Jerry Tuccio: 

1,200 Ridgefield Houses

 An immigrant mason’s son who had tried his hand at butchering meat and selling cars wound up developing more of the town than anyone in its history. 

By his own estimation, Jerry Tuccio  built “about 1,200 houses” in Ridgefield.

“I’m very proud of each one,” the 85-year-old builder said in 2007, a few months before this death. “I put a lot of pride into every house. We used the best materials and had the best construction.”

Success did not come easily, he added.

“We came into Ridgefield with nothing,” he said. “I had no money when I started. Ridgefield Savings Bank gave me the world. They asked me to go with them for all my business and I agreed.”

Attilio “Jerry” Tuccio was born in 1920 in Compo, Calabria, in southern Italy. As a boy of about 10, he came to the United States with his family and grew up in Bedford Hills, N.Y., where his father was a mason.

During World War II, he served in the North African campaign with the 213th Army Anti-Aircraft Battalion, which fought German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel at the Battle of Kasserine Pass in February 1943. 

Tuccio recalled going into action on Feb. 14 — Valentine’s Day. “I was never so scared,” he said. “I remember thinking I would work the rest of my life for nothing if I could come out of there with my life. I wasn’t the only one that said that. It was a sad day.”

After the war and back home, he tried working as a butcher and as a used-car salesman, “but construction was in his blood,” said Robert Tuccio, one of his two sons.

His first construction experience was helping his father.

“Pop could put up stucco with the best of them,” said Robert Tuccio. “He learned the mason trade from his dad,” 

With his father, Jerry Tuccio began building houses in 1947. The first two he built sold for $12,500 each.

“Can you believe that, $12,500?” Jerry Tuccio said in 2007. “That was a lot of money back then and no one thought I would be able to sell them.”

He was building in Ridgefield by the early 1950s and during two decades, developed subdivision after subdivision — Boulder Hill Estates, Twixt Hills, Mimosa, Stonehenge Estates, Westmoreland, Scodon, Ridgebury Estates, Pleasant View Estates, and West Mountain Estates/Eleven Levels, plus many smaller projects.

In the late 1950s and 1960s, the town’s boom years, houses seemed to sell as fast as they could be built — and  Tuccio honed the art of building them quickly.

“We would put houses in a cycle to be built,” son Robert recalled. “And that cycle was six weeks, from start to finish, from literally cutting the trees down on the lot to having a finished house ready to move into. There were 180 subs working — literally. Subcontractors like plumbers, electricians, they’d have crews that were on the job every single day and they’d literally go house to house as they were being built.”

In the larger developments, many of the house styles he built — with names like The Ridgefield, The Ridgebury, The Brewster, The Sherman — were 3,000 to 3,500 square feet, big houses for that time. And Tuccio dressed them up.

“He was proud of what he built. He tried to put as many features into a home as he could,” his son told The Ridgefield Press’s Macklin Reid. “He was an innovator in the sense the homes were being built with intercoms, central vacuum cleaners, the antenna systems were being put in.”

Many of his developments had recreation areas with swimming pools, tennis and basketball courts.

Over the years, disagreements with town zoning authorities arose — during his application for the Eleven Levels subdivision, Tuccio protested the two-acre zoning and maintained he was being unfairly denied his right to develop his land reasonably. At one point he uttered the declaration, much quoted at the time, “This is Ridgefield and not Russia!”

Looking back in 2007, Tuccio didn’t make much of the disputes with zoners. “I got along well with everyone,” he said. “There were never any big problems.”

He retired in 1970, at age 50.  Robert said his father estimated that he owned some 600 empty building lots around town at that time — many of the lots his brothers and sons would build on in the years that followed.

Tuccio and his wife Ernestine moved to Florida, first to Marco Island and then to Naples. He died in 2007 and is buried St. Mary’s Cemetery.

His family said Jerry Tuccio was a generous man.

“He helped people out whenever he thought they could be helped,” said Arthur Tuccio, one of his two brothers.

“He helped a lot of people along the way,” Robert Tuccio said. “I think helping people gave him a lot of enjoyment.”

George Doubleday: 

The Man of Westmoreland

George Doubleday was the once-famous, rich and powerful head of Ingersoll-Rand Corporation, but his legacy in Ridgefield is a house of worship and a neighborhood. 

