John Lovejoy: 

A Forgotten Hero

In a time when many unsung acts of heroism are taking place daily throughout the land,  it’s perhaps fitting for Old Ridgefield to remember an unsung hero of the past. John Lovejoy’s effort to save another man’s life 167 years ago has long been forgotten, and probably wasn’t even much known in 1853 when the 19-year-old gave up his life.

Lovejoy was born in Ridgefield in 1834, a son of Daniel and Betsey Lovejoy. His father Daniel was a native of Chatham, N.Y., up near Albany, but Betsey was a daughter of the prominent Ridgefield tanner and miller, Jabez Mix Gilbert. Daniel and Betsey were married in Ridgefield in 1828 by the Rev. John Lovejoy, Daniel’s father and undoubtedly the namesake for our John. Rev. Lovejoy was an itinerant Methodist minister who preached in eastern New York and western Connecticut.

Daniel was a currier, an artisan who dresses, finishes and colors tanned leather to make it strong, flexible, attractive, and waterproof. He no doubt worked for his father-in-law — he lived next door to the Gilberts in the Titicus neighborhood just north of the village.

Son John Lovejoy apparently had no love of leather. The Gilbert tannery at Titicus was probably a rather dark, dank, and smelly place to work. Instead John felt a call to the sea. When he was still a teenager, he left home and soon joined the crew of Advantage, a large ship that plied the North Atlantic.

On the day John left home in 1852, his mother gave him a letter and a Bible. According to an 1854 article published in  Sailor’s Magazine, a trade publication of the era, Betsey Gilbert wrote the letter because her “heart was too full for utterance in any other way.”  

In the letter “she reminded him of the instructions he had received from his earliest years,” the magazine said. She “entreated him to read and pray over the Bible she put in his hand; to touch not, taste not, handle not the inebriating cup, and avoid everything injurious to his character, and which would cause grief to her.”

The magazine felt that Lovejoy had followed his mother’s advice as well as “his own sense of right, and the teaching of the word of God. Consequently, he was everywhere respected and beloved.”

In March 1853, Lovejoy joined the crew of the ship Advance under Captain Arthur Child, a master with whom he had already been sailing for eight months. “I always found him an active and attentive young man, and very much esteemed by all on board,” Captain Child told Sailor’s Magazine. “If he had not been lost we should have made him 2nd mate the next voyage.”

The Advance must have been a sizable vessel; in the fall of 1853, it was on a trans-Atlantic crossing from Le Havre, France, to New York City, with 738 passengers on board.  On Nov. 2, about 800 miles west of Land’s End in Cornwall, one of those passengers fell overboard. Captain Child recorded what happened:

“On the morning of the 2d of November at 7:30 A.M. in Long.24 degrees West and Lat. 48 degrees North there was a cry of ‘A man is overboard’ when Lovejoy ran aft and jumped after him with the intention of rescuing him. We brought the ship to the wind, and got a boat out immediately; but it was of no avail. He was drowned before the boat could reach him.”

Sailor’s Magazine reported that later, “his mother’s letter was found, not on file with others, but carefully folded in his Bible.”

The death of John Lovejoy, and that of another son, Francis Mix Lovejoy three years earlier, may have led the elder Lovejoys to seek a new life. By 1860, they had left Ridgefield and were living on a farm in Derby. By 1880, the 72-year-old Daniel was working as a “bathhouse keeper” in New Haven. He and Betsey were living with their son, Frank Mix Lovejoy, a reporter for The New Haven Courier, along with Frank’s wife and his 21-year-old son, a  gun maker with the Winchester Repeating Arms Company.

 Betsey died in 1886 at the age of 79. Daniel died ten years later, aged 90. They are buried in New Haven.

E. Armitage McCann: 

A Man of Many Models

Captain E. Armitage McCann. An impressive name but one that’s not exactly widely known — unless you’re a student of maritime history and especially model sailing ships. For Captain McCann has been credited with virtually founding the hobby of model ship-building.

And he knew what he modeled: McCann spent much of his life at sea, most of it captaining ships plying the Seven Seas. His first job, as a young teenager, was aboard  clipper ship on which Joseph Conrad was a first mate.

McCann’s last days were spent in Ridgefield, where he left behind a collection of models that seem to have vanished, unwanted, but would be worth tens of thousands of dollars today. 

      A son of an Irish clergyman, Ernest Armitage McCann was born in 1875 in Glasgow,

Scotland, and was educated in England. He left home at the age of 14 to go to sea, becoming an apprentice aboard the steel-and-wood clipper ship, Torrens, which was the fastest passenger vessel sailing between London and Australia in the 1880s and 90s. In 1891, the first mate of the Torrens was a Polish mariner who took the name, Joseph Conrad. Encouraged by a passenger, Nobel laureate John Gallsworthy, Conrad changed careers and became a celebrated novelist. Thus, McCann’s first ship was Conrad’s last.

       McCann went on to be  an accomplished writer himself, but only after being a first-rate sailor. At the age of 19 he was the master of the 412-ton bark Umvott that sailed the Indian Ocean. 

