Mary Linda Bradley: 
Free-Spirited & Adventurous

Whether it was with four legs or two wings, Mary Linda Bradley liked being out in the open air. The poet and writer loved horses, dogs and flying and became one of the earliest women pilots, owning her own plane.

A descendant of Col. Philip Burr Bradley, a Revolutionary War leader and prominent 18th Century Ridgefielder, Mary Linda Bradley was born in 1886 in Chicago. Her father was William Harrison Bradley, a United States diplomat who brought the family with him on assignments in Italy, England and Canada. His first wife, Mary, was killed in a train crash, and his second wife, Carolina “Carrie” Lawson, decided to name their daughter after William’s first wife.

“Don’t you think it was sporty of my mother to name me after her?” Mary Linda once told a friend. 

Shortly after the turn of 20th Century, the Bradleys moved to Ridgefield, establishing an estate off Peaceable Hill Road called Felsenberg — possibly built on land that William’s great grandfather, Colonel Bradley, had once owned. When World War I broke out, both Mary Linda and her sister Marion became active in community efforts on the home front. Mary Linda founded the local chapter of the National League for Women’s Service, and was its first chairman. The league did projects to support the troops. Both sisters were athletic, organizing and playing on the Katoonah Basket Ball Club, a woman’s team that was captained by Mary Linda and coached by a young Francis D. Martin before the war.

After the war, Bradley built her own house, called Ackworth Cottage, off West Mountain Road, and although she later lived part of the year in Arizona or California, she always considered this her home. (Ackworth was the Yorkshire home of  the Rev. Thomas Bradley   [1597-1673], chaplain to King Charles I, and an ancestor of the Bradleys of Connecticut.)

Educated at private schools in Europe and North America, Mary Linda Bradley began writing while in Ridgefield, especially poetry but also natural history essays. Two books of her poetry were published. One, Reconnaissances, produced in 1937 by William Harrison Press, included a two-act poetic play, “Delusion,” set on an ocean liner and in Manhattan.

Her natural history interests included birds, and she wrote a number of pieces for publications about her observations. One, which appeared in a California periodical in the early 1930s, told of a problem that one bird caused.

“The viborous innocent villain,” she wrote, “was the Red-Naped Sapsucker, who gouged the trunk of the old Acacia by my west window, from dawn to dusk. The sap must have been worth a bird singing commercial, because one hopeful hummingbird took up his orbit around the tree and when the Red Nape withdrew for a ‘breather,’ the hummer rushed to the cracks and holes and satisfied his thirst till Red Nape returned.

“Then, amusingly, the sparrows came to the feast and tried to hover like tiny jeweled helicopters! At this point, I began to be worried about the poor Acacia, which was trying to become a golden tent, but was losing too much sap! So, ruthlessly, we decided to bind its wounds with friction-tape. The free lunch was over!”

She also liked horses. She had a postcard made of a picture of herself in 1926 with a favorite horse named Bird, whom she described on the back as “almost as clever and sassy as she looks.”

Over the years Bradley penned many letters to The Ridgefield Press, few of them of the warm and fuzzy type. In 1960, when town officials were considering a petition to change the name of the road bordering her family’s old estate from Standpipe Road to Peaceable Hill Road, she expressed her opposition and exclaimed, “How titsy-pootsy can one get!”

She also self-published a 188-page autobiography, The Fifth Decade, produced in 1947 by the Arts & Crafts Press of San Diego, probably mostly for family and friends. It was illustrated with black-and-white photos, printed on photographic paper and tipped into the binding, with captions hand-inscribed by Bradley herself. (A copy appeared on eBay in 2004 for $100. The owner called it “a very personal account of a free-spirited, adventurous single woman meeting middle age head-one — and on her own terms. It is also a record of a fledgling female pilot in an era when most American women were confined to roles as housewives and mothers.”

In the book, she describes herself as “the first Ridgefield she-pilot and the third to be licensed in Arizona.” Around 1930, at her part-time residence in Arizona, she had bought an airplane, naming it “Merry Robin.” At first she hired another early female pilot to be her aerial chauffeur, but by 1932  she had earned her private pilot’s license and was flying the Western skies on her own. She traveled extensively, both in her plane and on land, often accompanied by her dog, Arizona Pete. 

Mary Linda Bradley died at Ackworth Cottage in 1966 at the age of 79. She had been in poor health for many years and spent the last two years bed-ridden.

In late September six years earlier Linette Burton, a reporter for The Press, wrote Bradley, asking to do an interview for the newspaper. Bradley declined, saying “I am too full of wheezes to talk” and adding that “I feel my occupations in and enjoyment of life are of no specific interest to my fellow townsmen.” However, explaining that she admired Burton’s writing and was flattered by her offer, she said she would like to get together just to chat. “Please come to see me when the leaves are worth looking at,” she wrote.

 The Selling Of Eight Lakes

“Nowhere else in these United States is there such an abundance of fabulous, natural scenery,” boasts a remarkable brochure, published around 1955 to promote the Eight Lakes Estates and clearly aimed at dwellers of New York City. “That long dreamed of estate you have only wished you could afford is here NOW at a price you can afford.”

The fabulous abundance consisted of 1,750 acres — “over three times the size of Central Park” — spread across two states and including “eight magnificent, crystal clear, fresh water lakes, miles of lakefront studded with stately trees, hundreds of picturesque lakeview sites, divine locations high in the hill-tops [and] thickly wooded hideouts near streams.”

It was a masterpiece of real estate hype, aimed at “Mr. Family Man” who wants to make his “dreams come true.”

At times during the mid- to late 1950's, as many as 20 salesmen for Eight Lakes were

working in Ridgefield over weekends, selling houses and lots in the development. 

As we know two-thirds of a century later, not all of this real estate dream came true — though a lot of it did.

Only the Connecticut portion of Eight Lakes Estates was ever developed — today’s Mamanasco Road, First through 12th Lanes, Walnut Hill Road, Birch Court, Rock Road, Scott Ridge Road, Blue Ridge Road, Caudatowa Drive, Sleepy Hollow Road, Round Lake Road, and the west ends of both Barrack Hill and Old Sib Roads.

Those roads served more than 400  lots carved out of around 500 of 1,750 advertised acres. Virtually all of the New York side of the old Port of Missing Men resort — some 1,250 acres — was acquired by Westchester County and turned into the Mountain Lakes Park in North Salem.

Which means that only three of the “eight lakes” are in the Eight Lakes Estates: Lake Mamanasco, Hidden Lake, and Round Pond (which the real estate folk deemed too lowly a name and changed to Round Lake; fortunately, the town has stuck with the original 1700s name of Round Pond).

