Stephen Jenks: 

Prolific Psalmodist

Few people today realize it, but Ridgefield has been the home of some of the nation’s leaders in producing sacred music in the 19th Century. They ranged from the prolific hymn writer, Fanny Crosby, and the composer Hubert P. Main, who scored many of Fanny’s hymns, to the publishers Lucius Horatio Biglow and Sylvester Main, who printed hundreds of thousands of books of hymns.  

But the town’s earliest artist in sacred music was Stephen Jenks, a composer who came here in the late 1700s and married a Ridgefield native. During his lifetime Jenks composed the music for more than 200 hymns and songs, and compiled a dozen books of both sacred and secular music. He has been called “among the most prolific psalmodists of his day.”

One of his composition was even named “Ridgefield.”

Stephen Jenks was born in 1772 in Glocester, R.I., and grew up in Ellington, a small town in central Connecticut. As a young man, he was stirred by a love of music and began moving from community to community in Connecticut, teaching psalmody — hymn singing — while composing his own music and collecting the music of others he met. 

By the late 1790s, he was in Ridgefield where he may have taught singing, possibly at one of the three churches in town. Since he had married Hannah Dauchy, he may have been associated with St. Stephen’s —  she was a daughter of Philip and Mary Dauchy and granddaughter of Captain Vivus Dauchy, a French Huguenot who was a pillar of the Episcopal Church here.

Ridgefield records indicate Jenks never owned land in town, nor did Hannah. If he were farming, as some histories have suggested, it was probably on the land of his in-laws.

While in Ridgefield Jenks was very active composing, collecting and publishing music. In

1799, he produced the first of his collections of compositions, “The New-England Harmonist.” It contained “concise and easy rules of music, together with a number of tunes adapted to public worship, most of which were never before published,” according to Jenks himself. 

The book included 21 songs, 17 of which he had composed himself to the words of others. Because a hymn could have several different scores for singing the words, the music was often given a name of its own. Each of Jenks’s compositions is named, and one is called “Ridgefield.”  

      Another tune written in Ridgefield and appearing in his “The New-England Harmonist” was composed on the death of George Washington. “Mount Vernon,” which was probably performed in Ridgefield, uses words attributed to Theodore Dwight, journalist brother of Yale president Timothy Dwight.  “This tune, with this text, is still sung in the Southern U.S., and now, around the world,” reports Warren Steel, retired professor of music at the University of Mississippi and probably the foremost expert on Jenks and his work.

A year after “The New-England Harmonist,” his second collection, “The Musical Harmonist,” offered 35 songs, only 13 of which employed his own music. He went on to publish eight more books of sacred music through 1818.

Not all of Jenks’s work was solemn and churchly. In 1806, he published “The Jovial Songster,” which he described as “containing a variety of patriotic and humorous songs.” In it he put many Old World verses to music.

Despite his appreciation for things “jovial,” Jenks’s life was punctuated with problems. His

new wife, Hannah Jenks, died in August 1800, possibly in childbirth. She was 27 years old and is buried at Titicus Cemetery off North Salem Road in a large section devoted to members of the prominent Dauchy family. Hannah’s gravestone describes her as the daughter of Philip and Mary Dauchy, but does not even mention Stephen. Town hall records of her death, however, identify her as “wife of Stephen Jencks,” who was a “teacher of psalmody.” 

There is no record of their having had any surviving children together.

Only eight months later, Jenks married Rachel Travis, a Westchester County woman. Genealogical and local history records identify Rachel as a daughter of Lt. Jacob Travis, a prominent tavern keeper from nearby Pound Ridge, N.Y., who lost his left arm at the Battle of Ridgefield during the Revolution.

Jenks in 1801 was hired as the teacher of the new Singing School in the village of South Salem, N.Y., bordering Ridgefield and the place where he and Rachel were married that year. Singing schools were popular in New England and especially in the South in the 18th and early 19th Centuries. They almost solely taught religious music, mostly traditional hymns. South Salem’s was popular enough to last at least 20 more years under other teachers.

In 1803, he was living in Pound Ridge, perhaps with the family of his wife. There he published his fourth book of music, “The American Compiler.”

