John Morganti: 

A Solid Foundation

Giovanni Silvio Morganti was a teenager from Italy who spoke hardly a word of English when he arrived in America. Yet John Morganti, as he came to be known, fathered a multimillion dollar company and a family that have both been major forces in the shaping of Ridgefield in the 20th Century.

However, three times over the years he came close to dying — from disease, from war and from a fire. He survived to be 78.

Born in 1887 in Tomba, Italy, John Morganti got off the boat from Genoa on the morning of

April 17, 1903, with about $50 in his pocket. He was only 15 years old. He took a train from New York to Ridgefield and that afternoon, was hard at work on building the new sewer lines in the village. 

After some jobs in New Haven and then two years laboring at the Ridgefield Electric Company’s powerhouse alongside the old railroad tracks on Ivy Hill Road, Morganti worked for local contractors on building houses, including some of the High Ridge mansions – Altnacraig among them. Intent on becoming an American citizen, he studied English by attending night classes at the old Center School on Bailey Avenue.

In 1907, he decided to return to Italy to visit his parents for Christmas, only to be pressed into service by the Italian army and sent to Italian Somaliland in east Africa to help build a railroad. There, he contracted malaria and was sent back to Italy, spending 83 days in a hospital. 

Two years after his impressment into the Italian Army, Morganti decided it was time to go “home.” With the help of three friends, two of them Ridgefielders, he snuck across the Italian border into France and eventually returned to America in February 1910. He became a U.S. citizen in 1917.

In 1916, he started his own contracting firm. A year later he already had six workers and over the subsequent decades, employed dozens of Ridgefielders. 

Though he was reluctant to remain in the Italian Army,  Morganti had no qualms about joining the United States forces in World War I. He served in the Marne and Argonne campaigns in France with the 77th Infantry, fought in a half dozen major battles, and was wounded in the forehead.

After the war, he return to run his contracting company. “From its beginning through the 1940’s, Morganti grew from stonewall and small masonry projects into road building, bridge construction, high-end residential, shopping centers and commercial buildings,” Morganti Inc. says today on its website. A company motto is “Constructing solid foundations that last a lifetime.”

John Morganti and Sons also built and/or paved many of the roads in Ridgefield, and did some small-scale subdivisions. But large industrial and public buildings became the specialty of what became Morganti Inc.

The firm grew to the point where, in the 1970s, it was among the 400 largest construction companies in the nation. Among Morganti’s projects in town were East Ridge Middle School, Ridgebury School, Yankee Ridge shopping center on Main Street, Ridgefield Commerce Park on Danbury, and 901 Ethan Allen Highway (former Benrus Center, now the Pond’s Edge medical offices). Morganti built Wilton High School, much of Danbury Hospital, and in the last half of the

20th Century, many other schools, hospitals, and public buildings  throughout the eastern United States, and in the Middle East. 

John Morganti remained active in his company until the early 1960s when his son, Paul J. Morganti, took over as president. Paul Morganti was also well known in town, serving in the 1950s and early 60s as a selectman, and then again in the 1990s in the same position. John’s other sons, John, Joseph, and Robert, were also executives in the company and well-known in the community.

In 1988, his company was sold to Consolidated Contractors Company of Athens, Greece, which retained the Morganti Inc. name but moved its offices to Danbury. Other Morganti offices are now in Florida, Massachusetts, New York, and Texas, Abu-Dhabi, Dubai, Egypt, Greece, Jordan, Qatar, and — appropriately enough — Italy.

John Morganti and his wife, the former Elizabeth Eramo, marked their 47th wedding anniversary in January 1965, three months before his death. He died on April 17, just 62 years and two days after he arrived in Ridgefield, an eager teenager from a far-away land.

In the early days of their marriage, John and Elizabeth lived in a three-story building on Bailey Avenue, just east of the Ridgefield Press. The Italian cooperative store occupied the first floor, along with Travostino’s bakery, while several families — including the Morgantis — lived upstairs. 

“We had nice, large rooms in the Cooperative building and there was electricity,” Elizabeth Morganti told Aldo Biagiotti, author of “Impact: The Historical Account of the Italian Immigrants of Ridgefield, Connecticut.”

“There was a bathroom along the hallway. We paid $12 a month rent. Once a month on a Sunday morning, Sam Denton knocked at the door to collect the rent.”

On the night of April 22, 1922, John and Elizabeth were awakened to the cries of “Fire! Get out!” It was Antonio Travostino, who had arisen early to start up his ovens and who had discovered the building was on fire.

“My husband and I ... rushed out onto the sidewalk,” Elizabeth said. “The only thing I had on was my nightgown. We lost everything, as did all the others, and I do mean everything.”

The building burned for three days. “You know, the firemen did not have enough water to fight the fire,” she said. “Some of the roofs of houses way over on Governor Street burned as a result of the fire.”

However, she added, “if it were not for Travostino, we would have all burned to death. Although we and the other families lost everything, we were lucky. We got out of the fire with our lives.”

