Irad Hawley: 
His Name and Face Live On

A son of a Ridgefield deacon and great grandson of the town’s first minister, Irad Hawley made a fortune in food, coal and railroads, but he left his mark on the world in two rather different ways: The home of one of America’s leading art centers, and the name of a small Pennsylvania town.

And you can see his face, hanging on the wall, whenever you visit the Ridgefield Library — or the Salmagundi Club.

Born in Ridgefield in 1793, Irad Hawley was a great grandson of the Rev. Thomas Hauley, the first minister and the first school teacher in the town. The minister’s home  at the north corner of Main Street and Branchville Road is the oldest house in Ridgefield and is where Irad was born. It remained in the Hawley family for more than two centuries.

His father, Deacon Elisha Hawley,  was a leader in the First Congregational Church. His mother, Charity Hawley was active in the community, so much so that when he was preparing his autobiography, Recollections of A Lifetime, in the 1850s, Samuel G. Goodrich (“Peter Parley”)  interviewed her to refresh his memory about the town during his childhood (and he included a long profile of the Deacon in his book). She died in 1860, five months short of her 100th birthday.

 In 1807 when he was only 14 years old, Irad moved to New York to begin a career in retailing. He took a break to join the New York Militia’s 11th Regiment, serving in the War of 1812 as a private. He remained a reserve member of the militia until his death, by which time he’d reached the rank of major.

After the war he established a grocery firm called Holmes, Hawley & Company, which grew into “a prosperous house in the West India trade for more than 25 years,” said the New York Observer, a 19th Century newspaper. He married his partner’s daughter, Sarah Holmes, in 1819.

But his interests — and income — soon expanded. He helped organize the Pennsylvania Coal Company, and served as its first president. Many of that company’s operations were in Poconos.  There, Irad established the town of Hawley in 1827 at the important junction of a coal-carrying “gravity railroad” and the Delaware & Hudson Canal, which transported the anthracite from there to the Hudson River and on to New York City.

Not surprisingly, Hawley became a director Delaware & Hudson Canal Company.

However, he also invested heavily in the “new technology” of railroads, becoming a director of the Boston & Providence and the Chicago & Rock Island Railroads.

By 1841, he could retire from Holmes & Hawley with what one historian called “an ample fortune.”

The canal, railroads, coal company, and his own business have come and gone, but Hawley’s next big project proved quite lasting, and still stands today.

“In 1852 construction was begun on Hawley's imposing brownstone-fronted house at No. 47 Fifth Avenue between 11th and 12th Streets,” reports Manhattan historian Tom Miller.  “At nearly 40-feet wide, it engulfed two building plots.  Completed the following year, the house was an aristocratic expression of the Italianate style. Inside, the mansion was the epitome of current domestic fashion.  Elegant carved mantels adorned the main rooms, and the dining room was decorated in the Gothic Revival style.”

It is today a New York City Landmark and on the National Register of Historic Places.

Hawley became interested in education.  He was a director of the Rutgers Female Institute, the first New York City college for women, and in 1858 headed a group of citizens “in opposition to the expulsion of the Bible from our Public Schools” — not surprising for the son of a deacon and great grandson of a preacher.

By the early 1860s, Hawley was having health problems. In 1862, he sailed to Europe to try to regain his health. (His 1862 passport application, in the days before passports had

pictures, provided an interesting description of the 69-year-old Hawley’s appearance: “Stature, 5 feet 7½ inches; Forehead, high; Eyes, grayish blue; Nose, Roman; Mouth, small; Chin, round; Hair, white; Complexion, florid; Face, oval.”)

 Hawley wound up staying in Italy where, in 1865, he contracted typhoid fever and died in Rome. He left an estate valued at $500,000 — equal to about $8.5 million today — to his wife, Sarah, and five surviving children.

Some of that was real estate in Ridgefield and his sons, detecting the likelihood that the town would become more attractive to city dwellers once the railroad arrived in 1870, invested rather heavily in more village land — eventually owning most of what became the Lounsbury estate and Veterans Park as well as considerable acreage on lower High Ridge.