The other “lakes” in New York — mostly big ponds — are Mirror, Laurel, Pine, Deer, and

Rippowam, as the brochure points out. Lake Rippowam is in fact large enough to be a lake, but not a lot of the old Eight Lakes Estates property bordered it.

The language of the brochure is seducing, especially to anyone tired of the noise, grit and crowding of 1950s New York. 

“Astonishingly low prices prevail on lakefront estates bedecked with beautiful trees and estates nestling midst Pines and Cedars overlooking the lakes,” it promises. “Superb low-cost locations are limitless even to hideouts for cabins, near lakes and streams. Those wishing to live real high-up will find Sky-toppers in the famous ‘Blue Hills’ or along a road which winds up to great heights.” (There is no record of a place in Ridgefield known as the Blue Hills, much less a place famous as it, but the developers named Blue Ridge Road apparently to celebrate those unknown hills.)

The map in the brochure will bring back memories of the days, before the Interstates, when

the way to get from New York to Ridgefield was via the Saw Mill River Parkway — complete with the infamous Hawthorne Traffic Circle — or the Hutch to the Merritt. Note that the “model house” for Eight Lakes was on the west side of Mamanasco Road.

The brochure includes quite a bit of history of the property, which is fairly accurate. However, one might not term it a “Believe It Or Not” fact that millionaires once owned the land; much of Ridgefield in the early 20th Century was estates owned by millionaires.

All that said, Eight Lakes proved to be a great place for many families looking for an affordable home in the suburbs that wasn’t on a cookie-cutter lot. Countless kids grew up in the Eight Lakes neighborhoods with plenty of woods, streams and ponds to explore, and much fresh air to breathe.

It may not have been “another Tuxedo Park,” but it’s been a wonderful place for a simple country home.

Leopold and Sady Weiss:

Why Houdini Wasn’t Happy

For decades stories have circulated about Houdini’s visits to his brother in Ridgefield. Some reports have gone so far as to maintain the world-famous magician practiced his underwater escape tricks in a pool at the grand Sunset Hall estate on Old West Mountain Road.

However, there is evidence Houdini wouldn’t have set foot in that house, which belonged not to his brother, but to his hated sister-in-law.

The brother was Dr. Leopold Weiss, a pioneer in the field of medical radiology. The sister-in-law was Leopold’s wife, Sadie — later Sady, a Manhattan fashion executive who owned Sunset Hall for six years.

Born in 1877 in Appleton, Wisc., Leopold David Weiss was the youngest of six children of Rabbi Mayer Weisz and his wife, Cecilia, natives of Budapest. One of the five Weisz brothers, Ehrich, went by the name of Harry Houdini. 

Dr. Weiss, who was called Leo, became what some reports say was the first radiologist in New York City. He started his practice from Houdini’s brownstone in Harlem shortly after the turn of the 20th Century. 

The Weiss family members were close and often gathered together. But in 1917, the family was in turmoil.

Sadie Glanz Weiss had divorced her husband, Nathan Weiss — brother of Leopold and brother of Houdini — and 10 days later, she married Leopold.

Houdini was heartbroken as well as furious over what he considered scandalous mistreatment of Nathan.

“The precise details of the family drama are not entirely known, but Houdini's displeasure

took many forms, including cutting Leo’s head out of family portraits and forbidding his burial in the Weiss family plot,” said John Cox, a longtime student of Houdini.

Accounts do not specifically mention Leo’s being disinherited, but do say that Houdini’s will specified that none of his estate should “ever directly or indirectly go to Sadie Glantz Weiss, the divorced wife of my brother Joseph Nathan Weiss, and the present wife of my brother, Dr. Leopold Nathan Weiss.”

Sadie Weiss, who by 1928 was spelling her name Sady, was a New York City fashion designer and executive. The daughter of Hungarian parents, she was born in New York and married Nathan Weiss in 1899 when she was about 22 years old.

In 1912, she and her sister, Anna Bruck, established the Bruck-Weiss Millinery, which by 1918 was “the largest exclusive millinery shop to be found on either side of the Atlantic,” according to a contemporary trade publication.  The firm owned a 10-story building just off Fifth Avenue, and occupied most of the floors, selling not only hats, but other articles of clothing for wealthy women.

“The interiors are finished in old ivory, after the period of Louis XVI, with reproductions of needlework tapestry, and festooned crystal chandeliers of the same period,” the “Illustrated Milliner” reported. “Rich Chinese rugs ornament the beautiful parquet floors, while the curtains are of extraordinarily fine Belgium laces…”

Sady, who was referred to in the press as “Madame Weiss,” believed women should have a clothing philosophy. “Until a woman has a well-established idea in her mind of just what clothes she can wear, she is unsettled, drifting,” she said in a 1928 interview published in newspapers across the country. “A clothes philosophy is almost as important in a woman’s life as a career.”

In November 1924, Sady Weiss bought the Ridgefield mansion of James Stokes, a place today called Sunset Hall. A Manhattan banker who was a pillar of the YMCA movement, Stokes had built the huge, 10-bedroom house on Old West Mountain Road in 1912 and died six years later. Sady Weiss purchased the place from a niece who had inherited it. Houdini’s brother Leopold was not mentioned in the deed or in any deeds involving the property.

Sady Weiss held on to the house until 1931, when she sold it to Ruth Cutten. 

Meanwhile, the same year Sady bought Sunset Hall, Houdini wrote his will, excluding her

and perhaps Leopold from any inheritance.

On Oct. 31, 1926, Houdini died of peritonitis from a burst appendix.

Thus, there were less than two years when Houdini could have visited Sunset Hall — between December 1924 and his death on Halloween, 1926.

For all this period, he is known to have hated Sady Weiss and was reported to be estranged from his brother as well.

Why then would he have visited Sunset Hall — Sady’s house?

Houdini scholar Cox has also found evidence that Leopold may not have thought much of his brother Houdini. An interview with a woman who knew Leopold’s office nurse revealed that Dr. Weiss did not speak well of his brother. She reported Leopold had said Houdini “was an embarrassment to the family because he was a magician.” 

Cox wondered about this. “Possibly Leo felt entertainment was a lowly profession compared to his own,” he wrote. “Or maybe the hard feelings between the brothers went both ways. But it’s fascinating to hear what Leo had to say because, until now, we’ve only heard Houdini’s side of the feud.” 

Compounding the mystery of whether or why Houdini would visit Ridgefield is the account of Richard E. Venus, former Ridgefield town historian. In a Dick’s Dispatch column in The Ridgefield Press in 1987, Venus wrote that Houdini and his wife, Bess, “spent many weekends at his brother’s Ridgefield home. I recall seeing him as he stopped in the local stores on a Saturday morning. On one occasion, I sold Houdini a Ridgefield Press.”

