Larry Hoyt: A Centenarian Who
Loved Horses and the Harmonica 

Larry Hoyt was a rare Ridgefield centenarian who spent nearly all of his 100 years in his hometown, and was well-known locally for his love of horses and the harmonica. 

Lawrence Chestly Hoyt was born in 1902 in his grandfather’s house on Wilton Road West, a member of a family that dated back to the settlement of the town in 1708. His earliest education was in one-room schoolhouses. One of five brothers, he quit after one year at Hamilton High School to go to work to help support his family.

When he was 17,  Hoyt falsified his age so he could enlist in the U.S. Army, with the aim of serving in the cavalry. Raised among farmers, “I had always loved animals, especially horses,” he said in an interview when he had just turned 100.

He was sent to Vermont to train  horses for military combat and drills, and then to Texas, serving with Troop A of the Third Cavalry. He was one of the last of the “Brave Rifles” — a name coined by General Winfield Scott during the Mexican-American War for the Third Cavalry.  “We were the last mounted cavalry,” Hoyt said. “They were changing over to a completely motorized army at that time.”

“I think being in the cavalry was a highlight for him,” said his daughter, the late Doris Hoyt Ventres of Ridgefield. “If he didn't get married, he probably would have gone out and been a real cowboy.”

When he did leave the Army, he went to work for the village blacksmith, Harry Thomas, on Catoonah Street, shoeing 25 to 30 horses a day. He commuted the five miles to and from work on foot each day. 

Working for Harry Thomas was more than a chore. There he got to court Gertrude “Trudy” Thomas, Harry’s daughter, whom he had known since grade school. The two were married in 1925.

 Preferring to work outdoors — and with horses, Hoyt soon went to work on the Silver Spring horse farm of a wealthy New York lawyer, not only serving as  superintendent, but also training, riding and showing horses. His favorite mount was Bobby, who won more than 30 ribbons.

After 13 years of estate work, he started his own landscaping and tree business.

In 1956, however, he took a better-paying job as the head custodian at the then-new Veterans Park School. “I had a hard time getting used to this indoor work,” he told Ridgefield Press reporter Rick Honey. “At the beginning I wanted to quit every three months.”

When he’d complain about the job to his friend (but not relative), Irene Hoyt, the popular Visiting Nurse Association nurse, that his feet hurt from the custodial work, “All she would tell me was that they would toughen up.”

So he worked nearly 18 years at Veterans Park before retiring at the age of 71. And he did not regret working those years at VP. “They keep you young,” he said of the pupils, who would years later often come up to him in stores or on the street and say, “Hi, Mr. Hoyt.”

Larry and Trudy Hoyt raised two children during the Depression. Doris Ventres recalled her father as a gentle man who never got angry. “I don’t think I have ever seen him mad,” she said. “He’s been a wonderful daddy.”

Around 1980,  his wife was diagnosed with a disease similar to Alzheimer’s. Hoyt refused to allow her to go to a nursing home and he cared for her at their home on Silver Spring Road for nine years until her death in 1989.

An avid gardener, he enjoyed raising hybrid tea roses. In season his yard was always filled with flowers, much to the enjoyment of those who traveled Silver Spring Road. Even at 100, “he spades his own garden, he mows his own lawn, he trims his hedges, he takes care of his perennial bed,” said a neighbor and friend shortly before Hoyt’s death.

As a boy,  Larry Hoyt learned to play the harmonica and eventually became known in the community as “The Harmonica Man,” entertaining both young and old with his playing. At his 100th birthday party, he put on a harmonica performance.

At the Early Bird Cafe, the Ridgefield Men’s Club or among family and friends, Hoyt was known as a charming conversationalist who could tell stories of early 20th Century Ridgefield and Army cavalry life. He enjoyed recollections of listening to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats. “Roosevelt was a very effective president,” he told an interviewer when he turned 100. “His character was different than presidents today.”

He also had a fine sense of humor. Three months before he died in August 2002, when more than 100 people gathered to celebrate his century of life,  Hoyt confided that when he arose each morning, he’d look at a picture of himself as a young cavalryman and would ask: “What is that handsome young man going to do today?”

The Ebb and Flow of the Pond

When I first saw this Joseph Hartmann photograph many years ago, I figured it showed a mill somewhere in Ridgefield. It looked as if there was a sluice to power the mill built into that dam.

Only problem was: Where was the wheel the water would turn?

Then my boss, Karl S. Nash, publisher of the Ridgefield Press, explained what was probably shown here, a scene almost impossible to find today.

The stone-and-earth dam has an adjustable spillway, made of wood. Many farmers would use such an arrangement to keep their brook-fed ponds high in the winter so they could cut and store (or sell) ice, and low in the summer so the bog grass could grow, later to be cut as bedding for livestock.

This small barn or shed, and house to its rear, might be along some major highway in town, possibly North Salem Road. Karl believed that utility pole, visible just to the left of the barn’s peak, was part of an interstate telephone trunk line, connecting such cities as Boston and New York. It ran through town even before telephone service was available locally to many outlying sections of Ridgefield. It was the 1900 version of the underground interstate cable and gas lines that run through town now.

Unfortunately, neither Karl nor our readers back in 1982, when this photo was published in The Press, were able to identify the buildings shown here. Judging from their condition, they probably didn’t last too many years after the picture was taken by Joseph Hartmann.

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).

Harold Goldsmith: 

Prince of the Pulps

To Ridgefielders in the 1950s, he was a developer and owner of some of the town’s largest pieces of property. To the magazine world, however, he was the “Prince of the Pulps.”

Harold Goldsmith, the man who developed Lakeland Hills and created Lake Windwing, published dozens of “pulp” magazines with titles like Dime Detective, The Pecos Kid, Horror Stories, and The Spider that were read by millions of Americans.