However, one son — Elisha Judson Hawley — proved a disaster for the family. Judson, as he was called, was caught in 1871, stealing more than $237,000 ($4.8 million) from family investments to cover personal business interests. The result was years of financial stress, battling among family members and even a  lawsuit as the Hawleys struggled to make up for the losses.  The New York Sun reported that the widow Sarah Hawley had “agreed to take a much less income than she was entitled to so as to help make up the deficit.” 

Judson Hawley was never arrested or prosecuted. He died in 1915 in England, leaving an estate valued at only $200,000 in today’s dollars — less than a 20th of what he had stolen years earlier, reports Ridgefield village historian David Daubenspeck.

Irad’s estate wasn’t finally settled until 1919 when the last Ridgefield property — the Hauley Homestead where he was born — was sold.

Sarah remained in the Fifth Avenue mansion with two of her grown sons, Daniel Edwin and Elisha Judson, along with Judson’s wife, Anna. After Sarah died in 1891, the house was sold at auction to a Pittsburgh steel magnate.

That family sold it in 1917 to the Salmagundi Club, which describes itself as “a center for American art since 1871.” Its members have included   William Merritt Chase,  Frederick Stuart Church,   Charles Dana Gibson,   William Hart, Childe Hassam,   Howard Pyle,  Norman Rockwell,  Augustus Saint-Gaudens,  Louis Comfort Tiffany,  J. Alden Weir,   Stanford White,  and N.C. Wyeth.

Today, portraits of both Ira and Mary are displayed in those hallowed Salmagundi chambers the couple once called home. 

Duplicates hang in the Ruggles Fine Arts Reading Room of the Ridgefield Library.

Sturges Whitlock: 

Our Own Gutenberg

Ridgefield had its own Johannes Gutenberg, a man who invented a printing press that was so popular, his factory couldn’t keep up with the demand for it.

A fourth generation Ridgefielder, Sturges Selleck Whitlock was born in 1844 in the Bennett’s Farm section of town. His father, John, was a machinist and tinkerer, who taught his son the trade and apparently inspired  in him a desire to experiment.

Sturges grew up in Ridgefield, and probably attended the old Bennett’s Farm Schoolhouse.  As a young teenager, however, he studied at Jackson’s Academy, a private school that operated in the Turner House in Danbury (a hotel erected by retired circus owner Aaron Turner of Ridgefield). 

“He proved an apt and industrious scholar and left school at the age of eighteen, the possessor of a liberal education,” said a Whitlock family history.

He joined his father’s machine shop in Derby, learning both the skills and the business. In 1868, his father retired and Sturges took over, operating the shop for 20 years.

Meanwhile, he was coming up with ideas about improving the speed and performance of printing presses used for books, magazines and newspapers — all of which

were becoming increasingly popular after the Civil War. By 1877, he patented a new printing press design and began manufacturing them.

The presses became so sought-after, his factory could not keep up with the demand. For the first 10 years, he could produce about 100 units annually, each selling for the equivalent of about $60,000 in today’s money.

It might be said that his interest in machinery carried over into his romantic life. In 1868, Whitlock married Mary Olive Singer, a daughter of Isaac Merritt Singer of New York. Isaac Singer was a fellow machinist and inventor who had founded what has been called America’s first multinational corporation, the Singer Sewing Machine Company.

In 1888, as the demand for Whitlock’s Premier model press continued to increase, he reorganized into the Whitlock Machine Company and moved to larger quarters in Shelton (a building still standing and being considered for status as a state historic site).

Whitlock did not stop improving his press, and his business grew to the point where “the press is now used in most all of the printing offices in the country,” said an 1899 profile.

A year later, Whitlock’s wife died and he turned over management to a business associate and began to spend more time on community and political interests. A Shelton

resident, he served both as a state representative and state senator, was on the Board of Trade in Shelton, was active in Masonic organizations, served on the local board of burgesses, and was a strong supporter of the Episcopal Church.

Meanwhile his company took on a new name, the Premier and Potter Printing Press Company, and operations expanded in the 1920s to include actually performing high-quality printing. At one point, the firm was printing currency and stamped postcards for the U.S. government (which required the presence of federal agents who delivered the paper and oversaw the entire process).

