgefield. Murdock later revealed that Woolworth had called on the telephone to ask the firm about designing his new headquarters.  After Woolworth hung up, one of the firm’s partners told his secretary to give a polite brush-off to the “five-and-dime man.”

While some of his buildings were among the tallest of their time, Gilbert grew pessimistic about the future of skyscrapers, revealing in 1931 that he was uncertain that form of architecture was “here to stay,” The Ridgefield Press reported at the time. In fact, he didn’t seem happy about the tall, light-hogging buildings he’d done.

 “When I see the long shadows cast even at noon on a winter’s day,” he said, “I sometimes

wonder if the light and air their occupants enjoy compensate for the sunlight their neighbors lose.”

Among Gilbert’s less lofty Connecticut projects were the New Haven train station, New Haven (Ives Memorial) Library and the Waterbury City Hall. 

And, of course, a little fountain in Ridgefield.

Cass and Julia Gilbert came to Ridgefield in 1907, buying what had been the Ressiguie's Hotel, earlier known as the Keeler Tavern. (The Press in 1907 indicated Julia was a descendant of Timothy Keeler, the 18th Century innkeeper, but we have been unable to find evidence of that.)

The Gilberts called their home the Cannonball House because of the cannonball — actually, a defused grenade — lodged in one of the beams on the north side of the building; it was fired from a British cannon during the Battle of Ridgefield in 1777 and can be seen by visitors today.

Gilbert immediately set about enlarging the building by adding a wing to the rear that included a dining room and then-modern kitchen, with additional rooms upstairs. Around 1915, he built the formal, brick-walled gardens and Garden House, now used for many weddings and special events. But he avoided changing the lines and historic features of the old tavern building itself.

His best known work in Ridgefield, however, is the fountain that he donated to the community in 1916 at the intersection of Main Street and West Lane. When it was installed, the

intersection looked much different from today’s heavily trafficked junction — it was a simple triangle that included a tree, and the fountain itself was much lower, with its base almost flush with the ground. The fountain was made of Italian marble — the same material used on his U.S. Supreme Court building.

The fountain was not only a welcoming symbol for people arriving from the west or south, it had a practical purpose. The lower, ground-level bowl served as a watering trough for horses that had just made long climbs to reach Ridgefield; the fountain is some 800 feet above sea level.

After being hit by many automobiles over the ensuing century, including a Hummer driven by a drunk in 2003 that shattered much of the structure, the fountain has been raised a couple feet and surrounded by planters designed to absorb the shock of a crash. A truck that hit the fountain in 2018 did hardly any damage, thanks to these precautions. 

The landmark has also survived numerous attempts by the State of Connecticut to move it elsewhere so that a more traffic-friendly intersection could be created. Ridgefielders, of course, have fought each and every move-the-fountain proposal, refusing to sacrifice a landmark that sits in a prominent location at the main southern entrances to the village.

Cass Gilbert died in 1934 while on one of his frequent trips to England. There he was held in

such high esteem that he had been elected to the Royal Academy of Arts, the only American since John Singer Sargent, the painter, to be so honored. (Gilbert had earlier been president of the National Academy of Design for eight years and was appointed to the Council of Fine Arts by Presidents Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson.) 

The London Times wrote after he died, “The list of his most important buildings would only be long enough to prove him the most remarkable architect of his generation in America.”

Since his death, more than a dozen books have been written about Cass Gilbert and his work. 

Only a year after he died, his architect son Cass Gilbert Jr. of Wilton (he designed what’s now the Ridgefield Playhouse) created a brick building at 152 Main Street as a museum to hold his father’s sketches, drawings, paintings, and papers. Located just north of the Gilberts’ Keeler Tavern home and part of the original Keeler Tavern lot, the Cass Gilbert Memorial was dedicated in October 1937 in a ceremony at which Gov. Wilbur Cross spoke.

“I am proud...to have known him, for he was one of the highest ranking architects of the country,” Governor Cross said. “He was a man who could see beauty in the tall building. You cannot prize too highly Cass Gilbert.”

However, the memorial building turned out to be too small to house the large collection of Gilbert material, which was eventually turned over to the Smithsonian Institution, Library of Congress, Minnesota Historical Society, and other archives. The memorial building was sold as a residence and eventually became the home and dental offices of Dr. Robert Mead.