Harold Stern Goldsmith was born in 1903 in Manhattan where his father, who started out a clerk in a wholesale clothing business, was a partner in a skirt manufacturing company. He studied at Horace Mann, an elite prep school in the Bronx, and then entered Columbia University, eventually majoring in engineering but leaving after his junior year.

By 1924, he had started the H. Sanford Goldsmith Advertising Company (he changed his middle name from Stern to Sanford) and four years later, he was advertising director of the Magazine Publishers Group, a rapidly growing company that was acquiring many popular magazines. A year after that, he was managing editor of the group

In the fall of 1929 Goldsmith and two prep school classmates laid the framework for a new company that, by 1930, was called Popular Publications. Only 27 years old, he was publisher. That fall, Popular began publishing pulp magazines, starting out with  Battle Aces, Detective Action

Stories, Gang World, and Western Rangers. (They were “pulps” because they were printed on cheap, pulpwood paper that soon yellowed, as opposed to the classier, more expensive magazines that used glossy, or at least bright-white, paper.)

Around 1935, he and a partner also formed The Hartley Press to publish romance, mystery and Western novels.

By the late 1930s, Popular Publications was churning out more than 40 magazines a month, with such titles as Ace-High, Adventure, All-Story Love, Battle Birds,  Black Mask, DareDevil Aces, Detective Tales, Dime Adventure, Dime Detective, Dime Mystery, Dime Sports, Dime Western, Doctor Yen Sin, Dusty Ayres and His Battle Birds,  G-8 and His Battle Aces, Horror Stories, Knockout, Love Short Stories, New Detective, New Sports, New Western, The Octopus, The Pecos Kid, Rangeland Love Stories, The Scorpion, The Spider, and Terror Tales.

Probably his most famous — and longest-lived — was Argosy, founded in 1882, which has been called the first American pulp magazine. Goldsmith acquired it in the early 1930s and it lasted until 1978.

 Popular Publications helped start the careers of many writers. Probably the most famous was Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason mysteries. Goldsmith persuaded Gardner, an amateur writer, to give up his job as an assistant district attorney and devote himself full-time to writing mystery stories. 

Another Popular writer was longtime Ridgefielder Frederick Nebel, who created the MacBride and Kennedy series of mysteries about a police detective and a hard-drinking newspaper reporter.

Goldsmith was also involved in some censorship battles. In January of 1941, Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia ordered all “offensive” pulps be taken off the newsstands in New York City, including two of Popular’s magazines — Horror Stories and Terror Tales.  Goldsmith and his partner, Henry Steeger, “expressed the belief it would cost too much in time and money to fight in court, so they ceased production of those two titles,” said pulp historian David Saunders.   

However, Goldsmith did not always give up easily. Because some of his publications were on the racy side — covers sometimes showed half-naked women — the U.S. Post Office in 1943 ruled five of them “obscene” and denied second-class mailing privileges normally given to magazines and newspapers. Goldsmith sued the post office to restore the cheap-rate mailing permit, and won.

In the late 1940s, pulps were beginning to fade from the scene. “Public tastes had changed after World War II and sales of pulp magazines decreased,” said historian Saunders. 

By the early 1940s, Goldsmith’s own focus seemed to be changing. In 1940 he bought an estate in Wilton, the hometown of  his third and final wife, Yvonne Clementine Boisseau, a public relations executive. A year later, they were married and in 1943, they bought Taghkanick, the late Wadsworth R. Lewis’s estate on Limestone and Great Hill Roads, as well as portions of  the Todd and Hecht farms farther to the northwest along Bennett’s Farm Road in Ridgebury. He began practicing something he really enjoyed and that seemed totally at odds with  his New York City upbringing and career: He became a dairy farmer.

In 1946, he sold Taghkanick to another magazine publisher, Henry Luce of Time-Life and his wife, recently retired Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce. (Four years later Luce’s Life Magazine profiled Goldsmith’s wife, who was prominent in the dog world as popularizer of the Weimaraner breed in the United States and a crusader against cruelty to dogs.)

The Goldsmiths moved to another estate on Old Branchville Road. In 1950, he sold his interests in Popular Publications and devoted most of his energy to his two new farms,  located upstate in Litchfield and Morris. He became an expert, prize-winning breeder of Holstein cattle and his stock won awards in fairs throughout the United States and Canada.

 Goldsmith also noticed that Ridgefield was becoming a desirable destination for young homeowners wanting to live in the “country.” He decided much of his local farmland could  make more money raising houses than cows.  In 1954, he converted about 30 acres into one of the town’s earliest sizable subdivisions. Lakeland Hills consists of 27 lots  on the north side of Bennett’s Farm Road, opposite the Ridgebury School site and includes Skytop Road, Douglas Lane, and North Shore Drive. It also included Lake Windwing, which  Goldsmith created on the east side of the subdivision and which, for a while, was informally called Goldsmith’s Pond. 

According to The Press, “in 1946, zoning had been adopted and Mr. Goldsmith had to make his lots at least one acre in size. He accomplished this in part by drawing some boundary lines under the waters of his lake.” (The Planning and Zoning Commission later outlawed that practice.)

In the mid-1950s the Goldsmiths moved to Westport where Harold died in 1969 at the age of 65.

Their departure from Ridgefield came not long after a 1954 incident that created a bit of a

national controversy: Yvonne Goldsmith got into a rather bizarre battle with TV celebrity Arthur Godfrey — back then, both she and Godfrey were both vice presidents of the Weimaraner Club of America.

Godfrey had mentioned on the air that  Splash, his Weimaraner, had a “liaison” with Draga, his German shepherd. Yvonne Goldsmith publicly criticized Godfrey’s allowing the canine get-together, and pointed out that Weimaraner Club members sign a pledge to destroy any puppies that result from accidental cross-breeding. 