Adding still more to the mystery is the fact that Sady and Leopold themselves were not on the best of terms during the 1920s, according to testimony during their 1932 divorce proceedings.

The divorce battle was ugly. Leopold, who brought the suit against Sady, charged that she would spend weekends at Sunset Hall and another country home she had in Ossining with either of two boyfriends 20 years younger than her. Sady’s butler told Leopold he often served Sady and her lover breakfast in bed. One boyfriend was named “Locke Lorraine,” according to the suit.

Leopold also:

• Maintained that he gave Sady the money to establish Bruck-Weiss, and that in return she agreed to pay him $8,000 a year for life, but did so for only three years.
• Claimed he was broke now and wanted not only the promised payments, but also half of the $115,000 she got from selling Sunset Hall. (That selling price equals about $2.1 million in today’s dollars).

Sady in response charged that:

• Leopold “persuaded her to get a divorce” from Nathan Weiss, and then turned around and refused to marry her unless she gave him $100,000 and half her interest in Bruck-Weiss.
• Soon after they were married, he started abusing her and threatened to ruin her clothing business. “To keep the peace she agreed to give him $8,000 a year for life and did pay him that for three years,” said a newspaper report of the divorce proceedings.
• Leopold finally walked out on her in 1930, despite the fact that throughout their marriage, she had supported him with her money.

After their divorce — whose settlement is unknown — Sady lived on West 59th Street in Manhattan until her death in 1935 at the age of 54.

Leopold continued his radiology practice until 1949 when he retired because of increasing blindness — due, it’s been suggested, to his exposure to x-rays. He eventually began running low on money and on Oct. 5, 1962, Dr. Weiss jumped off the roof of his apartment building, killing himself. He was 70 years old. 

“Leo left all his worldly goods to his long-time, former nurse, Marguerite Elliott,” John Cox reported. “But Marguerite’s husband forbad her from accepting, so all that was left of the last living Weiss sibling was thrown out.”

 Even though Houdini had supposedly banned him from the family plot in Machpelah Cemetery in Queens 38 years earlier, Leopold was buried there. 

 The whereabouts of Sady’s remains are unknown.

Philip Wagoner, 

Underwood’s Overlord

Philip D. Wagoner may have built one of the largest mansions in town, but the man who produced millions of typewriters and was a pioneer in making digital computers, spent most of his Ridgefield years living in his own caretaker’s cottage.

Wagoner came to Ridgefield around 1932, when he was head of a group of companies that included Underwood Typewriter. He acquired a spread on West Mountain on the shore of Round Pond that included a residence and a large icehouse used to store ice cakes in the days before the electric refrigerators. Wagoner tore down both the house and ice house and built a large — some said “pretentious” — two-story mansion that was reputed to have cost about $100,000 at that time ($1.4 million in 2016 dollars). The stone facing on the house and entrance gates was imported from France. He called the estate “Oreneca,” after one of the American Indians who sold Ridgefield to the first settlers.

In 1940, about seven years after Philip and Effie Wagoner moved into their new house,  Effie died at the age of 64. “Although he recovered from the shock of this loss, it broke his spirit, which had led him to erect his great home here, and thereafter he spent the major part of his Ridgefield days in the seven-room foreman’s house on the property, which was a replica of the larger 27-room mansion,” wrote Karl S. Nash, former editor and publisher of The Ridgefield Press.

Born in 1876 in Somerville, N.J.,  Philip Dakin Wagoner came from a family that were among  the settlers of Staten Island, N.Y.

He graduated in 1896 from Stevens Institute of Technology; his thesis was typewritten, which was very unusual at the time, according the Journal of Business Education. Perhaps it presaged his future career.

Soon after graduation, he joined General Electric where he specialized in making military

products — airplane engines and artillery casings. In 1918 he became president of the Elliott-Fisher Company which soon merged with several firms, including the Underwood Typewriter Company, eventually operating under the name of Underwood Corporation.

Since the 1870s, John Thomas Underwood had been making typewriter ribbons and carbon paper, much of which supplied users of Remington typewriters. Then Remington decided to make ribbons themselves. That prompted John Underwood to fire back: Starting in 1896, he began making typewriters. In 1900 he launched the No. 5, which became the top-selling typewriter in the world; more than two million were made by 1920, by which time Wagoner had taken over the operation. (Underwoods were still being used in the newsroom of the Ridgefield Press in the early 1990s.)

Editor Nash himself used a No. 5 most of his journalistic life — he was a two-finger typist, but very fast with both. He recalled in the 1960s that “although Wagoner did not participate actively in the town’s affairs, he early made himself known in the town hall, particularly in the assessors’ and selectmen’s offices. On one occasion he presented several new Underwood typewriters for use in town offices. It pained him somewhat to see other brands in use officially in his home town.”

However, Nash added, Wagoner “thought the old No. 5 used by the editor of The Press at that time was certainly not worn out.” 

Under Wagoner’s command, Underwood operated the largest typewriter factory in the world, located in Hartford. The plant could turn out a typewriter a minute.

His favorite motto, “It Can Be Done,” was proven during World War II when Wagoner led the conversion of that huge typewriter factory into one that produced M1 carbines for the military.

Long before electronic computers, Wagoner saw the need for computing machines that could  

help businesses with functions like accounting and payroll. He established the Underwood Computing Machine Company in the late 1920s, making mechanical calculating machines. By the early 1950s, Underwood had acquired the business of the Electronic Computer Corporation, and began manufacturing digital computers under the trademark, Elecom. Its “low-cost digital computer” in 1952 consisted of two sizable desk units with an output of “20 digits per second of computed data plus 14 digits of descriptive information.” This machine weighed 750 pounds, had 160 vacuum tubes, required two kilowatts of power, and cost $17,000 ($153,000 today).  Its “average error free running period” was six hours.

At digital computers, Underwood lost out to International Business Machines and others, whose desktop computers eventually helped spell the end of the typewriter, too. The last Underwoods were made in the 1980s, after the company merged with Olivetti, another typewriter manufacturer.

Wagoner retired in 1956 after 60 years in the business world and died in 1962 at the age of 86, still maintaining his chief residence in Ridgefield.

Oreneca later became the home of Harrison and Jean Horblit, whose profiles also appear here.  

Dr. John G. Perry: 

Letter-Writing Civil War Surgeon

A young Harvard-educated surgeon from a well-to-do Boston family experienced the bloody horrors and the amazing heroism of the Civil War and described what he saw in letters to his fiancee and then bride. Forty years later, his wife turned dozens of those letters into a book that is still widely quoted — and reprinted — a century later.