       Captain McCann also served on land. At the turn of the 20th Century, he fought in  the Boer War as a member of the Imperial Light Horse regiment in the South African Army. He was injured in battle and sent to Johannesburg to recuperate. There he remained for a while after the war, acquiring “a modest fortune,” according to one historian. 

He eventually returned to England  where he was director of the International Art Association in London for several years.

World War I drew him back to the sea. He held captain’s licenses in both England and the United States, and commanded merchant marine vessels for both countries during the conflict. 

After the war, he occasionally captained American vessels but he seemed to tire of the maritime life — but not of ships. An accomplished artist who had painted many sailing ships and had built his first model ship at the age of 16, he began in the early 1920s to design precise scale model replicas of famous vessels. And it was here that he found a second “calling.”

His very first post-war model was praised by the noted American maritime artist Gordon Grant, and wound up being sold to Col. Henry Huddleston Rogers, a collector who donated the Rogers Collection now housed at the U.S. Naval Academy Museum in Annapolis.

One of his best known creations was the very ship he signed onto when he was 14: the Torrens of Joseph Conrad. By the 1920s, the Torrens had long been scrapped and he had to recreate the miniature vessel almost entirely from memory. The result was so good, it sold for $18,000 — around $275,000 in today’s money. Quite possibly, the high price was attributed not only to the craftsmanship, but also to the Conrad connection and the fact that the craftsman had sailed the same ship.

McCann’s love of model-making led him to start contributing a series of how-to columns to the magazine, Popular Science, starting in 1926. The last article was published in 1938, the year after his death. The columns, each offering detailed model plans for a different ship, generated such a large number of followers that McCann joined artist Grant and naval architect Charles G. Davis in founding the Ship Model Makers Club in 1929.  Thanks to his popular columns, the club soon grew to more than 1,000 members nationwide. 

During the same period, McCann was also writing books on model making, including some very focused, such as one dealing solely with how to tie the tiny knots and string the fine rigging lines on accurate miniatures of sailing ships.

He wrote scores of articles for newspapers, including The New York Times. In a 1936 Times piece, he explained some of the attractions of the hobby:

“With a very small outlay of money for material, one can either get results fairly quickly or spend the spare time of years in endeavoring to achieve perfection; some even say that a ship model should never be completely finished. A workshop is convenient, but not necessary. Good models have been made by the bedridden. Unlike so many things that are uninteresting until finished, a ship model is good to look at from the first roughing out of the hull. An earnest modeler is as eager to invite comment and praise of his progressing ship as of his finished product.”

McCann also edited the club’s magazine, The Shipmodeler, for five years until, in 1933, his health started to fail.

Thinking that the country climate might help his illness, Captain McCann moved from Brooklyn, N.Y., to Ridgefield that year, finding a house on Bryon Avenue. 

“The captain’s Bryon Park home was filled with models of ships of all descriptions as well as pictures of vessels and other treasures collected during his lifetime,” The Ridgefield Press reported. “One of his masterpieces was his model of the frigate Hartford, the masthead of which is in the state capitol at Hartford.”

Four years after he came to Ridgefield, the captain died at the age of 62. The Press noted that he left a nearly completed article  (which Popular Science published in 1938) and  “virtually complete a model of the Confederate ship Alabama on which he had been working for more than a year. Judging from the value of his other work, this model should be worth several thousand dollars.”

Alas, a sad story was to soon unfold. Captain McCann died without a will and had less than $60 in the bank, said modeling historian John C. Hudock. He was estranged, possibly divorced, from his wife, British sculptor Wilhelmina Louisa Neuwirth (1877-1964), who lived in England. They had had no children.

McCann left behind 22 models and a library of books that required 15 pages to list in the

Ridgefield probate records. “Remembering that Captain McCann died in the depths of the Great Depression, it is not too surprising that the court was unable to sell the models and the books in four years of trying,” said another historian, Bill Russell. “At that point the court gave everything to the undertaker to compensate for the debt he was owed.” 

No one knows what ultimately happened to the models, but they were probably sold for a fraction of their true value which, in today’s money, would be more than $1 million! The funeral home was Lawrence and Gillespie on Main Street (predecessor of Kane), which may have sold or given away some of them locally. Thus, somewhere in Ridgefield today, on shelves gathering dust, may be a few priceless E. Armitage McCann models of historic ships, just waiting to be discovered.

Captain Meinhard Scherf: 

Irony and Tragedy at Sea

Captain Meinhard Scherf’s life and death were full of ironies. 

The first of some 20 Ridgefielders to die in World War II, he was killed by his native country serving his adopted land and doing what he loved best: sailing the seas he was literally born on. 

The son of a German Merchant Marine captain, Meinhard Scherf was born in 1893 on a ship during a cruise his parents were taking in the Canary Islands.  At 13 he ran away from home in Germany to sign on as a cabin boy aboard a freighter.  Just before World War I, his ship docked in Portland, Ore., and he went ashore to visit a friend. When he returned, the ship was gone. 