     However, his marriage soon turned sour. At the top of the front page of the “Republican Farmer,” a Danbury newspaper, on May 21, 1806, appeared an advertisement: “Whereas my wife Rachel has behaved herself in a scandalous and unbecoming manner, this is to forbid all persons trusting or harbouring her on my account, as I will pay no debts of her contracting after this date.” It was signed Stephen Jenks.

      What happened to Rachel after this is unknown, but presumably, there was a divorce. Professor Steel notes that Jacob Travis’s will, written in 1804 and proved in 1809, mentions his daughter Rachel, “bequeathing to her or to her heirs 75 dollars, perhaps implying that she had children.” Another author has suggested Jenks had two young children by 1805, and another source indicated he “became so impoverished as not to be able to provide for his two sons and that they ‘passed into the custody of friends, and, at manhood, knew not even the whereabouts of their father,’ ” Professor Steel reports. It is also possible the children stayed with their mother, Rachel.

Just a couple inches below the newspaper announcement about his wife was another, dealing with his latest book, “The Delights of Harmony; or, Norfolk Compiler.”

From Westchester County, Jenks moved around southeastern New York and Connecticut, spending time in New Canaan, New Haven, Hartford, and in the Hudson Valley and producing more collections of his own and others music.

“Jenks was a prolific exponent of the American music idiom developed by Daniel Read and other Connecticut composers during the late 18th Century,” said Professor Steel. “Virtually unknown in the cities of the American seaboard, he flourished in the hinterland of New England and New York, where he taught singing schools and cultivated a network of pupils and fellow teachers, whose compositions he published.”

Around 1810 he married his third wife, Abigail Ross, a native of Stafford in northern Connecticut. She was about 22 years old, he 38. Their marriage was more successful than his previous unions, and together they had two sons and four daughters. 

Jenks periodically fell on hard times. His financial condition had always been tenuous, relying on small-town teaching jobs and the sales of his song books for income. Many of his books involved signing up subscribers who would promise to buy copies. 

However, when the books appeared, not all the subscribers apparently always showed up. In an 1806 advertisement in the Danbury “Republican Farmer,” Jenks and Norwalk merchant Hezekiah

Whitlock announced: “Subscribers for ‘The Delights of Harmony; or, Norfolk Compiler,’ are required to call on Hezekiah Whitlock, or either of the subscribers and received their books. Those who neglect to pay for them by the 1st of June next, may expect cost.” That is, a bill-collector may start dunning them.

By 1818, however, creditors were after Jenks and taking serious legal action. At that point he and his young family were living back Glocester, R.I., the place of his birth. Deputy Sheriff John Guild posted notice in several newspapers that more than 1,000 copies of “music books, published last winter by Stephen Jenks,” had been confiscated and would be sold at  public auction Jan. 4, 1819. 

A month later the State of Rhode Island was publishing notices that “Stephen Jenks, musician, of Glocester,” had petitioned to be allowed the benefit of  “an act for the relief of insolvent debtors.” In other words, he wanted to declare bankruptcy.

One historian says that he “became associated with someone who betrayed his trust and took the proceeds of sale to the extent that Jenks became discouraged, and so abandoned publishing…” Professor Steel suspects Jenks’s printer may have demanded payment for books, money Jenks didn’t have.

Glocester was near Providence, and the area had a sizable Jenks clan — including some named Stephen Jenks (also spelled Jencks), one of whom, a blacksmith, was also going bankrupt around then. Another Stephen Jenks had operated cotton mills and a munitions factory, and had also run into financial problems. The musician Stephen may have returned there because he was low on money and could find support from family members. 

By 1829, however, he apparently decided it was time for a major change. He and the family moved to the Western Reserve, a large tract of land given to Connecticut in the 1600s by King Charles II and settled largely by people from the Nutmeg State. It is now northern Ohio. Jenks and his family set up a farm in Thompson, northeast of Cleveland. 

There, besides farming, Jenks continued to compose and apparently also focused his musical

attention on making drums and tambourines. In the late 1840s he compiled a manuscript of 102 of his compositions — more than 80 of which had been written while living in Thompson. They were never published. In an odd coincidence, this manuscript was acquired after Jenks’s death by Hubert Platt Main, the Ridgefield native and hymn composer of the 19th and early 20th Century, who was also a collector of sacred music. Born in 1839, Main never knew Jenks personally. He eventually gave the manuscript to the Newberry Library in Chicago, which holds it in is vast collection. 