Quite appropriately, Bob Mead turned into an expert at repairing Cass Gilbert’s auto-

damaged fountain, and often was called upon to do so — using, also appropriately enough, dental epoxy. Dr. Mead even had copies of the fountain’s spouting turtles made so they could be replaced after periodically being stolen by vandals.

Dr. Mead died in 2015 and a year later, his family sold the homestead to the Keeler Tavern Museum, which now uses the building for its offices. Thus, two properties that were one in the 1700s and 1800s were back together again.

Cass Gilbert and many members of his family are buried in a large plot at Fairlawn Cemetery. Oddly enough, only a few dozen feet away is the grave of Ralph Thomas Walker (1889–1973),  designer of dozens of famous skyscrapers whom The New York Times called the “architect of the century.”

Thus, in a small rural cemetery on North Salem Road, containing about 625 graves,  the remains of two of the 20th Century’s greatest city architects rest in peace, each beneath relatively modest stones.

Florene Maine: 

Queen of Antiques

Few people in Ridgefield knew the value of antiques like Florene Maine.

“In addition to their historical importance, antiques are the best investment you can make,” Florene Maine said in a 1976 interview. “I have among my customers stockbrokers who consider a good antique a better investment than the stock market.”  

Born in 1896, she was a native of Indiana. Her mother and grandmother were involved in antiques, and with mom’s help, Florene Cansler sold her first antique at the age of 5 — a jewel box that had belonged to the Duchess de Orleans. The buyer, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, paid 4,000 times what she had paid for it.  

She soon decided that antiques would be her profession. She married Bruno Jalmar Maine, art director of Radio City Music Hall, and came to Ridgefield in 1928, opening a shop on Route 7, and later in life, living and selling at Red Petticoat Antiques on West Lane. 

She eventually became one of New England’s leading antiques dealers, and lectured not only on antiques but early American history. 

She also had many notable clients. When Dean Rusk was secretary of state under Kennedy and Johnson, Mrs. Maine helped furnish the reception rooms in the Department of State. Her customers included Governor and Mrs. Nelson Rockefeller, musician Benny Goodman,  actor Paul Newman, and Sara Ann Delano Roosevelt, mother of President Franklin Roosevelt. 

She retired in 1976 and died in 1980 at the age of 83.

Geraldine Farrar: 

A Great Human Being

Geraldine Farrar was still a teenager when she became a star, heralded around the world for her voice as well as her acting ability.

One of the Metropolitan Opera’s greatest lyric sopranos, Miss Farrar had spent 16 years with the company, singing the leads in Madama Butterfly, Carmen, Tosca, and many other productions.   

“Miss Farrar was the last of a great operatic tradition set by such stars as Enrico Caruso and Antonio Scotti,” The Ridgefield Press said in her obituary. 

Born in Massachusetts in 1882, she was a daughter of Sidney Farrar, a 19th Century professional baseball player with the Philadelphia Phillies, who later lived on North Salem Road—Farrar Lane is named after him, not his more famous daughter. He bought the place in 1923 and the story about his moving in said ”His daughter, Geraldine Farrar, will arrive later, it is expected.” 

Sidney Farrar and his wife, both church singers, sent Geraldine to singing lessons when she was 12.  

In 1901, she made her debut with the Royal Opera in Berlin and so impressed Lilli Lehmann that the star took Miss Farrar as a pupil. She went on to sing with companies all over Europe. She made her acclaimed debut with the Met in 1906, and over the following years, shared leading roles

with such greats as Caruso, Scotti, and Louise Homer. She knew many notables in the arts, including Camille Saint-Saens, Giacomo Puccini, Mark Twain, Sarah Bernhardt, Nellie Melba, Fritz Kreisler, and Jules Massenet. She was also the lover of Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini (who twice performed in Ridgefield). She made several films, including Carmen and Joan of Arc. 

When she sang her last role in 1922, “a cheering crowd surged forward shouting her name,” The Press said. “Outside 40th Street between Broadway and Eight was a solid mass of fans.”  

For years, recordings of her music were produced, and are still being sold today.

She wrote two autobiographies, “Geraldine Farrar: The Story of An American Singer” (1916) and “Such Sweet Compulsion” (1938). Several biographies have also been written.