Godfrey’s response on his TV show: “Fiddle de dee.” He said he never heard of such a pledge and was not about to “drown” any offspring between Splash and Draga.

Immediately, Mrs. Goldsmith was inundated with hundreds of letters, some of them threatening, from people believing she had recommended killing puppies. She was called a “heartless woman” and “a would-be murderer.” A number of letters suggested she stick to doing something more worthwhile for a woman: Being a housewife.

Mrs. Goldsmith said she never suggested killing Godfrey’s puppies, only that Godfrey should have taken precautions to prevent the cross-bred puppy possibility.

As a result of the mail, she said, she was afraid to leave her Old Branchville Road home, or to allow her children, aged six and four, to leave the house.

The State Police, which investigated the threats, attributed the letters to “crackpot dog fanciers.” Nonetheless, for a while, a state police trooper provided a “protective watch” over the Goldsmith’s six-year-old daughter when she went to school each day.

Thomas Fitch IV: 

Yankee Doodle’s Dad

Connecticut’s venerable Fitch family loved the name Thomas. Generations of men were named Thomas Fitch I, II, III, IV and well beyond. But it was Thomas the Fourth who had a Ridgefield connection and it was his son, Thomas the Fifth, who could be one of the most unknown,

yet at the same time hugely famous people in North America.

Thomas Fitch IV was born around 1700 in Norwalk, son of — of course — Thomas Fitch III, one of the first settlers of that town and a man of some wealth. Thomas IV was the first Norwalk man to graduate from a college (Yale, 1721), where he studied law and also earned a master’s degree. He was a representative from Norwalk in the colonial assembly and was later a chief justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court. 

He served as governor of the colony from from 1754 to 1766, a long stretch even by today’s standards. His tenure included leading Connecticut during the difficult French and Indian War, which resulted in the colony’s amassing a huge debt that led to a financial recession. However, he may be more famous as the father of  Thomas Fitch V,  reputed to have been the inspiration for  “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

Thomas V’s gravestone as well as Musicologist Oscar George Theodore Sonneck, who was once head of the music division of the Library of Congress, maintain that Captain Fitch  assembled a company of recruits at the Fitch homestead in Norwalk in 1755  at the beginning of the French and Indian War. The recruits lacked uniforms and Fitch’s sister Elizabeth wanted these soldiers’ appearance to  have at least some degree of uniformity. So she presented each man with a chicken feather for his hat. Fitch then led the rather tatterdemalion group of new volunteers  to upper New York to fight. 

According to the monument at his gravesite in Norwalk, “Upon entering West Albany with these plumes and their homespun and forlorn clothing, their motley appearance caused Dr. Richard Shuckburg, a British surgeon, being both a poet and musician, thru derision and mockery to write the verses dubbing them ‘Yankee Doodles and Macaronies’ ”:

Yankee Doodle went to town

Riding on a pony;

He stuck a feather in his hat,

And called it macaroni.

A macaroni was an 18th Century term for a fop or extravagant dresser, and the British doctor was likening the group from Connecticut to a pack of country-bumpkin dandies.

 However, the song that had been written in sarcasm soon became widely popular among the colonials, especially after their successful campaigns.

During the Revolution two decades later, both the British and Americans used their own versions of the tune as rallying cries.  Ferenz Fedor in his 1976 book, “The Birth of Yankee Doodle,” maintains it “became one of the most famous marching songs ever written.” It’s the official state anthem of Connecticut.

So what’s all this have to do with Ridgefield? The Doodle’s dad, Thomas IV, had farmland in what is now Ridgefield.

Sometime during the 1700’s, Thomas Fitch IV acquired at least 132 acres in a part of Redding that is now Ridgefield. “Fitch’s Farm” or “Governor Fitch’s Farm,” as it came to be known, was located in the northwestern part of Redding and what’s now the northeastern part of Ridgefield. The  farm extended along what is now northern Route 7 north of Great Pond, and probably included  the vicinity of modern-day Laurel Lane and the Laurel Ridge, Ridgefield Crossings and Regency senior citizen communities.  That land was  part of Redding until 1786 when it was ceded to Ridgefield.

When Governor Fitch died in 1774, his farm passed on to his heirs. One of these was another son, Jonathan Fitch (1723-93), a sheriff in New Haven County, who apparently got into some financial difficulties. The Ridgefield land records report that in 1787, Samuel Squire of Fairfield sued “Jonathan Fitch of New Haven, sheriff of said New Haven County,” to recover a 126-pound debt, and obtained as settlement from the County Court 132 acres of land – Fitch’s Farm. 

Squire subsequently sold the land to Thomas Sherwood, noting that it “is commonly known by the name of Governor Fitch’s Farm, lying in the northwest corner of the town of Redding, lately sett off to the township of Ridgefield.”

A year earlier (1786), Sherwood and others had petitioned the state legislature that a piece of Redding be annexed to Ridgefield because most of its inhabitants found it “inconvenient ... to attend public business in said Reading.” 

William Blodgett’s map (published in 1792, but not up-to-date) shows a triangular wedge of Redding extending nearly a mile into Ridgefield, north of Great Pond. Other boundaries on the map were not very accurate, but the document gives a clue as to the location of both the farm and the annexed territory.

The terms “Governor Fitch’s Farm” and “Fitch’s Farm” appeared fairly frequently in the land records in the 1780’s and 1790’s, but thereafter disappeared. 

Although the farm had been called Fitch’s, the governor probably never lived there. He may have maintained the land for growing crops, sending up crews from his Norwalk home to work the fields. 