Born in 1866 in Michigan, George A. Doubleday had no connection with the book publishing company (as is sometimes reported in town). He joined Ingersoll Sergeant Drill Company in 1894 as an auditor, soon became treasurer, and when it consolidated into Ingersoll-Rand in 1905, was named a vice-president. By 1913, he was president, a post he held until 1935. He was chairman of the board till 1955, the year he died at the age of 89. 

When he took over the company in 1913, a corporate history says, “Doubleday was determined to make Ingersoll-Rand the leader in its product areas — drills, air compressors, jackhammers, pneumatic tools, and industrial pumps.” He kept the company very profitable and debt free, but in the end was criticized for failing to diversify. After his death subsequent leaders did just that. Today, Ingersoll-Rand owns such brands as Schlage locks, Thermo King transport temperature control equipment, Bobcat compact construction equipment, and Club Car golf vehicles.

Ingersoll-Rand had major plants in Phillipsburg, N.J., Easton and Athens, Pa., and Painted Post, N.Y. “In these locations, Ingersoll-Rand was the major employer,” the company history said. “Community life centered on the firm: Many workers lived in company-owned houses, and community and school events were held in company buildings. 

“Doubleday hired boys off the farm and trained them to become skilled machinists through a seven-year apprenticeship. These artisans accepted the company’s credo of pride in personal work, and only a handful of quality-control specialists were needed. Doubleday charged a premium price for the high-quality machinery this system produced.”

George Doubleday was a rather private individual — he would not even provide a picture of himself for the press and images of him are exceedingly rare. He carried this trait over into his operation of the company, the history said.  “He provided a bare minimum of information about

Ingersoll-Rand. Under Doubleday the company never released a quarterly report and its annual report was a single folded sheet of paper containing only the figures the New York Stock Exchange required.”

  In 1939, the House Ways and Means Committee listed the highest salaried men in the nation, and George Doubleday, at the then-tidy sum of $78,000 — equal to $1.4 million today — was the only Ridgefielder on it. 

Doubleday made Ridgefield his home for 40 years, buying the former Francis Bacon mansion, “Nutholme,” on Peaceable Street in 1915. He proceeded to acquire much of the neighboring land, mostly to the west and totalling nearly 300 acres. He gave his vast estate a new name, “Westmoreland,” presumably because it was moorlike and west of the village. 

In town, he was president of the nearby Ridgefield Golf Club (later Ward Acres) for many years, and his first wife, Alice Moffitt Doubleday, was active in the Ridgefield Garden Club and sang in St. Mary’s Choir. (Her sister was Mrs. John H. Lynch, whose West Mountain estate is now the Ridgefield Academy.) After Alice Doubleday died in 1919, George married his secretary, Mary White, and she, too, was active in the garden club and was a founder of the Ridgefield Boys’ Club. 

In the early 1960s, Doubleday’s heirs offered the town 250 acres of Westmoreland, some of which was talked of as the site for a multiple school campus; town fathers turned it down as expensive and unneeded. A Massachusetts firm quickly bought the property and subdivided it into 150 house lots, which the late Jerry Tuccio developed. 

In the early 1970s, the estate’s mansion was acquired by Temple Shearith Israel, now Congregation Shir Shalom, which still uses it as its temple and school.

George’s son, James M. Doubleday (1907-1970), became well-known in town. Over the years the Princeton graduate and local banking leader bought  several estates, razing the old mansions and replacing them with more modern and efficient equivalents. One place was the old Hillaire estate off West Mountain Road where his new home was called Hobby Hill. The estate was later subdivided and a road serving it, Doubleday Lane, today recalls James.

Frederic Remington:

He Knew the Horse

Frederic Remington’s pictures and sculptures depicting the Old West are in countless museums and collections, and bring large prices: A sculpture in bronze, called “The Wounded Bunkie,” sold at auction for $5.6 million in 2008 while an oil painting, “A Reconnaissance,” fetched $5.2 million at a 1999 auction. 

Even postal people love him: Few Americans outside of presidents like George Washington have been so extensively remembered on United States postage stamps—at least six bear his art or his face.

Unfortunately for Remington, his stay in Ridgefield was brief. He died six months after arriving.

Though his fame is based on the Old West that he so colorfully documented, Frederic Sackrider Remington spent all but a few years of his life in the Northeast. He was born in 1861 in Canton, N.Y., son of a newspaper editor who wanted him to pursue that career. 

While he attended military schools in Vermont and Massachusetts, Remington found he loved to draw more than to write or fight, and he wound up attending the School of Fine Arts at Yale, where he also played football for the Bulldogs. His first published illustration was a cartoon of a “bandaged football player” for a student newspaper. 

