Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff: 
Beautiful, Talented & Gutsy

Blanche Shoemaker was no ordinary New York City socialite. The glamorous former debutante spent two years driving injured soldiers from battle zones in World War I and was a poet so popular she was nominated for a Nobel prize — by a member of the Nobel family.

As Mrs. Donald Carr, she once lived in Ridgefield with her  dog- and golf-loving husband on an estate they called “Birchglade.”

A native of Manhattan, Blanche Le Roy Shoemaker was born in 1888 to a well-to-do family — her father had been a railroad pioneer and president. She began writing when she was only seven years old and by 16,  Town and Country magazine had published her first poetry.

She made her social “debut” in 1905, the same year she was painted by the noted French portrait artist, Theobald Chartran, and the same year her first book of poems, The Song of Youth, was published. She was only 17.

In 1907, she married 1904 Columbia graduate Alfred Wagstaff Jr. who had apparently not yet found gainful employment after his recent motor trip around Europe. The New York Times coverage of the wedding gushed over the bride, calling her “highly cultured and exceedingly handsome,” noting that her first book of poetry had come out two years earlier and a second volume of verse, Woven of Dreams, was due out soon.  (Harrison Fisher, an artist once famous for his paintings of young women — especially for magazine covers,  later pronounced her “America’s most beautiful woman.”)

Blanche and Alfred had one child, Alfred III, born in 1908, and were divorced in 1920.  He served many years as president of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and died in 1930. Though she had divorced Alfred, she continued to write her books under the name of Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff for the rest of her life.

When the United States became involved in World War I, Blanche Wagstaff helped found organizations that  provided stateside war support such as feeding, caring for and transporting soldiers, veterans and war workers. Apparently feeling her work stateside was not enough, she went to France and became an ambulance driver for two years, hauling wounded soldiers from war zones to hospitals.

It was perhaps through her war work that she met an Army veteran, Donald Carr, who had also served in France. They were married in a small ceremony in 1921 among only a few close relatives and friends, said The Times which, nonetheless devoted more space to this small Vermont wedding than it had to her first full-scale ceremony in New York City.

And The Times offered glowing coverage of her life as a young woman, including listing her six books published so far and noting she was founding editor of the Boston Poetry Review.

“She was presented at the Court of St. Jame’s shortly after her debut here and later had a private interview with Pope Pius,” the Times continued. “She has traveled extensively in Italy and in the Orient and has made several campaign trips in the great Sahara desert. She was engaged in war work, driving her motor at the front, was in the War Camp Community Service, and was one of the founders of the National League of Women’s Service and other war organizations.”

       A descendant of a couple of Mayflower people, Carr was a real estate broker, a writer, and loved dogs and golf. His canine speciality was springer spaniels and he was widely used as a judge of hunting shows involving those dogs. As an accomplished amateur golfer, he was well known, especially in Westchester County, and won a number of tournaments.

       Meanwhile, Blanche continued to write poetry, turning out a total of nearly 20 books in her lifetime. Early on she became known for sensual poems — a dozen of her verses appeared in a 1921 anthology called Poetica Erotica, which contains poems from Latins like Catulus and Ovid right up to modern writers. Her interests apparently changed a bit as she grew older; in 1944, she wrote The Beloved Son, a life of Jesus in verse.  She even turned to drama, writing a couple of poetic plays. H.L. Mencken praised one of them, Alcestis, for its “constant novelty and ingenuity of epithet,” but also criticized her for sometimes letting “her adjectives run riot.”

Her poetry was popular not only here, but in Europe, and in 1933, Ludwig Nobel, nephew of the founder of the Nobel prize awards, nominated Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff  for the poetry award. Her book, Mortality and Other Poems, “is popular in Scandinavia,” said the Associated Press at the time.