Fitch IV died July 18, 1774. He is buried in the East Norwalk Historical Cemetery. The Fitch house in Norwalk, which had been partially destroyed during the “burning of Norwalk” raid carried

out by William Tryon and British troops in July 1779, had been home to Fitch family descendants until 1945. In 1956, a portion of the Fitch house was relocated to make way for the construction of the Connecticut Turnpike and stands today as part of the Mill Hill Historic Park next to the Green in Norwalk.

 Thomas V finished his service in the French and Indian War with the rank of senior colonel, in command of 16 regiments. Back home in Norwalk, he became a prominent citizen during and after the Revolution. He served as a town councilman and was  in the first delegation from Norwalk to the Connecticut House of Representatives in 1776. He helped with the reconstruction efforts after the burning of Norwalk.  He died in 1795 and was also buried in the East Norwalk Historical Cemetery. 

As for that name, Thomas, it just kept on going among the Fitch family descendants, including lawyer and congressman Thomas Fitch  (1838-1923), “the Silver-Tongued Orator of the Pacific Coast.”  Attorney Fitch, a former newspaper editor who helped teach the young Mark Twain how to write well, successfully defended Virgil, Morgan, and Wyatt Earp plus Doc Holliday when they were charged with murdering Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers in the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1881.

And he had a son named Thomas, too.

Nehemiah Lyman Keeler: 

A Last Link

When Lyman Keeler died in 2005, the town lost a last link with what Ridgefield was for most of its existence: A community of hard-working farmers, most of whom were born here and most of whom spent their lives in fields and barns, tending crops and livestock. For much of his life, he tilled land and milked cows, just as had generations of Keelers before him.

Fuzzy Keeler was a direct descendant of the pioneers who came to these hilly, rock-riddled woods in 1708 to create a new settlement called Ridgefield. One of his Keeler ancestors built the house in which he was born. It was the same house in which he died — the famous “Pink House” on Ridgebury Road that was torn down in 2009 amid much controversy.

“He gives you a flicker of what Ridgefield used to be, and the uncommon people that made it what it was — in a word, a pleasure,” fellow Ridgeburian John Katz once said of him.

Nehemiah Lyman Keeler was born in 1913 in that Pink House; it was one of the town's oldest buildings, dating from the early 1700s and believed to have been erected by Jonah Keeler. It had remained in the Keeler family for more than two and one-half centuries. His ancestors, Ralph and Samuel Keeler, were among the first settlers of Ridgefield and, later, its Ridgebury parish. 

When he attended first through eighth grades in the one-room Ridgebury Schoolhouse at the corner of Ridgebury and Old Stagecoach Roads,  Keeler was known as a boy with an eye for the prank. He once filled a bag with leaves, climbed a ladder onto the school’s roof, and stuffed the bag in the chimney. When the teacher lit a fire in the stove, the entire schoolhouse filled with smoke.

“They closed school for two days for that one,”  Keeler, a twinkle in his eye, recalled in a 2002 interview.

From northern Ridgebury, Danbury was two miles closer than Ridgefield center, and  Keeler attended Danbury High School — reached by horse and buggy. After high school, he began working

the family’s 124-acre dairy farm. “We were the biggest one — milked around 40 head,” he said. “I sold milk to Stew Leonard for 15 years.”

Back when he was a boy, Ridgefield was mostly an agricultural community. “Every place was a farm, every place,” he said. “I remember when there wasn’t a car on the road, just horse and wagons.” Occasionally a car might come along the dirt Ridgebury Road “and everybody’d run out to see and see who it was.”

“It’s like a city now,” he said in 2003. “I waited for 51 cars to go by my driveway the other day before I could get out.”

“But you can’t stop progress,” he added. “You got to keep going.”

By 1961, when Keeler was having difficulty finding enough good help to keep the farm going, he decided to sell most of the pastures, some 120 acres. Jerry Tuccio eventually acquired the property, turning it into the Pleasant View Estates subdivision. Keeler Drive there recalls the land’s past.

Over the next 30 years, Keeler held a variety of jobs, including car salesman, gun shop owner, assistant service manager for a Chrysler dealer, owner and operator of a trucking delivery business, and an auctioneer selling everything from cattle to go-carts.

When he was 90, he worked at the Parks and Recreation Center, opening the building at 5:30 each morning — the same time he used to milk the cows. He retired the year before he died.

In the 1930s,  Keeler began his lifelong interest in motorcycles, acquiring a four-cylinder Henderson. “His true love was motorcycle riding,” said his son, Peter. “He received many ‘oldest rider awards’ at rallies and rode up until the summer of 2004.”

He was also an avid hunter, gardener, and animal lover. 

Keeler loved Ridgefield and had no inclination to leave. “I’ve been to Florida a few times, but I won’t go back,” he said. “It's like a jungle down there with the heat and the noise. I said, ‘What the hell kind of place is this?’”

And while the farming community of his youth has disappeared, he accepted change. “There is nothing you can do about it,” he said. “But it is good to think about the old times.”

After his death his “Pink House” on Ridgebury Road was purchased by a couple who lived next door and who planned to restore it. When they found restoration would be too expensive and fearing liabilities from having a vacant, deteriorating building, they offered the old house to the town, which would have to move it to another site. When the town did not act on the offer, they tore it down, prompting many townspeople to decry landmark’s loss.

When Lyman Keeler died at the age of 91, The Ridgefield Press observed: “Over the years many people have been called ‘Mr. Ridgefield,’ chiefly for their involvement in town affairs. But few have had more Ridgefield in them than Fuzzy Keeler, a man who was born, lived and died in the home of his ancestors and who had worked the same land those ancestors carved from the wilderness nearly three centuries ago.”