  Dr. John G. Perry underwent experiences — including being trapped in the New York City Draft Riots — that seem unimaginable today. He later became a top New York City surgeon and had a summer home — the predecessor of Sunset Hall — on West Mountain for more than 20 years. He was one of many New York City physicians  around the turn of the 20th Century who found Ridgefield a healthful place to take a break. 

John Gardner Perry was born in 1840 in Boston. His father, Dr. Marshall Sears Perry (1805-1859), was a well-respected community physician while his mother, Abby Stimson Perry (1816-1857) “exerted a particularly strong influence on the moral and spiritual character of her son,” according to a 1918 biography. 

While his parents oversaw a top-notch education for their boy that included private schooling and attending Boston Latin high school, they also grounded him in the “real world” by sending him each summer to work on a farm. He said later that his love of nature and country life came from these summers; it may have led to his decision to buy an old farm in Ridgefield.

Perry had always been interested in the profession of his father and, as a boy, was called “the little doctor.” In 1858 he entered Harvard College but soon transferred  to study at Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School. He then entered Harvard Medical School.

While he was studying medicine, the Union Army issued a call for surgeons and, wishing to serve his country and gain surgical experience, Perry enlisted in April 1862 at the age of 22 as a contract assistant surgeon — because he did not yet have his medical degree, he could not be  commissioned.  

He was sent to northern Virginia where he treated countless badly injured soldiers, including Confederate prisoners. By August  Perry fell ill from the exhaustion of working almost non-stop

under trying combat conditions, and was sent home. During this break he finished his Harvard medical school studies and graduated with the class of 1863. He also married his longtime sweetheart, fellow Bostonian Martha Derby Rogers, in March of 1863. He returned to the war a month later, now a commissioned officer in the 20th Massachusetts Regiment.

During his periods of service, Perry wrote scores of letters to his fiance and then bride, describing his experiences. Forty years later, Martha Perry came across them in “a much weather-beaten trunk, which since the Civil War has travelled from one attic to another.”

She got permission from her husband to put together the book, “Letters from A Surgeon of the Civil War.” Published in 1906, the book was widely read, has been often quoted by Civil War historians over the past century, and is today still available in many reprint editions. 

“Letters” offers a well-written, frequently dramatic look at the often heroic and horrible results of combat. It also describes in non-technical language how the wounded were treated. 

Here is a sampling of Perry’s experiences:

• “I hear that the surgeon who served before me, while dressing a [Confederate] soldier’s wound, laid the knife for a moment on the bed. The man seized it and made a lunge at the doctor, but instead of killing him, as he had intended, only ran it into his arm; whereupon the doctor instantly shot him. I suspect that the surgeon may have been rough in this instance, possibly intentionally so; I am careful, however, not to leave my instruments within reach of these prisoners, although they seem friendly and I do not fear them. —May 18, 1862, Chesapeake Hospital at Fortress Monroe
  
• “This afternoon I collected all my convalescents in the kitchen of the cottage, placed them about a blazing fire — for it was chilly and raining hard outside — and started the singing of Methodist hymns. The music caught like an epidemic, and soon from every side came doctors, nurses, patients, negroes, until we had a rousing chorus. All of them sang with their whole souls, each one asking for his favorite hymn, and the concert ended with ‘Old Hundred.’ How I did enjoy it!” — June 15, 1862, Chesapeake Hospital
  
• “A new contingent to-day of sick and wounded; in fact, the men arrived in such numbers that we laid them on the grass and dressed their wounds there. I was obliged to perform an operation on one man and cut off two of his fingers. He sat up perfectly straight and did not wince a particle. I called him a ‘man,’ for he truly deserved the title, though he, poor fellow, was a mere boy of eighteen years.” —July 1, 1862, Chesapeake Hospital
  
• “Home! Oh, how that word still haunts me! Yet I am calmer now and take the situation more reasonably; but an awful sinking at the heart still sweeps over me, and I can easily understand how soldiers die of homesickness.” — Sept. 26, 1863, Culpeper, Va. (Many doctors back then believed both nostalgia and homesickness were deadly, says one scholar who quotes Perry and adds, “The idea that nostalgia and homesickness were lethal illustrates the fact that physically unwounded soldiers suffered debilitating symptoms, making them unfit for duty.”)
  
• “We had a drunken row in camp last night, owing to some villain’s having sold whiskey to the men, and it was one o’clock before the noisy ones were secured and all became quiet. These conscripts, or rather substitutes, behave disgracefully, deserting at every possible chance, even to the enemy. Notwithstanding that two who belonged to our regiment were shot, thirty-four deserted immediately after. One fellow, having failed to escape in the direction of his home, attempted to go over to the enemy, but was prevented. He then shot his finger off, with the hope of being sent to the hospital, where the opportunities for desertion are greater, but the result is that he will serve with one finger less.” —Oct. 1, 1863, Culpeper, Va.
  
• “Colonel Mallon was at that time with me in the rear, for, as the brigade had made a breastwork of the railroad embankment, he could not be in front; and we were lying side by side, flat on the ground, so as to be out of range of the enemy’s guns, when the colonel, who was very fond of Major Abbott, said he must take a look round and see if he were safe. I begged him not to, saying that he would surely be shot, but he answered, ‘No, I cannot stand the suspense, and it will take but a moment’; where upon he rose, and was instantly shot through the abdomen. I dragged him to a little muddy stream — the only place of safety — where the poor fellow lay with water almost running down his throat. He lived until the fight was almost over, and finally expired in my arms. He was just married.” —Oct. 22, 1863, at Auburn, on the banks of the Bull Run River. (In a footnote, Mrs. Perry adds that “Major Abbott was shot through the body, and lived for about eight hours after. He left all his money to the widows and orphans of the regiment.”)
  
• “Exhaustion and confusion, worse confounded. Although perfectly well, I am tired and hot, having slept only a couple of hours out of the last forty… the thought of sleep makes me absolutely silly. I now sit on the ground in the woods, leaning against a log and writing on my knee. I am surrounded by soldiers, bon-fires, and kicking horses — but out of their reach, I assure you; dust is sweeping over me like smoke; my face is black with dirt and perspiration, clothes soiled and torn almost to pieces. I am too tired to sleep, too tired to stand, and should dislike to have you see me just now. Although we have been steadily banging away at each other for a week, neither side has gained much advantage. The enemy has gradually fallen back, but each day shows a bold front.” — May 8, 1864, Cold Harbor, Va.
  
• “It seems to me I am quite callous to death now, and that I could see my dearest friend die without much feeling. This condition tells a long story which, under other circumstances, could scarcely be imagined. During the last three weeks I have seen probably no less than two thousand deaths, and among them those of many dear friends. I have witnessed hundreds of men shot dead, have walked and slept among them, and surely I feel it possible to die myself as calmly as any — but enough of this. The fight is now fearful, and ambulances are coming in with great rapidity, each bearing its suffering load.” —May 24, 1864, near Hanover Junction, Va.
  