The Carrs had been living in Bedford, N.Y., before coming to Ridgefield in the mid-1930s. The Social Register lists their home here as “Birchglade,” an estate we have been unable to identify but which they probably leased or rented.   In 1939  her son, Alfred Wagstaff III, became involved in establishing a summer theater, called The New England Playhouse, located in the Congregational Church House on West Lane. (The church house, which had been the old Ridgefield Clubhouse, burned down in 1978.)  Although  the operation struggled in its first two years, it was starting to draw sizable audiences when World War II came along and the effort ended.

In 1940, the Carrs were living on Ridgefield Road in nearby Wilton. They were in Hendersonville, N.C., by 1961 when Donald Carr died there at the age of 74.

Blanche was living with her son Alfred and grandchildren in Egham, Surrey, England when she suffered a stroke and died in 1967 (many profiles of her incorrectly report she died in 1957). She was 81. Blanche and Donald are buried together in Woodlawn Cemetery, the Bronx. Her son died in 1982.

Reflecting her husband’s interest in springer spaniels, Blanche Wagstaff wrote the 1927 book,  Bob, the Spaniel: A True Story, which among other things told how their dog saved them from their burning farmhouse.  Bob had also saved another dog from drowning and in 1930, Bob received a silver medal from the “Dog Hero Legion” in New York City.

Blanche may not have gotten her Nobel, but Bob got his silver.

Charles Recht: 

Voice of the Soviet Union

For 12 years following World War I, the United States had no formal diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. During that time Ridgefielder Charles Recht was in effect the Russian ambassador, the Russian embassy, the Russian consul and perhaps even the Russian Chamber of Commerce in this country. 

Recht, who had a home here for 15 years, was an American attorney who represented Soviet interests in the U.S. from 1921 to 1933. He was the only officially recognized contact between the two countries.

“His arguments in financial disputes for Soviet citizens against American interests were a prelude to the establishment of formal diplomatic contacts,” said The New York Times. “In his long career, the gentle, urbane lawyer also represented a variety of anarchists, radicals and persons accused of being Soviet agents.”

Recht was also a novelist, poet and translator of plays including the first English version of August Strindberg’s “Miss Julie.”

A native of Bohemia, now part of the Czech Republic, he was born in 1887 and came to this country when he was 13 with his widowed mother and siblings. The family settled in Manhattan and he worked at various jobs to support the family, including employment as a librarian before he was 20. He became a citizen in 1909.

He worked his way through New York University Law School and became an attorney, but he was also associated with many of the literati of his era, including H. L. Mencken (a client), Eugene O’Neill, Sherwood Anderson, and poet Edgar Lee Masters, the attorney who wrote the “Spoon River Anthology.”

In 1915, he married Aristine Munn, a physician who belonged to a wealthy Rochester family. She died in 1952. 

Recht opposed the U.S. entry into World War I. He became an attorney for the Civil Liberties Bureau, which advised many conscientious objectors, and he served alongside such notables as Clarence

Darrow and Norman Thomas, the six-time presidential candidate (who also had a home in Ridgefield). 

After the war he represented many foreign-born anarchists and radicals who were being deported by the U.S. Government in the wake of widespread labor unrest. One was Ludwig Martens, a Marxist and an engineer. At the Soviet Union’s behest in 1919, Martens set up the Russian Soviet Government Bureau, an informal embassy in New York, that conducted a considerable amount of commercial business. The federal government declared the operation illegal, and in 1921 deported Martens, who was defended by Recht.

Impressed with Recht’s work, the Soviet Union hired him as their representative in the United States.

During the 1920s he oversaw many trade negotiations between American companies and the Soviet Union, even exchanges of motion pictures.  He made 22 trips to Russia during the period, and often carried back dispatches from Lenin to leading American intellectuals. 

In 1933, Recht turned over his duties to the new Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., but he continued to represent various Soviet citizens and institutions throughout his career.   

Despite his close association with the homeland of communism, Recht maintained that he was never a communist. When questioned about it, he said communism was fine for a country like Russia, but “not the United States.”

Over the years, he also handled many smaller cases, including tenants fighting landlords and teachers who were fired for their views. He also fought for more liberal immigration policies.