Irving B. Conklin: 

A Symbol of Change

In a way, Irving Conklin symbolized the changing nature of Ridgefield in the 20th Century – from a farming town, to a haven for estates, and then to a bedroom community for commuters. Conklin participated in all three levels of the community, and was a leading participant in all three.

Born in 1899 in Hyde Park, N.Y., Irving B. Conklin Sr. came to Ridgefield as a young man and became superintendent of Dr. George G. Shelton’s estate along West Lane at the Ridgefield-Lewisboro line. 

From 1928 till the early 1940s, he owned Conklin’s Dairy on Ramapoo Road, Ridgefield’s largest and last major dairy farm. Over those years he had supplied most of Ridgefield with milk. 

“That was a time when the per capita consumption of milk in Ridgefield actually exceeded the per capita consumption of alcoholic beverages,” former town historian Dick Venus once observed, perhaps with a wink of an eye. As a young man Venus had delivered milk for Conklin, usually by horse and cart, and later had his own dairy.

In the 1950s, as more and more commuters were eyeing Ridgefield as a place to live, the Conklin farm was subdivided; it includes today’s neighborhoods of Farm Hill Road, Overlook Drive and Nutmeg Court.

In 1944 Irving Conklin and Leo Pambianchi started Ridgefield Motors, which grew into Conklin Motors, then became Village Pontiac-Cadillac on Danbury Road; the building now houses Party Depot.

In 1941, he acquired  Stonecrest, the large estate on North Street, and had his home there. During the war he and Joseph Young raised beef, pigs and sheep on the Stonecrest Farm.

In the 1950s he and his wife, Ethel, subdivided much of the property into the Stonecrest Road and Dowling Drive neighborhoods and around 1953 also established a riding stable on the old estate that is still in business today. 

Ethel, incidentally, was famed for her homemade ice cream.  “There can be no other

delightful repast that conveys such a pleasant taste, along with the urge for a second helping,”  Dick Venus wrote in a 1984 column in The Ridgefield Press. “A host will really enjoy the plaudits of the guests when serving ice cream made with Mrs. Conklin’s renowned recipe. It is a sure way to put everyone in a good mood.”

Irving Conklin was a president of the Lions Club, a member of the Rotary Club, and belonged to the Odd Fellows.

He retired to Florida where he died in 1966 at the age of 66. Ethel died in 1991 at the age of 94.

Conklin’s Dairy Farm was a huge operation and had so many cows that Conklin at one point was ordering freight-car loads of peanut shells from the Planter’s factory in Virginia to use as bedding for the livestock. Venus recalled that the light but bulky shells cost $11 a ton to buy, but $15 a ton to transport. They were packed in sacks “that were almost large enough to hold a Volkswagen.”

However, Conklin eventually found that, even though the shells had no particular food value, the cows would on occasion eat them. 

When he finally discontinued using peanut-shell bedding, Venus asked him why. “Because the milk was beginning to taste like peanut butter,” Conklin replied.

Fred Jones: 

Dog Detective

One day in the 1950s, Fred Jones’s telephone rang. He picked up the receiver and a very angry woman’s voice began demanding that he do something about the two peacocks fighting in her yard.

“Madam,” he replied patiently, “I am not the peacock warden. I am the dog warden.”

Though born in Canada in 1908, Fred B. Jones spent most of his life in Ridgefield. He was one of the town’s last old-time farmers,  caretaker of the working farm at the Brewster family estate, The Hickories, on Lounsbury Road for nearly 60 years. 

But he was also Ridgefield’s dog warden in the 1950s and 60s, and an expert lapidary. 

In 1960, The New York World Telegram and Sun called Jones “the best darned dog warden in Connecticut” and described how he tracked down the owners of a lost collie by contacting authorities in Long Island, Michigan and Florida, and mailing more than two dozen letters. 

The paper also told how one day, a Ridgebury recluse died while walking home from Danbury and his two dogs refused to let police or the medical examiner approach the body.   Jones talked to the snarling dogs, then walked into the dead man’s cabin. The dogs followed him and he locked them inside, telling authorities he had just employed some simple dog psychology.  (Jones and veterinarian Dr. Jordan Dann tried for six weeks to tame the dead man’s pets, but were unsuccessful and the dogs had to be put down.)

Perhaps it was more of that psychology — or just a good knowledge of the breed — that Jones employed when a wealthy guest at the Stonehenge Inn reported his two valuable beagles had run off. “Solving this case was child’s play for Fred Jones,” the New York newspaper said. “He knew beagles, so he went off into the Farmingville swamp and found the two dogs chasing rabbits.”

He also found a famous dog.  Morgan, a basset hound that had wandered away from its

owner, TV and movie producer Dick Gordon, was well known to television viewers in the 1950s, appearing regularly on the Garry Moore Show and in several sitcoms.  (In 1973, the Altman Department Store Christmas catalogue in New York featured a “Huggable Morgan” stuffed animal complete with a squeaker nose.)

Roaming and usually unlicensed dogs were a serious problem in the mid-20th Century, when there were still farms with livestock that could be attacked. Jones was tough about licensing dogs, so much so in 1954 that he conducted door-to-door surveys of the town to make sure dogs were licensed. 

In 1959, when roaming packs of dogs were attacking livestock and wildlife, he pointed out, under state law, that the town has to pay for chickens, sheep and rabbits that had been killed by stray dogs.

In 1961, the town was having problems with dog packs killing deer, which back then were relatively few in number to start with. Jones warned the public in February of that year that he had the right under law to shoot and kill dogs that were attacking deer.

Under Jones’s guidance in 1954, the town built its first dog pound to hold strays the warden had captured. It had six runs. First Selectman Leo F. Carroll said in 1959, when many of the state’s pounds were being criticized as cruel canine prisons, Ridgefield’s pound has “heat, light, meals, and each guest has his own private runway where he takes his exercise at his leisure.” 