He left Yale when his father became seriously ill and died. With an inheritance in hand, Remington decided against returning to college, and headed west in 1881 to seek adventure; he was only 19 years old. In the next few years, he traveled widely in the western states and territories, working as a cowboy, a sheep rancher, a saloon owner, a reporter, and at other jobs—all the while sketching what he was seeing. 

Around 1885, he came back east, studied at the Art Students League, and began an illustrating career with Harper’s Magazine in the days before photographs were common in publications. He returned to the West briefly to cover the Indian Wars in Apache country for Harper’s. By then, he was earning $1,200 a year as a commercial artist, a sizable sum at the time. “That’s a pretty good break for an ex cow-puncher,” he said. 

Remington went on to illustrate not only for magazines, but also books, and wound up writing a half dozen books of his own about the West. Virtually all of his illustrations, his paintings and later his sculpture dealt with the Western themes.  “I knew the wild riders and vacant lands were about to vanish forever,” he wrote. “And the more I considered the subject, the bigger the forever loomed.”

While he became widely praised as an illustrator, Remington wanted recognition as an artist. By the turn of the 20th century, he was devoting much of his time to painting and sculpture—and even burned many earlier works he felt were too much like illustrations.
Remington was living and working in New Rochelle, N.Y. when he decided he wanted a wilder environment. (Another noted New Rochelle artist-illustrator later did the same; Norman Rockwell moved first to Vermont, and later Stockbridge, Mass.) 

There are several stories about why Remington chose Ridgefield. One was that the town was recommended by his lifelong friend, Alonzo Barton Hepburn, with whom he had grown up in upstate New York; Hepburn, Chase Bank president, had recently built a mansion on High Ridge, called Altnacraig. 

Another explanation was that Poultney Bigelow, a close friend who was editor and founder of Outing magazine, had recommended Ridgefield for both its wildness and its sophistication. Bigelow lived in nearby New York State and probably knew the town from visits. 

Perhaps both Hepburn and Bigelow had talked up the town to Remington, who at the same time was being strongly influenced by the Impressionist movement—and a leading impressionist, J. Alden Weir, lived in Ridgefield and was often visited by Remington’s friend, Childe Hassam.

Remington wound up buying 42 acres along Barry Avenue on which he and his wife, Eva, designed a sizable home and a state-of-the-art studio that featured a huge fieldstone fireplace, and large (for the era) plate glass windows. The estate was known as Lural Place, according to his

Ridgefield Press obituary, but another source said he called it “One Hoss Farm.” After his death the estate became known as Oak Knoll, a name that has stuck over the decades since.
Remington moved into the home in July 1909. In December, he fell ill and was eventually diagnosed with appendicitis that developed into peritonitis. His condition was said to have been exacerbated by his treating himself with laxatives and the fact that he weighed 300 pounds. 

An emergency operation was performed at his house—reportedly on the dining room table. As The Press said at the time, “The artist rallied after the operation and it was believed he would recover. Complications, however, entered into the case on Saturday and the patient sank rapidly during the night.” He died Sunday, the day after Christmas. He was only 48 years old. 

During his career Remington produced more than 3,000 drawings, illustrations, paintings, and bronzes. “The extent of what he might have been was curtailed only by his untimely death at a time when he could have had 20 years of growth ahead of him, but he was already the paramount exponent of his kind of art and the most American of them all,” said biographers Peggy and Harold Samuels.

Remington loved riding and depicting horses in action, be it on canvass or in bronze. “When I die,” he told a friend not long before his death, “I want my epitaph to be, ‘He knew the horse.’” However, his spare gravestone in Canton, N.Y., bears only his name and the years of his birth and death.
In 1965, Remington’s house was declared a national historic landmark. The studio he had in the house has been reproduced in detail at the Remington Art Museum in Ogdensburg, N.Y., where his family once lived. 

For years, townspeople had wanted a road name recalling the artist. From shortly after his death until well into the 1950s, various movements tried to have Barry Avenue changed to Remington Road. In fact, a 1927 map of property along Barry Avenue called the highway “Remington Road.”
A new road at the1960s Westmoreland subdivision gave the town an opportunity to commemorate the artist: Remington Road runs between Barry Avenue and Peaceable Hill Road, intersecting Barry Avenue not far from Remington’s house. 

Perhaps the artist had gotten a chance to hunt on the Westmoreland estate during his brief stay here.—from “Hidden History of Ridgefield,” History Press, 2015