Jenks died in 1856 at the age of 84. Abigail died six years later.

“Stephen Jenks’s sacred tunebooks and his many published compositions establish him as an important figure in American sacred music of the early 19th Century,” Professor Steel said. “His large manuscript tunebook shows that he continued to compose as late as 1850 and that he grappled with the changing styles of nineteenth-century hymnody. His compositions reveal the stylistic growth of a composer, trained in the eighteenth century, who attempted over many years to assimilate new developments.”

Fanny Crosby: 

A Pioneering Woman of Song

Fanny Crosby was among the leading hymn-writers of all time, a blind woman who spent her formative years in Ridgefield. She wrote thousands of hymns, including “Blessed Assurance,” “Safe in the Arms of Jesus,” “Praise Him! Praise Him!,” and “Close to Thee.”

But while her production of religious music brought her fame, she was accomplished — even a pioneer — in others fields as well.

Born in 1820 in nearby Brewster, N.Y., Frances Jane “Fanny” Crosby was blinded at six weeks by a disease. A few months later, her father died, leaving his 21-year-old wife a widow. 

Fanny and her mother came to Ridgefield when she was nine, living with Mr. and Mrs. Elijah Hawley on Main Street on the south corner of Branchville Road in a house that’s no longer there. 

 “Mrs. Hawley, a kind Christian lady…who had no children of her own, became deeply interested in me, and under her supervision I acquired a thorough knowledge of the Bible,” Crosby wrote in one of her two autobiographies: “She gave me a number of chapters each week to learn, sometimes as many as five…and at the end of the first 12 months, I could repeat a large portion of the first four books of the Old Testament and the four Gospels.

 “The good Mrs. Hawley was kind in every respect and sought to teach me many practical lessons that I now remember with gratitude and affection.” 

When  Crosby was about 15, she left Ridgefield to attend the New York Institute for the Blind. Soon after graduation from the Institute in 1843, at the age of 23, she worked as a lobbyist in Washington, D.C., pleading for support of education for the blind. There she became the first woman to speak in the United States Senate. 

She later appeared before the joint houses of Congress, offering along with her oration this brief poem:

Ye, who here from every state convene,

Illustrious band! may we not hope the scene

You now behold will prove to every mind

Instruction hath a ray to cheer the blind.

Crosby soon joined the teaching staff of the New York Institute for the Blind. At this time she was beginning her writing career, producing non-religious poetry, and there she struck up a close friendship with a fellow teacher who was just 17 years old. His name was Grover Cleveland. The two spent time together after classes. and the teenaged future U.S. president often wrote down poems that Fanny dictated to him. 

She wound up publishing four books of secular poetry.

Crosby’s poetry-writing soon led to song-writing, though most were at first secular or, as she called them, “people’s songs” — probably what we’d today call folk songs. She wrote political songs, patriotic songs (especially during the Civil War), and even cantatas. During the war, she began writing religious songs, both under her own name and pseudonyms, and over her career she penned the lyrics to more than 8,000 hymns.

Crosby once said she wanted her hymns to win a million souls for Christ, and her words were certainly available to many more than a million:  Books containing her songs are said to have sold at least 100 million copies.

Many of Crosby’s hymns were published by Biglow and Main of New York City, one of the first publishers of sacred music. The “Biglow” was Lucius Horatio Biglow who, in 1889, bought an 18th century house on Main Street to create a fine retreat from the city. (When his daughter, Elizabeth Biglow Ballard, died in 1964, she bequeathed that estate to the town. Today, it is Ballard Park.)

Biglow probably came to Ridgefield because of his partner. The “Main” of Biglow and Main was Sylvester Main, born in Ridgefield in 1817 and a childhood friend of Fanny Crosby. “Among the playmates who used to gather on the village green was Sylvester Main who was two or three years older than I,” Crosby recalled.

“He was a prime favorite with the gentler sex, for he used to protect us from the annoyances of more mischievous boys.”

