Mahonri Young: 

The Greatest Moment

Mahonri Young, a preeminent American sculptor of the 20th Century, was a month short of his 70th birthday when perhaps his most famous work was unveiled: A tribute to his grandfather, Brigham Young, on the centennial of his arrival at what was to become Salt Lake City.

“This is the greatest moment of my life,” Young said at the 1947 unveiling of the 60-foot monument outside Salt Lake City, Utah, attended by 75,000 people.

Yet only two months earlier, his beloved wife, Dorothy, daughter of American Impressionist artist J. Alden Weir, had died.

Mahonri Mackintosh Young was born in Salt Lake City in 1877, the same year his grandfather, Mormon leader Brigham Young, died. Twenty days after his birth, the infant Mahonri received the blessing of his grandfather, who was president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and the governor of Utah territory.

Brigham Young had led the Mormons to their promised land in the Salt Lake basin, where they founded the city. As their wagon train approached the the basin, Young was lying exhausted and burning up with fever in the last wagon. As he looked down into the valley, he said, “This is the place.”

A century later, his grandson Mahonri engraved those words atop the the famous “This Is the Place Monument”  — a huge work that was created in Ridgefield.

Mahonri Young grew up in Salt Lake City where he began his art studies with J. T. Harwood, a painter. He was hired as a sketcher for the Salt Lake Tribune and by 1899 had saved enough money to move to New York and enroll in the Art Students League, where he later taught. 

In 1901 he began studies at the Academie Julian in Paris and also traveled to Italy. In Europe he

met prominent personalities in the arts including Leo Stein, brother of Gertrude, who took him to Pablo Picasso’s first exhibit in a Parisian furniture store, and Ernest Hemingway, who admired his work. He also associated with Robert Henri and the Group of Eight, leaders of the Ash Can School of American realism (Henri painted the noted portrait of Ridgefield General David Perry, also profiled in Who Was Who).

Young gained international recognition when his work was exhibited at the Salon, the official exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. 

Like his Ridgefield friend, Frederic Remington, Young was, throughout his career, an exponent of the West. Many of his paintings, etchings and sculptures dealt with Indians, cowboys, horses, and other aspects of Western life.

However, he also created works connected with industrial workers and even prizefighters. “Man with a Pick” and “Stevedore” are bronze figures now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and “Boxer” is at the Whitney Museum.

Young married Cecilia Sharp in 1907. She died ten years later of cancer. Although he had visited  artist J. Alden Weir in Ridgefield early in the 20th Century, Weir wasn’t exactly a catalyst in Young’s second marriage. “No matter how friendly Weir always was to us of the younger artists, he never introduced us to any of his three charming daughters,” Young said. “We never met any of them

until after he died. But it was no use. I married the most beautiful, the finest, the most talented of them, Dorothy.”

That was in 1931 and the next year, he moved to Weir’s farm in Ridgefield where he made his home much of the rest of his life and where he created hundreds of sketches and paintings of life at the farm, including scenes depicting animals, crops and farm laborers.

Soon after arriving Young built a studio behind the Weir homestead and next to his father-in-law’s, roomy enough to handle sizable sculptures and very bright, with large skylights. “At last I’ve got a studio large enough to do anything I want to do in paint or clay,” he said when it was finished. “If I ever have a big thing to do again, I will do it here even if I have to stay the whole winter.” The Young studio has been restored as part of the Weir Farm National Historic Site.

In 1939, he received the commission to create the big, centennial monument to his grandfather that would not be unveiled until eight years later. Most of the work on “This Is the Place” was done

in his Ridgefield studio.

In 1950, Young also created the sculpture that represents the state of Utah in the National Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol in Washington: It is a rendering of his grandfather.

Young’s works are also in the collections of many major museums, including the American Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Harvard Art Museum.

Skilled at painting, drawing, etching and sculpture, Young taught almost every subject in the curriculum at the Art Students League, said Dr. Thomas E. Toone, author of the 1997 biography, “Mahonri Young: His Life and Art.” 

Both this and 1999 biography, “A Song of Joys: The Biography of Mahonri Mackintosh Young, Sculptor, Painter, Etcher,” by Norma S. Davis, point out that despite his ancestry and upbringing, Young was not a participating member of Mormon church. “He liked cigars and wine and he found it humorous when he had to go to church twice in one day,” said Dr. Todd A. Britsch, a Brigham Young University reviewer of both books. Nonetheless, he was devoted “to his Mormon heritage and friends.”

Young died in 1957 at the age of 80 and is buried in Salt Lake City.

Abigail Goodrich Whittelsey: 

Pioneering Magazine Editor

The Rev. Samuel Goodrich and his wife, Elizabeth Ely Goodrich, must have had a great love of letters. Their marriage produced two significant 19th Century writers and one of America’s first woman magazine editors.