In 1936, however, the company closed, apparently a victim of the Depression as well as competition from more modern press equipment. Sturges Whitlock had died in 1914 at the age of 70. So, apparently, had the ingenuity that had once brought his company to the top of the printing press manufacturers in this country.

“Mr. Whitlock possessed a rather unusual union of characteristics which, when taken together, almost invariably spell success,” said his family history profile. “The capable business man and the inventor are rarely found together in one person, the qualities which make for ability in each line somewhat negativing the others. In his case, however, this was not so and he was equally capable of inventing his splendid press and successfully putting it upon the market. 

“Nor was invention one effort merely, but he followed it up by much valuable work, making great improvements from year to year in his own device, and had eventually about twenty patents on these various supplementary inventions.”

D. Smith Sholes: 

A Man of Many Shirts

Catoonah Street today is a microcosm of Ridgefield, with everything from stores and offices to condos and large, single-family homes, not to mention a church, a post office, a cleaners, a restaurant, and a firehouse. But it once also had a shirt factory.

Yes, Ridgefield in the 19th Century was a center, albeit small, of the shirt-making industry, thanks to a man named D. Smith Sholes and his partner, Edward H. Smith, both leading citizens of the town.

David Smith Sholes was born in Ridgefield in 1830, son of a shoemaker who’d moved here from Vermont. He attended local schools including a private school taught by the Rev. David H. Short on Main Street, where Sholes acquired a love of reading. He later helped found a circulating library in Ridgefield that grew into today’s Ridgefield Library, of which he was once treasurer.

When he was 15, he became a clerk at Henry Smith’s store on Main Street but after a few years went to Bridgeport to learn bookkeeping. 

He returned to Ridgefield and, in partnership with Smith, operated the Ridgefield Shirt Factory, which had been founded in the 1840s by George Hunt. The factory was at first located in the Big Shop, a large building that stood where the First Congregational Church is now. (Moved around 1888 to the center of town, the Big Shop is now the home of Terra Sole and Luc’s restaurants, and other businesses off the Bailey Avenue parking lot.) The shirt factory later moved across the street to a building on what’s now an empty lot, and then to Catoonah Street on the site of the current Ridgefield Fire Department headquarters. 

“Colored shirts were a specialty of the factory, which employed as many as sixty persons at one time,” said historian Silvio Bedini. “The chief market was New York City.”

However, it appears many more Ridgefield Shirt “employees,”  mostly women but including a few men, worked from their homes. Sholes and Smith would provide them with packages of  shirt “components” and the women would sew them together in their spare time. The final product was prepared for sale and packaged at the factory. The New York Times reported in 1860 that there were 1,100 home-working women in the area, sewing for Ridgefield Shirt.

Sholes continued in the shirt-making business until around 1893 when, probably faced with competition from large-scale, mechanized clothing operations in New York City, the factory was closed.

In 1886 Sholes was elected treasurer of the Ridgefield Savings Bank, now Fairfield County Bank; he had been one of its incorporators when it was founded back in 1871. He eventually became the bank’s president.

“It was in the discharge of the duties of this important position that he achieved the most marked success of his life,” said The Ridgefield Press in Sholes’s 1907 obituary. “It was under his administration that the institution has grown from a small beginning to be the depository of nearly a million dollars of the savings of our frugal people, and its affairs have been so wisely managed by him that no person has ever yet lost a dollar by his imprudence or mismanagement.”

This profuse praise appeared in a newspaper whose company president was  D. Smith Sholes.

Possible pro-Sholes press prejudice aside, the man was clearly a respected and popular personality in town. An active Democrat, he was appointed Ridgefield’s postmaster in 1886 by President Grover Cleveland, also a Democrat. When Cleveland left office, so did Sholes, but when Cleveland returned for a second term, so did Sholes.

He was a town assessor, a registrar of voters for 17 years, the probate judge in 1870, a member of the Democratic State Central Committee for two terms,  treasurer of the Ridgefield Water Supply Company, and a clerk of St. Stephen’s Church for a quarter of a century. He also helped found the First National Bank of Ridgefield in 1900 and was its first cashier.