• “Every day there is a fight, and every day the hospital is again filled. For
  four days now we have been operating upon the men wounded in one battle, which lasted only about two hours; but the wounds were more serious than those from former engagements. I am heart-sick over it all. If the Confederates lost in each fight the same number as we, there would be more chance for us; but their loss is about one man to our five, from the fact that they never leave their earth-works, whereas our men are obliged to charge even when there is not the slightest chance of taking them. Several times after capturing these works, our troops were unsupported and had to evacuate immediately, with great loss. The men are becoming discouraged, but there is plenty of fight in them yet.”  —June 4, 1864, Cold Harbor, Va.
  
• “We have had thirty of our division wounded to-day by shell which the Confederates manage to throw into our pits, but we are successful in dropping some into theirs also. The heat is intolerable, and the roads are covered with dust six or eight inches deep, which every gust of wind sweeps up, covering everything with a dirty, white coating.” —June 10, 1864, Cold Harbor
  
• “I had to follow the hospital wagons, look after the stores, and attend the sick and wounded in the ambulances. These wagons took the same route as the troops but kept far in their rear. The heat each day was intense, and the dust beyond any expression of which I am capable; but suffice it to say that most of the time I could not even see the head of my horse.” —June 21, 1864 near Petersburg, Va.
  

By the middle of August 1864, Martha Perry had fallen seriously ill and Dr. Perry was discharged from the Army to go home and care for her. After her recovery, the Perrys settled in New

York City where the doctor became  well-known for gynecological surgery and treatment of diseases of the thyroid and pituitary glands. He spent some time as a surgeon at the New York State Woman’s Hospital in Manhattan, now part of Mount Sinai Hospital.

Among his patients in the early 1870s was Salmon P. Chase (1808-1873), chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court who had been secretary of the treasury under Abraham Lincoln.

Perhaps recalling his childhood summers on Massachusetts farms, Dr. Perry decided to buy a summer place in Ridgefield. In March 1891 he paid Stephen Burt $1,100 for about seven acres and buildings on Old West Mountain Road. The Burt family had farmed this land since the 1700s. In the coming years, John and Martha bought more adjacent land.

It is unclear whether Perry built a new country home or modified the old Burt farmhouse, but his “cottage” was considered a showplace at the turn of the 20th Century. A picture of the house, taken in the late 1890s by Marie Kendall, shows a residence more modest than the 22-room mansion called Sunset Hall that is now on the property. Sunset Hall may incorporate parts of the Perrys’ place, or may have been built from scratch by Ambassador James Stokes, who bought the estate from the Perrys — by then including some 27 acres — in 1912.

Dr. Perry was among the physicians cited in an 1894 New York Times article, headlined

“Doctors Recommend Ridgefield.” The writer maintained, “That which has contributed largely to the success of Ridgefield as a summer resort is the influence of many of the prominent physicians of New York, who have induced their patients to pass the summer here.” 

Perry left Ridgefield after he had left New York. By 1912, he and Martha had retired to a

brownstone on Commonwealth Avenue back in their native Boston where she died in 1916 and he in 1926 at the age of 86.

John Perry witnessed untold suffering during the Civil War, but also experienced it himself well north of the battlefields. On June 15, 1863, somewhere near Fredericksburg, Va., he fell from his horse, badly breaking his leg. “Seeing the sole of my boot facing me, I knew what had happened — a multiple fracture,” he wrote Martha.

He was put in an ambulance where, for some reason, he was left for more than 24 hours. “The next day after my accident a wounded officer was placed beside me in the ambulance, who died during the following night, and to add to my torments, the body of this poor man incessantly rolled over and against me, rendering my condition absolutely unendurable.”

After pleading for assistance, he was eventually moved to a railroad freight car and shipped to a hospital in Alexandria, Va. There a surgeon removed his boot, revealing “a black and angry-looking limb,” Perry said.  The surgeon quickly declared, “It is gangrene and the leg must be amputated!"

Perry refused amputation, maintaining his leg was just swollen and dirty. “Determined to save that leg, and to avoid any serious conflict, [I] felt that I must, as it were, escape from the hospital. I called one of the nurses to me, told the circumstances, and asked her to find two trusty

men, whom I would pay liberally, to carry me on my stretcher to a steam-boat bound for Washington. This she agreed to do; and that very evening I was carefully lifted through a window and placed on the deck of a boat which was to sail in the morning.”

Arriving in Washington, he convinced a doctor at a military hospital to send him to New York where he hoped to get his leg properly cared for. In New York, however, “one physician after another was called to set my poor long-suffering leg, but each left with the same response, ‘I am not a surgeon-doctor; call this one and that.’ At last, in sheer desperation, I asked my wife’s brother to find splints, plaster, and bandages, and we, together, set my leg.”

But the tale doesn’t end there. During his recuperation in Manhattan, John and Martha Perry found themselves in the middle of the famous Draft Riots of July 1863 (featured in the 2002 Martin Scorsese film, “Gangs of New York”).

“About noon that same day we became aware of a confused roar,” Martha writes in the book. “As it increased, I flew to the window, and saw rushing up Lexington Avenue, within a few paces of our house, a great mob of men, women, and children; the men, in red working shirts, looking fairly fiendish as they brandished clubs, threw stones, and fired pistols…

“The mass of humanity soon passed, setting fire to several houses quite near us, for no other reason, we heard afterward, than that a policeman, whom they suddenly saw and chased, ran inside one of the gates, hoping to find refuge. The poor man was almost beaten to death, and the house, with those adjoining, burned.”

As the days of rioting continued, she witnessed more fires and “men, both colored and white, were murdered within two blocks of us — some being hung to the nearest lamp-post and others shot,” Martha said. “An army officer was walking in the street near our house, when a rioter was seen to kneel on the sidewalk, take aim, fire, and kill him, then coolly start on his way unmolested.”

At one point, “a crowd of boys arrived with stout sticks, threw stones at our house, called for the ‘niggers,’ and then rushed on. This added to my alarm, I having heard that a rush of street arabs always preceded an attack by the mob. Parties of Irishmen passed and pointed to our house, and a boy ran by shouting, ‘We’ll have fun up here to-night.’ My heart felt overloaded as I looked at John in his helpless condition. What were we to do?”

Fortunately, patrols of citizens and police  protected their neighborhood that night and soon federal troops arrived to quell the riots. John was unaware of much of the goings on; Martha kept him away from windows and did not reveal the seriousness of their situation, feeling it would interfere with his recovery.