Sometimes even high-class impoundment did not sit well with locals, however. In 1957, Police Chief John F. Haight reported that some local children broke into the pound and “liberated” a beagle that had escaped from its Danbury owners.  Chief Haight said the children felt sad for the dog being locked up, but warned that “sometimes vicious dogs are kept at the pound, and any child gaining entrance to the building via a window might run the risk of being badly mauled or bitten.”

By the early 1960s, the pound was overcrowded and was housing two dogs per run. It wasn’t until 1973 that the town tore down the 1954 shelter and built a new 14-run building. By then Jones had retired.

 Especially later in his life, Jones became well known an expert lapidary, a person who cuts and polishes gemstones. And to get the gemstones, he had rocks. Lots of them. “The quantity of rocks in and around the Lounsbury Road home of Mr. and Mrs. Fred  B. Jones might lead one to believe that the couple was planning to build a house of stone,” said a 1974 Ridgefield Press interview with Jones. “Not so. These are not ordinary rocks, they’re semi-precious stones in the rough.”

“A rock hound, Mr. Jones is hooked on the beauty which can be wrought from rough stones.”

  By the 1970s, he and his late wife, Ruth, were traveling 25,000 miles a year, acquiring and selling rocks in a business called as Fred’s Gem Den. 

Fred Jones died in 1999 at the age of 91.

Over his years in office as dog warden, Jones put in some long hours and was on call 24/7. Once he told a woman whose dog had run off to be sure to let him know if it returned. Two days later, his phone rang. “I wanted you to know that Rover just came home,” the woman reported. 

It was 2:30 in the morning.

Daniel M. McKeon: 

The Squire of Ridgebury

Sometimes affectionately called the “Squire of Ridgebury,” Daniel McKeon was probably the best-known resident of Ridgebury during the last half of the 20th Century. The Yale graduate, who operated one of the last working farms in Ridgefield, was a leader in town government, in the Catholic Church, and in local and regional conservation and organic farming movements for more than 60 years. 

A native of New York City and son of a family that helped establish St. Patrick's Cathedral, Daniel Manning McKeon was born in 1906 and was among the first 50 graduates of The Canterbury School in New Milford, a then-new prep school and experiment in lay Catholic education. 

He graduated from Yale in 1928 and was a stockbroker for many years, with a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, retiring in 1965.  

He and Louise Hoguet were married in 1935 in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Her family were leaders in Catholic education, and co-founded St. David’s School in Manhattan and Portsmouth Priory in Rhode Island. 

In 1938, the McKeons bought a 135-acre farm on Ridgebury and Old Stagecoach Roads, naming it Arigideen after a river in County Cork. The farm was steeped in history, parts of it having been granted by the colony to one of Connecticut’s early physicians in the late 1600s, long before the town was settled. French troops camped there in 1781 and the house, built  in 1782 by Revolutionary War veteran Captain Henry Whitney, was once a stagecoach stop and later the home of the one-armed Civil War veteran and selectman Samuel Coe. (The house was moved  northwesterly to the corner of Ridgebury and Old Stagecoach Roads in 2009, and was replaced by a new but similar-looking home.)

The McKeons maintained a herd of as many as 45 Brown Swiss dairy cows over the years, and sold unpasteurized milk for many years. The dairy operation, Ridgefield's last, closed in August 2000, causing much sadness among Ridgefielders so accustomed to seeing cows in the fields along Ridgebury and Old Stagecoach Roads. 

McKeon was best known locally for his long service in planning and zoning, starting in 1958 when he was appointed a charter member of the new Planning Commission. A year later, he was elected its chairman, and when the Planning and the Zoning Commissions were combined in 1962, he was its first chairman.

On the occasion of his 10th anniversary as chairman, the commission presented him with a commendation for his “prodigious endeavors” on behalf of the town. It noted that for many years, the commission had no paid staff, and McKeon had “devoted many hours performing multitudinous duties necessary for the proper functioning of the commission.”

Several months earlier,  McKeon had been involved in what his supporters called “the fight of his life,” a Republican primary challenge from former town planner Lowell I. Williams, who had been linked to real estate development interests.

“His enemies, self-interested people, have sworn to beat him because he has never ceased to fight for you and for his town,” a pro-McKeon advertisement said in September 1969. His campaign focused on his efforts to upzone residential areas, his work to zone more than 1,000 acres for tax-generating light industry, and his having “led the battle to have the town buy 1,000 acres of land for open space and recreation.” 

McKeon handily defeated his challenger and went on to serve 25 more years with the commission, retiring in 1993. 

A lifelong Republican,  McKeon had been considered a possible Eisenhower appointee as U.S. ambassador to Ireland in 1952. 

Like their parents, the McKeons were closely involved in the Catholic Church. Mr. McKeon helped establish the St. Thomas More Center at Yale and contributed toward the establishment of a chair of Catholic philosophy at the university. In 1975, the McKeons flew to Rome to attend the canonization of Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton as the first American saint. Later, they were instrumental in the establishment of St. Elizabeth Seton Parish in Ridgebury, where McKeon served as a trustee and on the parish advisory council.

In 1983, he was made a knight of the Order of St. Gregory the Great, a papal honor that was conferred on him at St. Augustine Cathedral in Bridgeport. The McKeons counted among their friends Father James Keller, founder of the Christophers, and Frederick Shrady, the noted Catholic artist who was the first American to have a sculpture placed in the Vatican gardens.