Seven years after he died in 1907, he was remembered on Old Home Day, July 4, 1914, when he was saluted as one of Ridgefield’s “sturdy citizens, whose place it seems impossible to fill …Many can testify to his kindness in hours of trouble.”

Joseph Shapiro: 

Simplicity himself

It was simplicity itself, but the idea to help women make clothing came from a Russian immigrant with a background in chemistry.  

When Joseph Shapiro came to the United States in 1912, his first jobs were as a laborer and a mechanic, though he had been trained in chemistry in his native Russia. Eventually he became an ad salesman for a women’s magazine that carried designs for making dresses and other articles of clothing at home. 

In 1927, he decided that dress patterns were too expensive and too complicated, so he started producing his own and selling them at first for 10 cents — instead of 45 cents to $2 that was common at the time for magazines offering patterns.

He once told an interviewer that he had asked himself, “What is the tendency of the American people in everything: in architecture, in eating, in living?” The answer, he said, was: “Simplicity.”

“I was pretty sure cheap patterns would go,” he continued. “But I made one mistake. Ten cents was too cheap. No one would believe they could be any good at that price. So I raised it to 15 cents, and they began selling like hot cakes.” (15 cents back then was the equivalent of $2 today.)

By the time of Shapiro’s death in 1968, the Simplicity Pattern Company had an annual volume of $25- to $30 million, selling more than 120 million patterns a year. The company had some 4,000 employees and even owned a paper mill. He headed Simplicity from 1927 until 1949 and was chairman of the board till 1967.  On his desk he kept a sign that said, “Fools invent fashions—Wise men follow them.”

Mr. Shapiro came to Ridgefield in the late 1930s, buying the Eleven Levels estate that Jerry Tuccio later subdivided in a development of the same name.

His wife, Nora Shapiro, established the Ridgefield Toy Clinic, which refurbished donated used toys that were then given to needy families; it was based at the Community Center for many years. The couple contributed much money to museums, educational institutions, and charities. 

The Shapiros sold Eleven Levels in 1952 to Paul and Elizabeth Arnold, who founded the large bakery still bearing their name.

Robert Ullman: 

Tools for the Trades

“I’m interested in mainly two things,” Robert Ullman told a reporter 50 years ago. “The retarded adolescent, who I feel has been tossed onto the scrap heap of life, and the person over 55 who is forced into mandatory retirement at age 65.”

Ullman, owner of Ridgefield’s oldest industry, did his best to help both groups, hiring many mentally disabled workers and senior citizens. He also provided jobs for numerous students working their way through college.

A part of Ridgefield since 1959, Ullman Devices Corp. is the town’s only true manufacturing

industry. Its modest-sized factory on Route 7 just north of Route 35 turns out thousands of specialized tools used by mechanics, technicians, and others around the world.

Robert James Ullman was born in New York City in 1905. His family of seven was so poor that that he dropped out of school when he was 12 to work in a shoe factory. By the time he was 16, he had started his own company, making artificial flowers and employing 16 people. After two years, the business failed and he was broke — but not for long. By his 20s, Ullman was president of the Mercury Manufacturing Company and a partner in Century Dryer Company, both in New York City.

New York is also where, in 1936, he founded Ullman Devices,  a company now well known in industry for making small tools, many involving moveable mirrors on long telescoping handles that allow the user to see hidden places in machines. 

According to a company history, “In the middle of the Depression, Robert Ullman invented

the first inspection mirror. While taking a tour of an aircraft plant, he got the idea from watching a mechanic using a crude mirror to look into the inner part of the engine.”

Among its other products are flexible claws for grabbing small parts, like screws, that have fallen into hard-to-access places; small lights on flexible mounts; scribers, hooks and picks on handles; screw and nut starters; and magnetic pick-up devices. Most were designed by Ullman himself.

Ullman’s customers have included such corporations as Ford, Xerox, General Motors, and Sears (for which Ullman has manufactured tools for the Craftsman brand).

Ullman moved his operations at first to Norwalk and then, in 1959, he built a plant on Route 7 in Ridgefield that still is its only quarters.