Ninety days after he signed himself out on medical leave, Dr. Perry returned to his unit in Washington where he had to meet with the surgeon-general to be approved to return to service. He hid his crutches so that the surgeon-general would not send him to the “invalid corps” and he “managed with great difficulty” to walk unaided across the superior officer’s office. His infirmity went undetected.

Eventually his leg fully healed and for the rest of his life, John Perry’s favorite form of exercise was walking.

(Note: Dr. John Perry was not related to the Perry family that produced three generations of respected Ridgefield physicians, Dr. David Perry, son Dr. Nehemiah Perry and grandson Dr. Nehemiah Perry Jr.) 

Samuel Rubel: 

The Ice and Beer Baron

The life of Samuel Rubel reads like a script to a lively Hollywood drama. A penniless Latvian immigrant arrives in the United States at the turn of the 20th Century, begins peddling ice on the  streets of Brooklyn, soon creates a growing company, has his fiancé arrested for grand larceny and

then marries her, becomes a multi-multi millionaire, is indicted for heavy handed business practices, turns into a beer baron, parties with 10,000 orphans at Coney Island, sees his 32-room home burn to the ground, moves to a mountaintop mansion in Ridgefield, and soon dies. Oh, and his widow marries a supermarket magnate and lives on Fifth Avenue.

Samuel R. Rubel was born in 1881 in Latvia, then part of Russia. Around 1904, he emigrated from Riga and, with barely a dollar to his name, arrived in Brooklyn. “He went to work in a seltzer-bottling establishment and by dint of many privations and much frugality, saved enough to buy a horse and wagon,” The New York Times once reported. “He then sent to Russia for his brother, Isadore, and together they started the Independent Ice Company.”

It was the era of the icebox, long before the days of refrigerators, and Rubel sold blocks of icebox ice to the occupants of the tenements in the East New York section of Brooklyn. The  business grew, expanded to include coal for heating, and within a few years, he and his brother headed the Rubel Coal and Ice Company in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn.

In 1912, The Times published the first of dozens of stories about Rubel — this one probably the most extraordinary. In February, he pressed charges of forgery and grand larceny against Dora Nachumowitz, who had been his bookkeeper. She had also been his fiancé. 

According to The Times, testimony in police court revealed that “Rubel had promised to marry her, but the engagement had been broken. She then sued him for breach of promise. The suit is still pending. Among the witnesses against Miss Nachumowitz was Henrietta Marcus who succeeded her as bookkeeper. Miss Marcus testified to finding that Miss Nachumowitz had indorsed [sic] a check for $50 payable to the company, and had not entered the payment on the company’s books.” 

Nachumowitz was released on $1,000 bond but apparently the charges were soon dropped, for not long afterward, Rubel and Nachumowitz were married. They went on to have two daughters, and remained together until his death. She, in fact, took over his corporation when he died.

The Rubel ice and coal empire, with Samuel now in command, continued to grow. By 1913 his company was worth $2 million and in 1925, 20 years after he’d arrived from Latvia, he’d engineered a $25-million merger with several companies into the huge Rubel Coal and Ice Corporation, which became the largest purveyor of those commodities in the eastern United States. (His newspaper ads in the late 1920s proclaimed that he had “the largest coal and ice office in the world.”) He had 25 ice plants and 15 coal supply yards spread around New York City alone, and was also serving customers in northern New Jersey. Two years later he acquired even more companies, had 40 ice factories, 50 coal yards, 2,000 employees, and a value of nearly $30 million. Rubel would promote his coal with a bit of humor: “One good ton deserves another,” he’d quip.

But legal problems were beginning to arise. In 1927, a court in Brooklyn indicted Rubel and two of his officers for conspiracy to drive competitors out of business. They were also served with 28 separated civil actions.

“Among the intimidations charged to the defendants is a demand that stockholders in the Paerdegat corporation turn over their minority stock of the Rubel corporation to them on pain of being driven out of business,” The Times said. “When this demand was refused, according to the indictment, the Rubel corporation not only refused to sell ice to those stockholders, but prevented them from getting it elsewhere. Free ice was furnished to customers of the Paerdegat corporation to take them away from that corporation.” The cases were eventually settled quietly.

Later that year, one of Rubel’s own partners named Henry J. Senger sued him for $6 million, charging that Rubel had lied to him about the degree of authority Senger would have in the company — Senger said he understood he would be an equal partner when he merged his company with Rubel’s — and that Rubel even had detectives spying on him. The two settled that suit out of court a year later.

In 1930, Rubel filed a libel suit against Jay Carton, an investment broker and one of his minority stockholders, charging that Carton had written a letter to other Rubel minority stockholders in which alleged that Rubel had failed to pay them dividends and forced them to sell their stock at less than book value.

Two years later, Carton himself sued, charging Rubel with mismanaging the company and speculating on Wall Street with its funds, causing the company to lose $20 million. The Rubel company by then was said to be worth $40 million — $715 million in 2016 dollars — of which more than 90% was owned by Samuel Rubel himself. That December, after a two-week trial, the suit was suddenly and unexpectedly settled out of court.

Finally, in 1934, a New York Supreme Court judge sentenced Rubel to 10 days in jail for contempt of court after he had shown a “flagrant disregard of court mandates.” The judge had ordered him to appear in court in connection with another civil suit by a company called Paramount Ice, which had charged Rubel with using illegal tactics to take over their territory and thereby create a monopoly in Brooklyn.  Rubel failed to appear and was sentenced to jail. He appealed and escaped the sentence, but paid a fine.

Meanwhile,  if all those legal battles were not enough, in 1931, two 20-year-old men sent a letter to Rubel’s wife, Dora, threatening to kill her if she did not pay them $10,000. The two were arrested, convicted of attempted extortion and sent to prison.

And then in 1944, during World War II, Rubel’s son-in-law was sentenced to 30 days in jail and fined $1,000 after pleading guilty to 37 charges of violating the wartime Office of Price Administration ceilings on the sale of coal. He had charged five to fifty cents per ton above limits for coal sold to dealers handling small lots of fuel in poor sections of the city. The Times headlined the story: “Coal Chiseler is Jailed.”

By 1927 Rubel was seeing the future of ice beginning to melt. Refrigerators were becoming

more common and his ice sales were declining. So in what some might consider an odd move during Prohibition, he bought the Ebling Brewery Company in the Bronx, noted for making beers “aged in natural rock caves.” Perhaps he saw the repeal of Prohibition as inevitable. Probably he  got a great price in the dry decade, especially after a scandal in which Ebling’s headquarters were padlocked by police after a raid uncovered two truckloads of beer with higher-than-legal alcohol content, The Times reported. At any rate, while Rubel told authorities that he planned to use the factory for making ice cream, he probably instead produced legal “near beer,” which had a very low alcohol content, to keep the operation alive until until Prohibition was repealed in 1933.