Sylvester Main became a singing-school teacher and wound up in New York City, compiling books of hymn music. He went to work for William Bradbury, music publisher and hymnist, and when Bradbury died around 1868, he and Lucius Biglow partnered to take over the firm, calling it Biglow and Main.

Sylvester’s son, Hubert Platt Main, was also born in Ridgefield, and composed more than 1,000 works, including the music for hundreds of popular hymns of the mid-19th century, among them “We Shall Meet Beyond the River,”  “Blessed Homeland,” and “The Bright Forever” — the words of the last two were written by Fanny Crosby.  

In the 1915 book, “Fanny Crosby’s Story of Ninety-Four Years,” she called him “one of my most precious friends.” The book includes a picture of the two, seated together, called “Fast Friends”

Fanny Crosby died in 1915 at the age of 94 and is buried in Bridgeport. She had been married for a while, but eventually separated. The couple had one child, who died as a baby. 

Hubert Main, who died in 1925, is buried in New Jersey beneath a stone that says, “We shall meet beyond the river.” —based on “Hidden History of Ridgefield”

Hubert Main: 

Holy Music

Ridgefield has had a surprisingly noteworthy history in the world of religious music: It was childhood home of one of the world’s most prolific hymn writers, it was the adulthood home of a major hymn publisher, and it was the birthplace of a major hymn composer. Oddly enough, Fanny Crosby, Lucius H. Biglow and Hubert Main all knew each other.

Hubert Platt Main was born in Ridgefield in 1839. His father, Sylvester Main, was a music teacher who became a compiler of hymn books and eventually joined Lucius Biglow in the music publishing business. 

But Sylvester was also a childhood friend of Fanny Crosby, the blind author of more than 3,000 hymns, who grew up on Main Street. In fact, Crosby fondly recounted how Sylvester often protected her from the local bullies when she was a young girl.

Hubert displayed an early love of both music and independence. According to J.H. Hall in his book, “Biography of Gospel Song and Hymn Writers,” Main had an amazing memory of his early childhood to as far back as 1842 when he was three years old. “He hasn’t forgotten a whipping received in that year for repeatedly running off from home at evenings to the band room, hiding under the benches and listening to the music.”

As a child, he would compose tunes by speaking “do, re, mi, fa...” for the notes. “If, when walking on the street, any air came to his mind, he would apply the syllables to it, and sing away,” Hall said.
As a young man, he moved to New York City where compiled books of music, was a choir leader and organist in churches, and eventually joined Biglow and Main, the music publishing company that his father had owned with Lucius Biglow. (Biglow moved to Ridgefield in the late 1880s, buying the estate that is now Ballard Park — donated to the town by his daughter, Elizabeth Biglow Ballard.)

Over his lifetime, Main composed more than 1,000 works, including “singing school pieces, Sunday-school songs, hymn tunes, gospel hymns, anthems, sheet music songs, love songs, quartets, and instrumental pieces,” Hall reports.

He composed the music for hundreds of popular hymns of the mid-to-late 19th century, among them “We Shall Meet Beyond the River,”  “Blessed Homeland,” and “The Bright Forever”— the words of the last two were written by Fanny Crosby.    

In the 1915 book, “Fanny Crosby’s Story of Ninety-Four Years,” she called Hubert Main “one of my most precious friends.” The book includes a picture of the two, seated together, called “Fast Friends.” 

Main also collected a huge library on music — he was “a veritable antiquarian in old music books,” said Hall. In 1891, he sold 35,000 volumes to the Newberry Library in Chicago, one of the world’s leading research libraries to this day.

Main was known not only for his independent thinking but for his sense of humor. “In regard to his religious proclivities,” Hall reports, “he was brought up a Methodist, joined the church in 1854 before he came to New York but he quaintly says that he is not outrageously pious, and could laugh at a funeral, even his own, if he saw anything comical, and he could just as easily shed tears at anything tender and pathetic.”

Hall added, “He is full of sunshine and good humor. He is immensely entertaining in his conversation, and one of  the best of companions. His letters to his friends are usually full of wit and humor. He remarks that he might be more dignified, but it would increase his doctor's bills.”

Main lived his later life in New Jersey where he died in 1925. He is buried there beneath a stone that says, “We shall meet beyond the river.”