In 1924, a year after her parents moved here, she acquired Fairhaven, a large home on West Lane. In 1954, she decided to downsize and, with her companion of 50 years, Sylvia Blein, moved to a much smaller place on New Street.

During her years in Ridgefield, Farrar didn’t just twiddle her thumbs. She did  much work for

the Red Cross, and during the war, drove for the American Women’s Voluntary Services and served on the War Price and Ration Board. She also helped the Girl Scouts and served as finance chairman of the organization. She sang at fund-raising concerts for Danbury Hospital in the late 1930s.

On the night she died in 1967 at the age of 85, the Metropolitan Opera was performing Madama Butterfly, an opera Farrar had starred in nearly 100 times. That week, The Press suggested her epitaph might be a sentiment she herself once expressed: “Far more important than being a great artist is to become a great human being.” 

Melbert Cary: 

A Man of Many Parts

Melbert Cary was — as they used to say — a man of many parts. He was a lawyer, a politician, a novelist, a historian, a leader in medical education, and a philanthropist. He came close to being the third Ridgefielder elected governor of the state. But one of his more unusual, and probably least successful “parts” was being an inventor.

Cary’s namesake son and his daughter in law gained even more notoriety for their accomplishments and gifts than he did.

Melbert Brinckerhoff Cary Sr. was born in 1852 in Racine, Wisc. By his own account, after graduating from Princeton, Phi Beta Kappa, in 1872, he “spent a year cattle-ranching in the far West.” He returned to Wisconsin, practiced law briefly in Milwaukee and then became assistant general solicitor of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway until 1882. He moved to New York in 1883 and formed his own law firm, which grew into Cary, Miller and McEwen.  His specialty was railroads.

Cary came to Ridgefield in the early 1890s, owning “Wildflower Farm” along both sides of

lower West Lane. His mansion stood atop a hill across from Cedar Lane. The spread included a sizable farm on the north side of West Lane; two barns on the property were later converted into houses at 334 and 336 West Lane.

Cary quickly became active in the Democratic party in Connecticut, and served as chairman of the Democratic State Central Committee for several years. 

In 1902, a year after Republican Governor George E. Lounsbury of Ridgefield left office, Cary ran for governor on the Democratic ticket.  He lost to a Meriden Republican named Abiram Chamberlain, but remained a power in state politics as well as influential in Ridgefield goings on. He was a delegate to the 1908 Democratic National Convention that nominated the golden-throated William Jennings Bryan for president. (Bryan spoke in Ridgefield in 1907 — “Main Street looked as though half the population of the town had turned out,” The Ridgefield Press reported. However, Bryan was as successful in his bid as Cary had been in his.)

Cary was also a writer, whose four books included “The Connecticut Constitution” (1900) and “The Woman Without A Country” (1934) and, when he was in his 80s, the novel, “Back Stage” (1938). 

His wife, the former Julia Metcalf, was active in the woman suffrage movement.

Although Cary moved around in New York’s high society, hewas  evidently in touch with the ordinary folk of Ridgefield. When the son of a local farmer ran into trouble with the New York City police and, with his wife, was thrown in jail, Cary volunteered his services to rescue them.

It was like an episode from “Downton Abbey” or “Upstairs, Downstairs.” In 1896 young newlyweds David and Susan Dann were held in Manhattan’s notorious “Tombs” prison, accused of involvement in the theft of silverware from a banker’s Manhattan townhouse where Susan worked as a maid. Susan was a recent immigrant from Ireland and David was a poor housepainter who grew up on a Ridgefield farm.

There was no real evidence that Susan or her husband had anything to do with the stolen silver, yet they, along with Susan’s sister, spent 10 days in the Tombs.  “They put [her and her sister] in with the lowest kind of women,” Susan told a newspaper. “We heard things that were terrible to us, and were compelled to associate with women who were awful. They said things that men would not say.”

David Dann’s father, Levi, was a farmer who lived near Cary’s Ridgefield mansion. He knew Cary was a prominent New York lawyer and approached him about helping his son. Cary did so immediately, and soon told The New York Times, “I have gone through the evidence … and the only way it connects Susie Dann with the silver is through the fact that she had charge of it. The only way her husband is connected with it is through the fact that the morning after the robbery, he walked with her in public for an hour ... Yet our clients were kept in jail ten days. It was simply an outrage.”

Cary not only got the Danns freed from prison and the charges dropped, but also sued Susan’s employer, blaming the banker for convincing the police that she should be arrested.