Throughout their lives, the McKeons had a deep interest in history, perhaps inspired by their old farmstead. Dan McKeon was considered an expert on early Ridgebury and was especially interested in the role French soldiers played in the American Revolution. In 1781, French troops under Comte de Rochambeau and Duc de Lauzun camped on the McKeon farm and it’s believed that the first Catholic mass ever celebrated in town took place there. For many years, McKeon was a part of an American regiment that portrayed the French troops, and he took part in the re-enactment of the Battle of Yorktown at its 200th anniversary in 1981. 

Two years later, he portrayed the Duc de Lauzun of the Lauzun Legion, marching with the Rochambeau Army in Chartres, France, during ceremonies there honoring Rochambeau.
An excellent horseman,  McKeon was a longtime master and member of the Goldens Bridge Hunt Club. In 1985, when he was 79, he was hospitalized after a fall during a hunt club event. After recuperating, he continued to ride until 1990.

Both he and his wife, who died in 1993, were involved in the preservation of the Keeler Tavern, and in the establishment of historic districts in the village.

A lifelong environmentalist, McKeon was appointed to the Connecticut Conservation Commission in 1950. He also later served on the Fairfield County Soil and Water Conservation Board of Supervisors, and had been active in the organic farming movement starting in 1947.  He was one of the founders of the Discovery Center, one of whose aims is to encourage people to use Ridgefield’s many open spaces.

The McKeons were devotees of unadulterated foods, noted a New York Sunday News story in 1960. “Some call ’em ‘health cranks,’ but with a leader of the stature and background of McKeon, they rate more attention than ordinary food faddists.”

In the spring of 1971, when a huge outbreak of gypsy moth caterpillars was expected, the selectmen hired a helicopter service to spray the town with insecticide.  McKeon led other conservationists in threatening to sue the sprayer, arguing that the spraying would certainly kill useful insects and might also harm people. The sprayer backed out, and the caterpillars eventually died of a natural disease.

McKeon died in 2001 at the age of 94. 

Sharp shoes

Remember studded snow tires? Chains? In the era of all-wheel drive and efficient highway maintenance, both of these once common winter transportation aids have all but disappeared.

Back before the automobile, however, winter travel needed its own version of studs or chains. At this time of year, the shoes of horses had to be kept very sharp so that hooves could bite into the ice. A horse with dull shoes could slip and injure a leg.

Later, horseshoes were equipped with devices called calkins or calks. A calk was a tapered wedge or cone-shaped piece of iron or steel projecting downward on the shoe of the horse to prevent slipping.

According to one old source, it was a Ridgefield, Conn., man who invented calks. He sought the aid of an attorney to get a patent. However, the attorney stole the idea from the poor inventor and took out the patent in his own name.

The Ridgefield man was so upset, the story goes, that he went out of his mind and wandered aimlessly around the village the rest of his days.

Maybe the man should have left well enough alone. For him, good advice might have been, “If the shoe slips, bear it.”

Winter harvest

There’s an old saying that firewood keeps you warm twice: Once when you’re cutting it and once when you’re burning it. But that’s not why winter was the time for woodcutting among the old farmers who lived in town a century or three ago.

Winter was woodcutting time for more practical reasons. First and foremost, farmers had the time – there were no crops that needed tending in January and February.

In winter, it was easier to pull large loads of wood on a sledge or “stoneboat” because the winter woodlands were usually covered with snow or ice and the forest floor did not have much of the thick underbrush that made travel among the trees difficult at other times.

The wood was drier in winter, lacking the sap found in spring, summer and fall. Logs would season more quickly and be safe and ready for the following winter’s home fires.

Good farmers loved the outdoors and always needed something to do. Wood was their winter harvest.

Cowslip season

April offered old-time farmers a free treat that could warm their stomachs, brighten their rooms, and even line their pockets. We call them marsh marigolds, but New Englanders knew them as cowslips.

Their yellow flowers filled wetlands, offering the first big blooms of the season and a chance to decorate winter-weary homes.

They were also popular as a spinach-like dish. William Hamilton Gibson wrote in 1880: “The eager farmer’s wife fills her basket with the succulent leaves she has been waiting for so long; for they’ll tell you in New England that ‘they ain’t noth’n’ like cowslips for a mess o’ greens.’” Being bitter like most buttercups, they had to be well-boiled first. That bitterness, incidentally, is protection from today’s voracious deer.

There was gold in those yellow flowers, too. Enterprising farmers picked bunches of cowslips to send to nearby cities where boys would sell them on street corners to people eager for spring blossoms.

The plant’s name sounds romantically agrarian, but isn’t quite. Cowslip, named for a European barnyard weed, is from the Old English, meaning “cow slop” – that is to say, cow crap.

Hoop poles

Mention a “hoop pole” today and you might inspire images of basketball or tent supports. A century or two ago, however, hoop poles were a well-known and valuable commodity that many local farmers harvested from the wild to earn extra cash.

Hoop poles were long, straight rods, cut in the woods from ash, hickory, hazel, and white oak saplings or from bushes that had been specially pruned for the purpose. While they might be cut in spring or fall, farmers often processed them in midwinter, when they were less busy. Bark and shoots, for instance, had to be removed.

The poles were used around the farm for many tasks such as rollers for moving heavy loads and for temporary floors under haystacks. They were also split to make barrel hoops and basket-weaving material; the poles were hammered to flatten them, soaked in water, and then split into the hoops that held the barrel staves together.

Perhaps the oddest use for hoop poles, however, was as stiffeners in the colossal, but fashionable skirts women sometimes wore in the 19^th Century.

Tie Hacking

New England farmers were famous for not wasting time, energy or resources. Even in January and February, when the ground was frozen and snow covered, they were hard at work outdoors.

Mid-winter was the time for cutting down and chopping up trees. Most wood was bound for the fireplace or the stove, but not all.