And Abigail Goodrich Whittelsey’s magazines sometimes gave wonderful glimpses into the private life of the Ridgefield Congregational Church’s third minister.

Abigail Goodrich was born in 1788 on West Lane, just two years after her father came to Ridgefield. Mr. Goodrich served the First Congregational Church until 1811 when he moved to a congregation in Berlin, Conn., where he died in 1835.

Her brother, Charles Augustus Goodrich — who wrote a dozen books on history and on religion — was born two years later. Another brother, Samuel G. Goodrich — popularly known as Peter Parley, author of more than 100 books, mostly for children — was born six years later.

Abigail grew up in Ridgefield and undoubtedly through her father’s ministerial connections, met the Rev. Samuel Whittelsey, a Congregational minister in New Preston. They were married in 1808 and eventually moved to Canandaigua, N.Y., where her husband managed the Ontario Female Seminary, a private high school for girls, and where Abigail served as a matron. In 1828, the Whittelseys moved to Utica, N.Y., and founded their own girls seminary.

While there, she became involved in a networking group for mothers, called the Utica Maternal Association. In 1833, the group decided to publish a periodical, “Mother’s Magazine,” with Abigail Whittelsey as editor. The aim was to provide information on how to be a good mother — always with a religious slant. A year later, the Whittelseys moved themselves and her magazine to New York City, and by 1837, “Mother’s Magazine” had a circulation of 10,000 copies. It was even being reprinted and circulated in England.

Abigail’s husband died in 1842 and she began getting help with the magazine from the Rev. Darius Mead, a brother-in-law, who was an editor of “Christian Parlor Magazine.” In 1848, “Mother’s Magazine” merged with a rival, “Mother’s Journal and Family Visitant,” and Whittelsey soon opted to bow out of the operation after the new publisher decided to add pictures and more “popular” material to the magazine.

However, in 1850 she and her son, Henry Whittelsey, founded a new publication, “Mrs. Whittelsey’s Magazine for Mothers”; it lasted three years.

Whittelsey would use her own life as examples in articles she wrote in her magazines, and sometimes they would tell of growing up in Ridgefield. In an 1853 issue of “Mrs. Whittelsey’s Magazine for Mothers,” for instance, she related this story about her father, the Ridgefield minister:

“My parents had six children when the eldest was but eight years of age. 

“I love to recall to mind my father’s sunny face, always beaming with love and good-will to one and all. How often have I seen him sit with the three youngest children on his lap at a time, with all the rest about him, telling us stories of his boyhood — about his early companions — his college feats — his skating and ball-playing — his fishing and hunting excursions — his catching a whole flock of pigeons in a net at a haul, and quails in snares made of horse-hair, and now and then a young fox or a young raccoon.

“He would often sit in his chair and pretend to be fast asleep and snore and snore away. One child would be hold of one hand, another of a foot, another of his eyelashes, another of a lock of his hair, and so on; and presently, he would spring forward and manage to catch us, one and all, and bring us all into a heap on the floor together.

“But when he said, seriously, ‘Children, it is time to stop,’ we all quickly found our seats, and were as whist [quiet] as mice; there was no more play; not a whimper of noise after that.

“We all knew too well, even the youngest child, that we made too great a sacrifice of our own comfort and gratification when we displeased our father. We would not afford, for trifles, to lose the sunshine of his face, or his delightful companionship.

“It was too great a punishment for any of us to see him look displeased.”

Late in life, Whittelsey moved Colchester, Conn., where she spent her final years.  She died in 1858 at the age of 70 and is buried in Berlin, alongside her father and mother. 

Rev. John Ball: 
Church Founder, Rights Leader

In 1940, Ridgefield’s black community was large and active enough that members decided to establish their own church. They approached the Rev. John Ball, who had recently become a pastor in Norwalk and, led by Ball, the Goodwill Community Baptist Church had its first service March 5, 1941, in the First Congregational Church chapel. 

A year later, the 34-member congregation bought the former creamery on Creamery Lane from Samuel S. Denton, and converted it to a house of worship under Ball’s leadership.  

Born in 1908 in Richmond, Va., John Percell Ball was the son of a Baptist minister who was pastor of the Goodwill Baptist Church in downtown Richmond — Ridgefield’s church was named after his father’s congregation. He graduated from Virginia Union University in Richmond and was ordained a Baptist minister in 1934. 

He came north in 1938, first serving as pastor of a Methodist congregation in New London and soon settling in Norwalk where he was pastor of Grace Baptist Church for 20 years and then founder of Canaan Institutional Baptist Church. 

The new church on Creamery Lane was officially dedicated in 1942, and chief speaker at the service was the Rev. W. B. Ball, the pastor’s father. Among the guests were the Rev. William Lusk of St. Stephen’s, the Rev. George Tompkins of Jesse Lee Methodist, and the Rev. Hugh Shields of the First Congregational as well as Selectman Harry E. Hull.