He published several books including two novels, “Rue With A Difference” in 1924 and “Babylon on Hudson” in 1932, and a collection of his poems, “Manhattan Made.”

Recht had a house on a hill off Florida Road from 1950 until his death in 1965 at the age of 78. According to The Ridgefield Press, he and his wife, Lillian, “did not participate much in the civic affairs” of Ridgefield, but “they had a wide circle of friends here.” 

Hardwick Nevin: 

Playwright, Actor and Poet

He possessed one of the most colorful names any Ridgefielder ever had, and led a fairly colorful life. But few people today remember Hardwick Marmaduke Nevin.

Hardwick Nevin was a playwright, an actor and a poet whose careers on and behind the stage peaked in the 1920s and 30s. 

Born in 1897 in Pennsylvania, Nevin was studying at Princeton when he left to enlist in the American Field Service in World War I, providing medical support for French troops. He received the Croix de Guerre for bravery from the French government.

After the war, he returned to Princeton, not to study but to help start the Princeton Theatre.

He also associated with many of the young literati of the period, including the poets Edna St. Vincent Millay and Edward Arlington Robinson, and the actor Claude Raines. 

He began his career as an actor, appearing in smaller parts in Broadway plays.  In 1923, he performed in Cyrano de Bergerac, starring the famous stage actor from Ridgefield, Walter Hampden. In 1925 he appeared with Bela Lugosi in “Arabesque” on Broadway.

Soon he was writing plays of his own. In 1929, “Young Alexander,”  about Alexander the Great, was staged on Broadway and among its cast members was a young Jessie Royce Landis, who later lived on Old Branchville Road and is buried here.

“What Ever Possessed Her” was produced on Broadway in 1934.

He wrote other plays and one, “Blue Haze,” was to be produced by Leslie Howard, but the actor died before production began, and it was never staged.

Nevin, who wrote poetry, was a great fan of Walt Whitman, and was involved in an unsuccessful effort  to save a Long Island schoolhouse where Whitman had taught for a year, He and his friends had more success in getting Whitman’s birthplace four miles away preserved.

Nevin had lived in Ridgefield, then moved to Redding (where his house burned to the ground, destroying much of his writing), and finally in Wilton where he died in 1965 at the age of 68. He is buried in Hillside Cemetery on Route 33 in Wilton.

He married twice, first to actress Patricia Barclay; they were divorced. His second wife, Edna Hoyt Nevin, survived him.

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”

Robert W. McGlynn: 

Beloved Man

Many of us often forget the impact that teachers have had on us. Pulitzer Prize-winning writer John McPhee never forgot a Ridgefield native who had a major influence on his life.

    Robert William McGlynn was born in 1921 into a working class family who lived on Fairview Avenue. His father, J. Edward McGlynn, was a house painter who late in life became an acting postmaster of Ridgefield.

    McGlynn attended Ridgefield schools and excelled at Ridgefield High School. In his senior year he was editor of The Hilltop Dispatch, the school newspaper, which that year won high praise in the Columbia University scholastic press competition. He was ranked second in his class of 37 students  (behind Stata Norton, who went on to become an acclaimed professor of pharmacology and dean of the University of Kansas School of Health Professions).

    As #2 in his class, McGlynn became salutatorian at the 1939 graduation. His speech, called “Through the Rough,” likened life to a game of golf, in which a group of men play the 18th hole. One player gets a hole in one while others, running into obstacles with their shots, struggle to

reach the cup. The strugglers are gaining more from the game — or from life, he suggests. “It is always wisest and best to seek that goal by the more difficult pass, for with the dumps and the knocks come the care and experience demanded by the importance of the position to be attained,” he says. “Those same bumps and knocks mold the character of the individual and the more intricately molded the character, the more capable the individual.”

One sentence in his talk, describing stronger vs. weaker players, perhaps hinted at one of his own struggles: “Determination, education and competency are ready and willing to back up the weaker.” In his senior year, his physician told McGlynn his health was too fragile for him to attend college and that he might not live beyond the age of 21.