The brewery became a big money-maker in the 30s and at least the early 40s. In 1947, Rubel was widely quoted when he decided to take part in voluntary grain rationing to help provide more food for Europe, which was still struggling in the aftermath of World War II. “When it’s a question of beer or bread, our vote is for bread every time,” he told the President’s Food Committee in Washington.

The brewery closed in 1950, the year after Rubel’s death. Many years later, developers leveled the old brewery building and were about to start foundation work for a big apartment complex when they stumbled upon the long-forgotten cluster of caves Ebling had dug a century earlier for aging its beer — 20 feet wide and up to 100 feet deep. Workers — unaware of Ebling’s old motto of “aged in natural rock caves” — at first speculated that the caverns were part of the Underground Railroad or perhaps old bomb shelters. “It was amazing,” said one building official. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

While Rubel and his wife lived in Brooklyn, they had a country estate in Roslyn, on Long Island, consisting of a 32-room home atop a hill surrounded by 50 acres. In April 1946 a workman spread some paint remover on exposed wiring, causing an explosion. The house burned to the ground, destroying more than a million dollars worth of antiques and jewelry as well as a pipe organ worth more than $100,000 ($1.3 million today). “The ruined house presented a strange picture this morning,” The Times said. “In the cellar, which was nearly full of water, hundreds of cases of Scotch whisky and other liquors stood exposed amid charred debris.”

In 1947, Sunny Cutten was trying to sell her house, Sunset Hall, a mansion built in 1912 on Old West Mountain Road in Ridgefield. She even offered it to the United Nations as a possible headquarters site, and they came and took a look. The handsome house included eight bedrooms, six baths, nine fireplaces, a full-sized ballroom, views if the New York City skyline, and many other amenities.  

Burned out on Long Island, Rubel went looking for a new place to the north, came across Sunset Hall, and fell in love with the place. After moving in, he made some of his own entertainment modifications,  including an elaborate stone barbecue in the pool area. However, a more unusual feature was described by town historian Dick Venus. “One of the surprises for his guests were slides, similar to those on a playground, that went from the bedroom windows to the pool,” Venus reported in 1987. “This was before the day of the heated pools so it is expected that those using the slide in the early morning would be fully awake by the time they reached the cool waters of the pool.”

Rubel also lined the walls of his house with art. “It was said that Sam Rubel had so many works  of art that before long, the place began to look like a museum,” Venus wrote. “It sure looked like a museum a few years later when I was selected as one of the appraisers for the estate.”

Samuel Rubel may have been hard-nosed in business, but he was soft-hearted when it came to kids. He supported the work of many orphanages in the city and in 1933, brought more than 10,000 orphans at his own expense to Coney Island for a day of fun to mark the 65th anniversary of the Ebling Brewery. A few months before he died, he donated 1,100 acres — including the 350-acre Lake Stillwater — in the Poconos to the Boy Scouts of America. The land,  now known as Camp Minsi, is still in use today (an inlet on Lake Stillwater has been named “Rubel Cove.”) A longtime member of the Brooklyn Boy Scout Council, Rubel said the gift expressed his gratitude for the opportunities that America had given him.

On April 27, 1949, Rubel suffered a blood clot while at his New York office. Two days later, he died at Sunset Hall. He was 66 years old. 

At his  death, the value of his estate was placed at $8 million ($81 million today). Much of the

contents of Sunset Hall were sold at a 1950 auction at Parke-Bernet Galleries — now Sotheby’s. The catalogue for the sale was 142 pages long.

The estate itself was purchased in 1955 by the Congregation of the Mission of St. Vincent de Paul. It was used as a novitiate to train future Vincentian priests and brothers until the late 1960s when it reverted to a single-family residence. For many years, it was the home of actor Robert Vaughn. 

In 1959, Dora Rubel, then chairman of the board of the Rubel Corporation,  married a recent widower, Louis Daitch, one of the owners of the Daitch Supermarket chain which became known as Shopwell and now, The Food Emporium. She died in 1969 at the age of 74 and is buried next to Samuel in Mount Ararat Cemetery, East Farmingdale, Long Island.

Rubel’s colorful and litigious life included a history-making event with which he had no personal connection, yet bears his name. On Aug. 21, 1934, an armored car, collecting money for deposit in a bank, had stopped at one of Rubel’s ice and coal depots in Brooklyn to pick up a $450 deposit. A gang of hold-up men overpowered the guards and stole $427,000 — nearly $8 million in today’s dollars — from the truck. “The Rubel Ice and Coal Corporation Robbery” was famous for decades as holding the record for the largest amount of money ever taken in a robbery in New York City history.

Dr. Patrick Neligan: 

Raising Health Standards

 In 1970, when Dr. Patrick Neligan was appointed Ridgefield’s director of health, the town was in serious trouble. Scores of septic systems, some only a few years old, were failing because of poor design and improper installation and placement. Wells were being polluted. Restaurants weren’t being inspected. 

“This town needs some drastic changes for the better,” Dr. Neligan warned the selectmen. 

Dr. Neligan was appointed and immediately created the town Health Department. He  hired George Frigon as the town's first full-time, registered sanitarian, and the quality of health-related services immediately began to improve. 

In the 34 years that followed, Dr. Neligan, through the Department of Health,  ensured strict compliance with the state’s public health code. 

In 1985, he also initiated and aggressively promoted the concept of having paramedics provide around-the-clock medical care through the Ridgefield Fire Department, and the next year, they were in place. In 1974, working with the Ridgefield Visiting Nurse Association, he established the annual spring Health Fair that has continued to this day.

A native of Ireland, Patrick Neligan was born in 1926 and graduated from the University College Dublin School of Medicine in 1951. While attending medical college, he was editor of the “National Student,” a literary quarterly published by students of the university.

He came to the United States in 1954 on a fellowship to study at Cornell, sponsored by Sir Daniel Davies, who’d been physician to King George VI, and Sir Alexander Fleming, discoverer of penicillin who was a friend of Dr. Neligan. 

In 1956, he and his wife, Veronica, moved to Ridgefield and he opened a family practice on Main Street. A year later, he joined the staff of Norwalk Hospital and in the years that followed he served on almost every committee of the medical staff and held many offices. In 1975, his peers elected him chief of staff and he served three two-year terms. From 1985 until his retirement in 1995, he was vice president of medical affairs, medical director and director of medical education. 

In 1996, he was given the William J. Tracey M.D. Award for “exemplary commitment and philanthropic leadership” at Norwalk Hospital. 