Though he was primarily a pastor in Norwalk, where he lived, he participated over the years in many Ridgefield community events and was well known and liked here. At the town’s memorial service for President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945 in the high school auditorium (what’s now the Ridgefield Playhouse), he was one of two soloists to sing — the other was Metropolitan Opera star Geraldine Farrar.

In Norwalk, he was much more active, serving on the Norwalk Common Council and as head of the NAACP. He was instrumental in getting Norwalk to hire its first black teacher, and was also behind efforts to hire the first black firefighter and policeman. He helped pass the city’s Fair Housing Law and was involved in creating the Fair Rent Commission. He co-founded NEON, Norwalk’s anti-poverty agency, and worked to help the homeless. 

Over the years, he lobbied for civil rights not only in Norwalk, but also in Hartford and Washington. 

Ball served the Goodwill congregation until 1959, and returned in 1969. However, dwindling membership led to the closing of the Goodwill church by 1975. The building is now an apartment house. 

Ball died in 1992 at the age of 83, leaving “his mark upon Norwalk as a mighty warrior and an ambassador for the cause of Christ,” his Canaan congregation said. 

*  *  *

For years it was thought that the Goodwill building had been moved to the site from the old Village Green, where it had served as the First Congregational Church from around 1800 to 1888.

However,  Robert J. Walker, who bought the building in 1976 and converted it to apartments, believed this to be impossible.

In renovating the structure extensively, he found that the first floor, rotted and termite-infested, was the only portion of the three-story building that could have been the old creamery. His study of the framing – it was actually two buildings joined together – indicated that the structure was not large enough to have been the old Congregational church, photographs of which he had examined. However, pieces from the old church, such as beams, may have been used in constructing the creamery.

Francis H. McGlynn: 

Theologian and Leader

Ridgefield in the 20th Century was home to several novitiates, schools operated by religious congregations that trained future priests, sisters or brothers. The largest and longest-lived novitiate belonged to the Congregation of the Holy Ghost,  then commonly called the Holy Ghost Fathers. Now officially known as the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, or the Spiritans, the missionary order bought the former Cheesman estate on Prospect Ridge and trained novices there from 1922 to 1971.

Not surprisingly, the operation of a novitiate in the center of town attracted a number of young Ridgefield Catholic men. One of them was Francis McGlynn, who wanted to become a missionary in Africa. He wound up, however, spending most of his career within 20 miles of his birthplace, not as a parish priest but as a leader and scholar of national reputation, a theologian and professor of theology who taught decades of future missionaries.

Francis Hennelly McGlynn was born in Ridgefield in 1897, attended grammar schools here and graduated from Danbury High School (in the days before Ridgefield had its own high school). In 1918, he entered the Holy Ghost Novitiate on Prospect Ridge, studied at the congregation’s major seminary at Ferndale in Norwalk and at St. Thomas Seminary in Hartford. He was ordained in 1924 and celebrated his first mass at his old parish church of St. Mary.

Within three years, he was named master of novices at Prospect Ridge and a professor of sacred scriptures. Clearly seen as a rising talent in the order, McGlynn in 1929 was sent to the Gregorian University at Rome to earn a doctorate of sacred theology.

For the next 20 years he was a professor of moral theology at Ferndale, serving also a head of a retreat program for lay Catholics.

Not only his scholarship but his leadership skills were recognized by the congregation, which named him superior — the head — of the seminary in 1947 and two years later, the provincial — the head — of the congregation’s entire United States province. During his eight years as provincial, he led more than 100 of the congregation’s operations in the United States, Puerto Rico, and East Africa from the headquarters in Washington, D.C.

But it was teaching that Father McGlynn liked best and after his term in Washington ended, he returned to Ferndale, where he taught and worked on retreats. 

He died in 1965 at the age of 68 and is buried in the cemetery at Ferndale.

The Holy Ghost Novitiate, purchased by the town in 1971, became the Board of Education offices until the late 1980s, and was converted to the town’s congregate housing for the elderly, which opened in 1991. Ferndale was sold in 1979 and is now a 66-acre hotel and conference center called Dolce. 

Incidentally, although it has closed and consolidated many of its past facilities, the congregation still operates Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, considered one of the nation’s top Catholic colleges.

Benjamin Washburn: 

Bishop of Newark

Ridgefield has been home to many ministers, priests and rabbis, but perhaps only one bishop.

The Rt. Rev. Benjamin Martin Washburn, D.D., a retired Episcopal bishop of the Diocese of Newark, N.J., spent his last eight years living on Barrack Hill Road.

He was long active in the administration of the national Episcopal church, but also known for his outspoken criticisms of one of New Jersey’s biggest political bosses.