McGlynn ignored the doctor’s advice and went to Wesleyan University where, in 1942, he was chosen a member of Wesleyan’s Honors College. Early on in his college years, he had planned to become a psychologist, “an outgrowth of my profound interest in human nature and all its intricacies,” he once told Karl Nash, editor of The Ridgefield Press.

However, McGlynn apparently found literature more rewarding than psychology. After he graduated in 1943 he was immediately hired as an English instructor at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, where he eventually became a legend.

At Deerfield, around 1948, McGlynn met a new student named John McPhee, who had transferred for a post-graduate senior year after completing Princeton High School and before entering Princeton University. Though McPhee never actually had him as a classroom teacher, McGlynn became both a mentor and a lifelong friend. 

In a 1996 essay McPhee recalled one of his first encounters with McGlynn — on a football practice field.

 “Attendance was taken exactly 17 times a day,” McPhee wrote, remarking on how closely

Deerfield students were watched. “In fall, attendance was taken on the Lower Level by Robert McGlynn with a clipboard. Relying on recognition alone, he checked off names. In the ranks and files of lightweight football calisthenics, he failed to see me. He walked around behind my jumping and flapping teammates, and found me lying on the ground looking at the sky. He liked that. He checked me off. In the extended indolence on the grass, he recognized essence of writer.”

    McPhee biographer Norman Sims describes McGlynn as “a voracious reader with an Irish background and a babbling, fluid way of talking.” He got McPhee excited about literature in a way his classroom teachers never had. One day he’d hand McPhee a book and later McPhee would go back and discuss it with him. “He was willing to talk about them, that was the thing,” McPhee said. “Like the students, he lived there the whole time and the school was his life.” 

And talk he did. McGlynn was famous for his amazing outpourings. As McPhee put it in 1984, his words “come in cloudbursts, in flooded rivers, braided cataracts, foaming white cascades. Kick him in the leg and words pour out his ears.”

In the foreword to McGlynn’s only novel, Ten Trial Street, McPhee wrote that McGlynn “became, among other things, a student of his students, exposing their innards with rays of humor that went to the bone but cut nothing. He led us up the hill to Joyce and Conrad, and down the other side to meet ourselves. He was prodigal with his talent — that brook he was babbling wherever he might be. It was for anyone. It was for me. As a writer now, I am forever grateful to him. And, as it happens, I was never in his class.”

McPhee biographer Michael Pearson put it simply: “McGlynn sparked in McPhee a deeper love of reading than he had ever experienced.”

During his years at Deerfield, McGlynn became widely known for inspiring many young writers and teachers, and for his interest in the literature of Ireland, birthplace of his grandmother and his great-great grandfather. He brought several Irish poets to the campus to speak and work with with students — one, Peter Fallon, spent a year at Deerfield. These visits helped spark McGlynn’s interest in publishing the works of Fallon and others by creating the Deerfield Press, a publishing house

described in its day as “important in the worlds of letters and small presses.”

In 1984, the year he retired, Deerfield Press published the small book, The Little Brown House: A Garland for Robert McGlynn. Among its contributors were poets Seamus Heaney and Robert Creeley. And, of course, John McPhee.

Three years later, alumni and friends donated $850,000 toward establishing the Robert W. McGlynn Chair in the Humanities at Deerfield Academy.

After his retirement Bob McGlynn moved to a log cabin in Warrenton, Va. He read  four to five books a week, gave readings of Irish poetry in the area and maintained a sizable correspondence with former students around the world. (More than two dozen of those students became school, college or university English teachers.)

McGlynn also eschewed technology of almost any kind. “I know nothing of faxes, word processors and computers,” he told a friend around 1990. “I don’t even own a telephone.”

He was only 72 when he died in 1993 — but he was long past 21. His ashes are buried in St. Mary’s Cemetery. 

Among the new friends he made in Virginia was newspaper publisher Arthur Arundel, who greatly admired the retired teacher. “There are so few like McGlynn who so completely earn and define the appellation of ‘Beloved Man,’” Arundel wrote after McGlynn’s death.