Over the years Ullman became well-known and praised in the region for hiring the elderly

and disabled, especially the mentally handicapped. Quite a few became loyal employees for many years.

“Treat others as you want to be treated yourselves,” Ullman once said of his attitude toward all his employees.

Ullman served as a director of the State National Bank in Ridgefield and had been listed in Who’s Who in the United States. He and his wife, Marie, the company treasurer and secretary, lived in Wilton. 

After he died in 1978 at the age of 73, Marie Michaelson Ullman took over as president of the company. The daughter of Russian immigrants, she was also born in New York City. She held a degree in nursing,  had studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, and was later in life listed in “Who’s Who of American Women.”

Marie Ullman died in 1999 at the age of 87.

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.

Karl F. Landegger: 

The European Yankee

The New York Times once described Karl F. Landegger as “the very model of the urbane and impeccable European businessman…and a tough Yankee trader.” Fortune said: “Hard-driving, sophisticated, and a cool risk-taker, he will obligingly arrange payment and long-term credits, in any one of six different currencies, and spend $300,000 bidding for a paper-mill contract in far away Egypt that he may never get.” 

A mill magnate, Mr. Landegger may also have been the wealthiest man ever to live in Ridgefield. In 1964, Fortune magazine estimated his worth at $34 million, but a year before, Parade magazine put his fortune at $250 million, “making him one of the wealthiest men in America.” 

His wealth was earned through years of hard work and wise investments. A native of Vienna, he was born 1905 and when he was only 25, had saved $5,000 — and borrowed $200,000 — to buy a paper mill in Austria. Fleeing the Nazis in 1938, he went to London where he joined a pulp merchandising firm that sent him to the U.S. in 1940. Four years later he bought Parsons & Whittemore, a pulp, paper and mill equipment merchandiser and later added other companies. By the year 2000, it was the fourth largest producer of paper pulp in the world. 

In the 1950s Mr. Landegger began building paper and pulp mills for developing nations. At one point he had built 14 mills in 10 countries in five years, with 12 more under construction at a total capital investment of a half billion dollars. 

“In 1953 he launched the ‘packaged mill’ concept providing all services for developing and operating pulp and paper plants in developing countries,” says the Paper Industry International Hall of Fame. “This resulted in completion of 60 plants in 28 countries, all based on using local raw materials including a variety of non-wood fibers such as straw, bagasse, reeds, grasses, bamboo, esparto, abaca, etc. as well as various wood species. He encouraged governments and private investors to see the rewards of having their own paper industries in these countries, many of which were unable to import adequate paper to satisfy their needs.”

Under his leadership many new kinds of machinery for making — and recycling — paper were put into use.  

In the early 50s, Mr. Landegger and his family bought Flat Rock House, a 160-acre estate here, which his family still owns. 

Mr. Landegger died in 1976 while at his winter home in the Bahamas, and is buried at St. Mary’s Cemetery. He was 70. Though he was never involved in local organizations, Mr. Landegger and his family have quietly made many contributions to the community. In addition, the Karl F. Landegger Program in International Business Diplomacy at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service was endowed to train future leaders in international business, public policy, and business-government relations.

Henry Leir: 

Visionary Philanthropist

A captain of industry whose writing was once likened to Jules Verne’s, Henry Leir is remembered today as a philanthropist who gave away millions in his lifetime and whose foundations still donate large sums to universities, hospitals and other organizations around the world. He and his wife established a retreat house at their Ridgefield estate that annually sponsors and hosts conferences on humanitarian, scientific and health-related subjects.

Born Heinrich Hans Leipziger in 1900 in Prussia, Leir was one of seven children. His father died when he was 11, forcing him to help support the family at an early age. When he was still a teenager, he began working for a German steel company and eventually rose to leadership positions in Magnesit, a German manufacturer of heat-resistant materials.

However, in 1933, as Hitler was becoming chancellor, he and his wife, Erna, fled Germany and settled in the tiny duchy of Luxembourg, where he established his first company. He was always grateful to Luxembourg because the primarily Catholic nation had welcomed the two Jewish refugees.  After world War II, he contributed millions to the rebuilding of the country and its economy.