Bishop Washburn was born in 1887 of old New England stock in Vermont. He graduated from Dartmouth in 1907 and studied at the General Theological Seminary of the Protestant Episcopal Church in New York where he received his degree in divinity in 1913.  He later earned a doctor of divinity degree from Dartmouth, and a Doctor of  Sacred Theology degree from General Theological Seminary.

Washburn served as a minister in parishes in New York City, Kansas City, Mo., and Boston before being named bishop coadjutor of the Diocese of Newark in 1932. Three years later he was named bishop, serving until his retirement in 1958.

Despite his many duties as bishop,  Washburn was also involved in many other areas of church leadership during his 23-year tenure, and during his retirement. He was a member of the board of trustees of the General Theological Seminary, served as president of the Episcopal Church Pension Fund, was on the board of the Church Life Insurance Corporation, and also sat on the board of the corporation that produced Episcopal hymnals. On the civic side, he was active in the New Jersey Historical Society. 

Washburn was also a vocal supporter of free speech. In 1938 he helped lead a battle against Mayor Frank Hague of Jersey City, then vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee, who’d been called “the granddaddy of Jersey bosses.” 

To keep his critics at a minimum, Hague had enacted a law requiring permits to speak in public. At a rally opposing the law,  various permitless people spoke, including two congressmen; a longtime political opponent, who was beaten up and jailed; and Norman Thomas, the presidential candidate (who had once had homes in Ridgefield), who was subsequently “deported” from the city.

Bishop Washburn declared that Hague had not only threatened  “personal and political freedom by his dictatorial actions, but threatens also the right of religious liberty.” 

(That same year, Mayor Hague told the Jersey City Chamber of Commerce, “We hear about constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time I hear those words, I say to myself, ‘That man is a Red, that man is a Communist.’ You never hear a real American talk in that manner.”) 

Washburn and his wife, Henrietta Tracy de Selding Washburn, had one son, Seth (1921-2016), an MIT graduate who became a Bell Laboratories engineer and wrote a seminal book on the design of switching circuits. Seth was also an accomplished musician and a civil rights activist.

Bishop Washburn died here in 1966 at the age of 79.

Clayton R. Lund:
Uncontainable Compassion

Only two pastors in the three-century history of Ridgefield’s oldest church have served longer than the Rev. Clayton R. Lund. One was his predecessor, the Rev. Hugh Shields, and the other was the Rev. Jonathan Ingersoll, from 1740 to 1778. 

The 17th minister of the First Congregational Church arrived in 1956 and retired just 30 years later. During Lund’s first 10 years here, the congregation tripled in size to 800 people, a church school was added, and an assistant minister was hired. 

A native of Providence, R.I., Clayton Reginald Lund was born in 1919 and graduated from Clark University and Andover-Newton Theological School.  He served congregations in Massachusetts and New York before coming to Ridgefield at the age of 37.

“A ministry is a life of service to other people,” Mr. Lund said in 1986 when he was retiring after 42 years of parish work. “My daily agenda is created by the needs of others. A minister has to be a teacher, preacher, pastor, administrator, and community leader.” 

Lund was all of those, often participating in community organizations and speaking up for people in need. 

He was also a strong leader. In 1978, just after extensive renovations were completed, a child playing with a candle ignited a fire that destroyed the Church House. Lund led the efforts to build a new church house, which was completed in 1980 and named Lund Hall in his honor. 

However, over his three decades in Ridgefield,  Lund was best known for comforting those in need. At his retirement, novelist and historian Kathryn Morgan Ryan, whose Roman Catholic husband, author Cornelius Ryan, was a close friend of the minister, called  Lund “a man of surging talent and uncontainable compassion. Very soon now…we in the town he loves will realize that, like others in our lives, we took him for granted, that we believed he would always be here for us — all of us, any of us, at any time. It is hard to let go of the security he represents.” 

He was so respected as a minister that in 1990, Andover-Newton, his alma mater, established a $20,000 Clayton R. Lund scholarship for ministerial students. 

Lund, who had moved to Danbury after his retirement, died there in 2000 at the age of 81.

“Clayton Lund brought a powerful blend of dignity, faith, wisdom, flair, and charm into the pulpit,” wrote the Rev. Dr. Charles Hambrick-Stowe in his 2011 church history, “We Gather Together.” “He was well-suited for leading the church through the rapid changes coming to the town of Ridgefield from the 1950s through the 1980s.”

Lund himself described those changes concisely in a 1987 church history, “Ridgefield … was on its way to becoming one of the East’s most desirable and expensive places to live. Ridgefielders watched with some apprehension as their beautiful town, in which they knew and greeted one another, was ‘invaded’ by newcomers. Change was rapid, construction was everywhere. Woods were cut down for new development; oddly named new roads ribboned the hills and valleys; personal service and shopping became a thing of the past.”