(The unusual story of David and Susan Dann is recounted in much more detail in “Wicked Ridgefield, Connecticut,” a book published by The History Press in 2016.)

Cary became quite involved in the stock market in which he invested heavily. However,

according to Ridgefield historian Dick Venus, “there were times in the early part of [the 20th] century when the world of finance sent out some unmistakable signals that it might be ailing. Then came the Panic of 1907 and 1908, and Mr. Cary was one of those who suffered serious financial setbacks.”

This probably led him to decide to sell his Ridgefield mansion in 1909. However, he held onto a couple of hundred acres of the estate with the hope of one day building a new house for himself. That never happened, and his home remained Manhattan, at first on Broadway and finally in the Hotel Gotham on Fifth Avenue (now called The Peninsula New York).

Cary remained active in community service. He served for 12 years as president of the Board of Trustees of New York Homeopathic Medical College, now New York Medical College, and 20 years as president of the board of the college’s Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital, the first teaching hospital in the United States to be owned by a medical college.

When Cary retired from the law in 1926, he was apparently able to spend more time with other pursuits. He sought — and successfully obtained — a patent on a rather unusual  lamp device that, as he put it, “can be easily and quickly attached to a vase or other receptacle without requiring any preliminary adjustment of or mutilation of the article to which the device is attached.” Simply put, it was a pair of opposing light-bulb sockets, attached to a flange that fit over the top of vases or jars so one could instantly create a decorative lamp. The top socket held the bulb that would provide illumination and support the shade while the bottom socket’s bulb would make the vase glow and provide weight to keep the array from tipping over. 

In 1926, two years after he applied, the U.S. Patent Office granted patent number 1,573,805 for the “lamp structure.” It is not known whether the device was ever subsequently marketed, successfully or otherwise.

When Cary died in 1946 at the age of 93, he was the oldest living Princeton graduate. 

Melbert Cary’s son, Melbert Jr. (1892-1941), who had lived at Wildflower Farm as a boy and was known as “Mike,” became even more famous than his father. The Yale graduate was a celebrated graphic artist and an expert on printing, who brought many European typefaces to America and wrote books on the printing and type.  

Cary founded the Press of the Woolly Whale, which republished out-of-print titles that he felt should be reintroduced to the public. 

His own professional library of 20,000 volumes was donated to Rochester Institute of Technology, where it is today considered “one of America's premier libraries on the history and practice of printing.” For many years, RIT has had the position of “Melbert B. Cary, Jr. Distinguished Professor,” and the school periodically presents the “Melbert B. Cary Jr. Award”  to those “who have advanced technology in graphic communications and related industries.”

One of his more unusual interests was antique and unusual playing cards, and his collection of more than 2,600 packs of cards was donated to Yale where it is now at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

 In 1923, Melbert Jr. married Mary Flagler (1901-1967), a wealthy granddaughter of Henry Flagler, who with the Rockefellers founded Standard Oil and who was largely responsible for developing Florida by creating railroad lines and towns there. Melbert and Mary eventually acquired a 1,8000-acre estate outside Millbrook, N.Y., which they turned into a vast wildlife refuge called Cannoo Hills. In her will Mary Flagler Cary established a charitable trust to oversee the estate, which became the Cary Arboretum. Today it is the Cary Institute for Ecosystem Studies, a nonprofit institution that has 120 staff members and maintains one of the largest ecological research programs in the world. Its areas of expertise include disease ecology — especially tick-related diseases, urban ecology, forest health, and freshwater ecology.

Mary also made another, rather astounding gift: She left $50 million — about $365 million in today’s dollars — to create a trust fund for the State of New York. She said the money could be used for any public, religious, scientific, charitable or educational purposes. The only restrictions were that the trust could not “carry on propaganda or otherwise attempt to influence legislation” and that it “not participate in or intervene in any political campaign on behalf of any candidate for public office.”

In 1936, Melbert Cary’s Wildflower Farm became the home of another New York lawyer, William Matheus Sullivan, who called it Dunrovin and built a small theater on the property where Metropolitan Opera stars would periodically perform. The opera house is still there, but the mansion burned to the ground late one Sunday night in 1977 after the owners left a bucket of hot fireplace ashes on the porch and returned to their New York City home.

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. 

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.