While in Luxembourg, Leir wrote a utopian science fiction novel, “La Grande Compagnie de Colonisation,” which promoted world peace. The book described a global corporation that sponsored development, training and research to improve international economy and raise standards of living throughout the world. The novel envisioned many things that later became fact: the United Nations, the European Union, the defeat of Nazism, a tunnel under the English Channel, turning deserts into fields in undeveloped countries, and the growth of China, for instance. While the book sold few copies at the time, it was still being studied in the 1990s for its ideas. 

The book was Leir’s only effort at writing. “I had my disappointment with this book and I did not write any more,” he said in a 1996 Ridgefield Press interview.

War was breaking out in Europe in 1938, and the Leirs decided to move to the the United States where he adopted the new name, Henry Leir, and founded Continental Ore Corporation. The company became a major international trader in ores, minerals, alloy, and carbon products, and had offices in Luxembourg, London, Paris, Tokyo, Mexico City and Dusseldorf. 

In 1962, Leir completed a deal that was considered both visionary and huge: A $250-million ($2 billion in 2016 dollars) contract to sell pig iron to Japanese steel manufacturers. He had convinced the Japanese it was in their best interests to use their resources for finishing steel rather than producing pig iron. This would free up resources and eventually help launch the rapid expansion of the Japanese steel industry and fuel the production boom of Japanese goods, especially cars. 

Also in 1962, Leir fought Union Carbide Corporation over its monopoly of the vanadium market in the United States. His antitrust suit resulted in an 8-0 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in his favor. (Leir was represented before the court by Joseph Alioto, a lawyer who became mayor of San Francisco from 1968 to 1976, a period of considerable turmoil.)

Leir sold Continental Ore in 1966 for $40 million in stock ($300-million in 2016), but continued being active in the industry until his death, serving as chairman of S.A. des Minerals, the largest trading firm in Luxembourg — which he had founded more than 60 years earlier. At the age of 98, he would still work at his office in New York City.

In the 1930s, Leir had become close to the leadership of Luxembourg and when he moved to the States, he helped create close relations between the royal court of Luxembourg and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose mother, Sara Delano, traced her ancestry to Luxembourg. In the years after the war, Leir attracted several major American corporations to Luxembourg, including Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Goodyear, DuPont, and Monsanto.

After he sold Continental Ore, Leir focused much of his energy on philanthropy, especially on helping hospitals, universities and underprivileged children here and abroad.  To do this he and his wife set up three foundations — The Henry J. and Erna D. Leir Foundation, Inc. of Luxembourg, The Ridgefield Foundation, Inc. and The Leir Foundation, Inc.

“The wealth of the Leirs has been devoted primarily to those charitable purposes having the widest benefit to humankind,” says the New Jersey Institute of Technology, a major recipient of Leir grants. “Following their precedent, Leir chairs have been endowed at universities and hospitals in medical research. The chairs were created for humanitarian studies on relief of poverty, famine, conflict resolution, and international trade and development, along with a chair in foreign languages and cultures.” 

They endowed chairs at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University, New Jersey Institute of Technology, the Weizmann Institute in Israel and Hebrew University of Jerusalem as well as the Luxembourg program at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.  

 Two of the Leirs’ largest local grants were $500,000 to the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and $1-million to Ability Beyond, both in 1996 (he had visited Ability Beyond, then called Ability Beyond Disability, at the age of 96 and was impressed with the work it did for the disabled).  

 Around 1952 he and Erna bought a 33-acre estate on Branchville Road that he would later

leave to one of the charitable foundations. Leir was 97 years old when he oversaw the planning and construction of Leir House at the estate, now formally called the Leir Retreat Center. The facility has sponsored or hosted conferences on such subjects as substance abuse, Lyme disease, human rights, assessment and treatment of suicide risk, human-animal interaction,  mental health, training of police detectives, dementia, child abuse, and geriatric orthopedics.

Over the years Henry Leir received many honors around the world. And despite being self-educated, he wound up with four honorary doctorates, including one from Tufts University.

Erna Leir died in 1996 and Henry, two years later at the age of 98.