In the 19^th Century many local farmers made railroad ties. Tens of millions of these eight-foot, six-inch logs were needed yearly, not only to support new tracks being laid across America but also to replace existing sleepers, whose life expectancy was only about five years. The ties were cut and sledded back to the farm where were they were hand-hewn into shape. In the spring or summer, they were carted to the depot and sold to the railroad.

Even the bark shaved off the logs was saved and sold to local tanneries, which used bark extract in processing leather.

“Tie hacking,” as it was called, provided useful income to many people, most of whom were subsistence farmers growing little more than was needed for the family. In fact, many farmers earned more from winter work than summer crops.

Firewood words

“Don’t let it lie in great sticks,” the Old Farmer’s Almanac urged its readers for December 1864. The season of sawing and splitting was here.

For the local farmers, early December was the time to work on wood, not for the winter ahead, but for the next summer and beyond. Wood for stoves and fireplaces needed drying, for sap-filled “green” wood cuts heat output by a third. Split up, firewood dries quickly and, as the almanac exhorted, it was best left outside a while in the late-fall weather. “Give it the wind a few weeks before housing, and it will dry all right,” the “old farmer” wrote.

Today, many people still heat with wood, using sophisticated stoves that burn logs and even conveyor-fed wood pellets, or employing high-tech furnaces that can burn both wood and propane or fuel oil.

But the old farmer’s old advice on firewood still holds true: Dry it right to burn it well.

The miry mess

Most folks in town a century or two ago would have not been pleased with the warmer than usual winter of 2005-06. It’s not that they loved cold; it’s just that they liked to get their work done.

Warm winters were a muddy mess, and mud was the enemy of the farmer. When the ground was frozen, the narrow wheels of wagons could handle the dirt roads and farm paths with ease. Thawed, roads and paths were one miry mess after another.

When the ground was snow-covered, life was even better for the farmer, whose slays, sleds and sledges could get much more work done than could wheeled vehicles. A horse could drag four times more weight on a sled across snow than could a wheeled cart across dirt.

That meant that farmers could easily haul timber home from the woods to cut for firewood, to saw into lumber, or even to hew into railroad ties. It meant that stoneboats could remove large boulders from fields, and that other heavy-duty tasks could be accomplished.

Winters may have been colder back then, but the work was harder and kept people warmer.

The Hessian fly

In the 19^th Century, farmers here grew many crops, but the most common grain – wheat – was generally not among them. This was probably because of the Hessian fly.

Hessian fly? Not your everyday bug of 21^st Century suburbia, yet this mosquito-like insect had a major impact two centuries ago because its larvae sucked the life juices from wheat.

The insect, which first appeared on Long Island around 1779, is believed to have arrived with Hessian soldiers fighting in the Revolution – hence, the name.

Many farmers in the Northeast gave up the crop – despite the fact that no less a personage than George Washington urged them not to do so. Washington recommended growing yellow-bearded wheat, which was more resistant to the larvae.

Hessian fly is still around and now attacks wheat coast to coast. But fly-resistant wheat varieties have been developed and are so successful that insecticides are often not needed to combat this strange, living remnant of a war fought 225 years ago.

Butchering season

For local farmers of a century or two ago, mid-December was a time for butchering, a multifaceted event that led to many life-sustaining products.

Hogs and cattle produced various cuts of meat, much of it salted and preserved over the winter in cold cellars. Scraps were mixed with salt and pepper, and ground into long-lasting sausages. Fat was boiled or “tried” for use as kitchen lard, as a main ingredient in soap, or to make tallow candles. Marrow made puddings. Hides were hauled off to the local tannery to become leather, which in turn became shoes, boots, harnesses, saddles, and other products. Even the bones were saved and ground to enrich soil.

The whole process often lasted several days and involved family and friends. The work was hard, even dangerous. Old records often tell of people being maimed by the animals they were slaughtering. In fact, in Ridgefield in 1858, meat market owner David Hurlbutt died after being gored in the head by the horn of a cow he was trying to butcher.

Pignuts

This is the season for gathering pignuts.

What nuts?

The pignut is the fruit of the pignut hickory, a common tree that grows 90 or so feet high. A century or three ago, some people collected and ate the somewhat bitter meats of pignuts, though most people ignored them as food. Instead, as the name suggests, many a thrifty farmer would collect them to feed to his stock.

However, not everyone cast pignuts before swine. “I am partial to the peculiar and wholesome sweetness of a nut, and I think that some time is profitably spent every autumn in gathering even such as our pignuts,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in his diary one November. “Some of them are a very sizeable, rich looking and palatable fruit.”

“How can we expect to understand nature unless we accept like children these her smallest gifts, valuing them more as her gifts than for their intrinsic value.”

Alas, encouraging the eating of pignuts is too much to ask today. Besides being bitter, the kernel is up to 80% fat, and offers few vitamins or minerals.

The farmers were probably right.

Farmers convention

In the 1800s, when farming dominated local industry, this was the season of the agricultural fair.

The Ridgefield Fair and Cattle Show was a typical 19^th Century fair, with exhibits of products, produce and livestock, plus awards. The fair offered 31 categories for ribbons, ranging from crops, grains, vegetables, and fruit, to cakes, wines, musical instruments, fine arts, and “ladies' industrials.”

Agricultural markets were booming with new machines, tools and seed varieties in the 19^th Century, and farmers got to see the latest products and hear lectures on improved farming methods. They could also chat with a wider group of farmers, discussing and critiquing modern-day advances as well as time-tested techniques.

At a fair, “they saw, gathered up in a small compass, what was going on in the farmer’s world, and this within a single day or two,” said an 1860s book on farming. “Thus, they accumulated a fund of knowledge which they could not have acquired had they remained at home.”

Thus, old-time country fairs were a time to learn as well as play -- the precursor of the modern convention.