But retirement from the hospital and the practice of medicine did not mean retirement from promoting and advancing good quality medical care. Dr. Neligan immediately set about solving a problem that had long concerned him: The desperate need for good health care services for the people of South Norwalk. 

No primary care physician had opened a private practice in South Norwalk in decades, and the poverty was so extreme that many people could not even afford transportation to go to the hospital for medical help. 

“I know what it's like to be poor,” he said, recalling his work as a medical student helping the destitute in the slums of Dublin. 

In April 1999, the 10,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art Norwalk Community Health Center opened. Today, an even larger successor facility cares for 12,000 of Norwalk’s residents, and provides over 48,000 medical office visits a year.

“Everyone in this country has a basic and fundamental right to quality health care — a place where the sick, the poor, and the indigent, can get quality health care in their own community,” Dr. Neligan said.

He retired as Ridgefield’s director of health in 2004 after 34 years in the job.

Patrick and Vera Neligan raised a large family in town. They lived at first on Main Street and then, in 1964, moved to an 88-acre estate, which they called Innisfree, off West Mountain Road. 

In 2013, with Dr. Neligan in failing health, the couple moved to the Meadow Ridge community in Georgetown. He died a year later at the age of 88.

When he retired 10 years earlier, Helena Nicholas, head of the RVNA, wrote a tribute to Dr. Neligan, saying he’d “worked tirelessly to promote health and wellness in all settings — he has always been accessible and giving of himself….The community has a great deal for which to thank Dr. Neligan.”

He often volunteered at the RVNA flu clinics, and, Nicholas noted, at one clinic, “we recorded 250 vaccines given in under two hours' time, single handedly, by the good doctor.”

Sarah Bishop: 

The Hermitess on the Mountain

Ridgefield has had not only a hermit, but also a hermitess—though, officially, she was a New Yorker. Sarah Bishop lived in a tiny cave in the side of West Mountain in Lewisboro, N.Y., just across the Ridgefield line westward of Oreneca Road and Sturges Park. 

She arrived during the Revolutionary War, but no one knows why. Several legends explain her appearance. One said she was in love with a sea captain who deserted her. Another maintained that shortly before her wedding day, British troops invaded her Long Island home and a Redcoat raped her. Full of shame or sorrow, she ran away to this cave from which, on a clear day, she could see Long Island and the place where she spent her girlhood days.

Sarah Bishop lived on gifts of food, on wild plants, and on a small garden she kept near her cave, which was little more than a hollow in some rocks. 

A reporter who visited her in 1804 said a few peach trees, as well as beans, cucumbers and potatoes grew in a nearby clearing. There were also said to be many grape vines nearby. 

She also got some necessities from kind-hearted people on West Mountain and in Ridgefield and South Salem, whose villages she periodically visited.

A religious woman, Sarah Bishop sometimes attended services at the First Congregational Church here or the Presbyterian Church in South Salem. At the home of Jared Hoyt in South Salem, she kept some fancy dresses from her youth. She would come down from the mountain, dress at his house, attend church, and return to the house to change back into her “rags.”

One of the places she visited in Ridgefield village was the home of the Rev. Samuel G. Goodrich, minister of the First Congregational Church. The house still stands on High Ridge at the head of Parley Lane. His son, author S. G. Goodrich (whose pen name was Peter Parley), remembered as a boy seeing her. “This strange woman was no mere amateur recluse. The rock—bare and desolate—was actually her home, except that occasionally she strayed to the neighboring

villages, seldom being absent more than one or two days at a time. She never begged, but received such articles as were given to her.

“She was of a highly religious turn of mind, and at long intervals came to our church and partook of the sacrament. She sometimes visited our family—the only one thus favored in town—and occasionally remained over night. She never would eat with us at the table, nor engage in general conversation.

“Upon her early history she was invariably silent; indeed, she spoke of her affairs with great reluctance. She neither seemed to have sympathy for others, nor ask it in return. If there was any exception, it was only in respect to the religious exercises of the family; she listened intently to the reading of the Bible and joined with apparent devotion in the morning and evening prayer.”

Goodrich added, “I have very often seen this eccentric personage stealing into church, or moving along the street, or wending her way through land and footpath up to her mountain home. She always appeared desirous of escaping notice, and though her step was active, she had a gliding movement, which seemed to ally her to the spirit world.”

Sarah Bishop died in 1810. According to George L. Rockwell, “the generally accepted story is that one stormy night, she left the house of one of the neighbors, who lived on the corner of the road leading up to the mountain. Wending her way up the steep mountainside to her cave, she fell, and too weak to continue her way, perished from the cold. She was found among the rocks a short distance from her cave.” She was buried in an unmarked grave in North Salem.

In 1908, Dr. Maurice Enright, a physician who maintained a summer place here, wrote a novel, “The Ridgefield Tavern, A Romance of Sarah Bishop, Hermitess, During the American Revolution.” The book cast Sarah Bishop as the daughter of the operator of the Keeler Tavern (“Ridgefield Tavern”), a photograph of which appears in the book. The account is, of course, fictional.

Goodrich turned to poetry to capture the color of the old hermitess, publishing the following in 1823 under his pen name of Peter Parley, in a Hartford newspaper. It’s a great piece to read aloud on Halloween night.

For many a year the mountain hag

Was a theme of village wonder,

For she made her home on the dizzy crag

where the eagle bore its plunder.

Up the beetling cliff she was seen at night

Like a ghost to glide away;

But she came again with the morning light

From the forest wild and gray.

Her face was wrinkled, and passionless seem’d,

As her bosom—all blasted and dead —

And her colorless eye like an icicle gleam’d,

Yet no sorrow or sympathy shed.

Her long snowy locks, as the winter drift,

On the wind were backward cast;

And her shrivel’d form glided by so swift,

You had said ‘Twere a ghost that pass’d.

Her house was a cave in a giddy rock

That o’erhung a lonesome vale;

And ‘twas deeply scarr’d by the lightning’s shock

And swept by vengeful gale.

As alone on the cliff she musingly sate —

The fox at her fingers would snap;

The crow would sit on her snow-white pate,

And the rattlesnake coil in her lap.

The night-hawk look’d down with a welcome eye

As he stoop’d in his airy swing;

And the haughty eagle hover’d so nigh

As to fan her long locks with his wing.

But when winter roll’d dark his sullen wave

From the west with gusty shock,

Old Sarah, deserted, crept cold to her cave

And slept without bed in her rock.

No fire illumined her dismal den,

Yet a tatter’d Bible she read;

For she saw in the dark with a wizard ken,

And talk’d with the troubled dead.

And often she mutter’d a foreign name,

With curses too fearful to tell,

And a tale of horror—of madness and shame —

She told to the walls of her cell!