Ebenezer W. Keeler: 

A Remarkable Man

Beyond having a rather remarkable beard, Ebenezer W. Keeler was a rather remarkable 19th Century man —  an admired farmer, an avid reader, a town leader, and a builder who worked on major mansions and led construction of a landmark church.

A descendant of one of Ridgefield’s founding families, Ebenezer Wood Keeler was born in 1840 on the family farm along Branchville Road, land that had belonged to Keelers for four generations. 

He was educated at the Rev. Dr. David Short’s private school on Main Street where he became “a great reader,” according to a contemporary biography. His love of reading led him, along with other community leaders, to serve on an 1871 committee that put together the first public library in Ridgefield. His wife, Emma, was also active in the project, and helped care for the first collection of 2,500 books.

Like his ancestors, Keeler was a farmer and he was quite good at it. “Ebenezer Keeler approached the operation of his farm with the same tenacity of his forebears and he could make that farm work where others just could not make it go,” said town historian Dick Venus. (Today’s Twin Ridge development is part of the old Keeler farm.)

But Eben Keeler pursued other vocations as well. He was a surveyor and did much  surveying work in the south part of town. Perhaps more noteworthy, he was involved in the construction of several mansions, at least one of which still stands today: The house of book publisher E.P. Dutton on

High Ridge. He worked on Casagmo, the mansion that once stood at the northern end of Main Street. During his building heyday, he employed crews of 20 to 30 men.

A member of the First Congregational Church, Keeler put his knowledge of construction to work there, serving as chairman of the building committee that in 1888 erected the current stone church at the corner of Main Street and West Lane.

He was also a public official. In 1865, he was elected a state representative from Ridgefield;  at 24, he was the youngest member of the House. He then became the town’s chief executive. However, election wasn’t always easy. Venus tells it this way:

“Eben was elected first selectman of Ridgefield back in the days when it was necessary to elect a board of selectmen each and every year. He won in 1877, in 1878 and again in 1879. After losing in 1880, he came back to win in 1882, in 1883, and in 1884. He lost again in 1885 but came right back and was returned to office in 1886 and 1887. Once again he lost in 1888 and by so doing, missed the ‘pleasure’ of serving the town during the great blizzard that year. However, Eben stormed back to win in 1889, and again in 1890, truly a remarkable man.”

Keeler died in 1900 at the age of 59. His wife, who died in 1934, was the daughter of Dr. Archibald Y. Paddock, a noted New York City dentist who committed suicide in 1889 after accidentally shooting her brother, Harry (see Dr. Paddock’s WHO WAS WHO profile).

Peter McManus: 

Judge and Legislator

In 1945, during the second of his six terms as representative from Ridgefield in the General Assembly, Peter McManus helped draft the State Labor Relations Act. The Republican’s post that year as chairman of the House labor committee was rated the “toughest assignment” of the session by a Hartford newspaper columnist. 

The act established a three-member Board of Labor Relations, aimed at protecting the rights of citizens to join unions and bargain collectively. 

When Governor Raymond E. Baldwin was ready to sign the bill, he called  McManus and other sponsors to the ceremony. It was April 12, 1945. Just then the phone rang with news of Franklin Roosevelt's death, and the signing was postponed.  McManus often observed in later years that he had an edge of Democrats who didn’t remember the exact date on which President Roosevelt died.

Once the bill became law, the governor named McManus to the board, a post the Republican held through Democratic and Republican administrations until his retirement in 1967. 

A native of Scotland, Peter A. McManus was born in 1889 and was trained as a builder and architect. He came to Ridgefield as a young man, at first working for “Big Jim” Kennedy, the town’s major builder.  One of his first significant jobs was construction of the sunken gardens at Casagmo in 1911-12. (After Miss Mary Olcott died in 1962, McManus proposed that the town purchase the Casagmo estate and use the mansion as a town hall, a proposal that did not gain much support.)

McManus eventually started his own construction company, and many men who were to become top carpenters in town got their training under him, including Dan Tobin, Terry Knoche, Gus Venus, and John P. Leary.

When the town had a Trial Justice Court, he was a judge for many years. The court handled  smaller offenses such as  breaches of the peace, domestic disputes, bootlegging, and traffic violations. It was the last that took up most of the court’s time, and one of the most frequent offenses back in the 1920s was driving without a license. One day, McManus heard 16 cases of people caught without a license — he gave the opinion afterwards that half of Ridgefielders on the road had no license. “Some of these people reasoned that because a license was not needed to drive old Dobbin,” said historian Dick Venus, “they should not have to get one to drive the family car.”

McManus served six terms  in the Connecticut legislature from 1941 until 1953, and was also on the Board of Assessors. He was active for more than half a century in the Knights of Columbus.

Two of his three sons also became active in the community — James, as the town’s building inspector in the 1970s and 80s, and Joseph, as a sheriff and volunteer fireman.

He died in 1970 at the age of 80.