The abandoned young man decided to become an American citizen and he soon joined the Merchant Marine. He moved to Ridgefield and Barry Avenue in the 1930s.

In all, Captain Scherf had spent 37 years at sea when, in February 1943, he took command of the William P. Frye, a brand-new Liberty ship.  In a speech at the launching Feb. 11, Captain Scherf said, “As our ships sail all the oceans, bringing supplies and help to our men and to our allies, every American realizes the great value of our Merchant Marine in this war. The Merchant Marine brings weapons to war to those who fight that democracy may live. It brings food to those who fight for us and to the innocent sufferers in a world at war. 

“The world in which we shall live after the war will be a better place for our children and for ourselves because we in America consider our way of life the only way, and our fight a fight for the ideals which all true-thinking people hold right.”

On its maiden voyage a month later, The Frye was loaded with wheat, 750 tons of explosives, and, on deck, five landing craft, being shipped from Nova Scotia to England. It had 40 crew and 24 Navy guards.

The vessel had been built in just three months in Portland, Maine. Like many quickly built Liberty ships, it had problems. A mechanical failure during a hurricane-force gale caused the Frye to stop her engines March 28. As engineers worked on repairs, the ship was a sitting target for U-boats in the area. Seven hours after the Frye stopped, two torpedoes fired from a U-boat in a wolf pack just missed the ship in the heavy seas.

Capt. Scherf quickly restarted the engines and  zigzaged the Frye to avoid being hit while trying to rejoin his convoy. Unfortunately, on the night of March 29, the ship sailed within view of U-610, sitting on the surface in the darkness. The sub fired two torpedoes, both hitting the Frye, which quickly sank. Captain Scherf and most of the crew and guards were lost. He left a wife, Elsa, and two daughters.

Two officers, three crewmen, and two Navy guards survived by climbing into one of the landing craft that had broken free. They spent five days and six nights with only seven carrots for food and no fresh water before being picked up by a British destroyer.  

Seven months later, U-610 was bombed and sunk in the North Atlantic; all aboard died.

In another bit of irony, the William P. Frye was named for the first American vessel sunk by the Germans in World War I.

More than a year after the sinking, Captain Scherf’s widow was presented with the Mariner’s Medal, the Merchant Marine’s equivalent of the Purple Heart. The head of the War Shipping Administration wrote Mrs. Scherf that her husband “was one of those men who today are so gallantly upholding the traditions of those hearty mariners who defied anyone to stop the American flag from sailing the seas in the early days of this republic. He was one of those men upon whom the nation now depends to keep our ships afloat upon the perilous seas — to transport our troops across those seas and to carry to them the vitally-needed materials to keep them fighting until victory is certain and liberty is secure.”

Capt. Benjamin Keeler: 

The Ill-Fated Captain

Ridgefield is less than 15 miles from Long Island Sound, and a good number of residents in the 18th and 19th Centuries became sailors. It was a dangerous profession, and some lost their lives at it. 

One of the first and worst maritime disasters involving a Ridgefield native occurred on Jan. 16, 1791, when the brig Sally, captained by Benjamin Keeler of Ridgefield, was wrecked in a storm off Eaton’s Neck, Long Island, right across the sound from Norwalk. 

He and his entire crew of 10 died. 

In an 1892 article about “Notable Shipwrecks on Long Island Coasts,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Almanac reported that the Sally, based in Stamford, was returning from a voyage to the West Indies with a cargo of molasses when it hit Eaton’s Neck Reef. “A terrible snow storm prevailed at the time, and the entire crew, supposed to number ten persons, were drowned,” the almanac said. “Six bodies were recovered from the waves.”

An account of the disaster appeared in newspapers along the East Coast, though the news took a while to travel. On March 3, 1791, six weeks after the wreck, The Maryland Gazette in Annapolis carried the story. “The shore presented a mournful and distressing sight” with parts of the vessel, its cargo and the bodies of  the crew floating in the water, the newspaper said. 

“The body of Captain Keeler was found, drifted on shore, with his arms clenched fast round the top-mast shrouds, where he probably was when the vessel struck, and fell with the mast.”  

“It appears that Captain Keeler, apprehending the destruction which awaited them, packed his clothes up and put them, with his papers respecting the voyage, his watch, medal, and some other things, into his [trunk], locked it, and fastened his keys to the hinge,” The Gazette said.

“Among the papers found, there was one written by the captain, and carefully packed up with the log-book, describing the horrors of the storm, and the distress they were in, being presented with nothing but the gloomy prospect of a watery grave.”

This wreck helped energize efforts in a longstanding fight to establish a lighthouse at Eaton’s

Neck, scene of many shipwrecks. Five years later, a bill finally passed in Congress to erect the lighthouse and by 1799 Eaton’s Neck Light was burning. It still is today.

Capt. Benjamin Keeler was the son of Benjamin and Mary Smith Keeler, born about 1762. He served in the Revolutionary War in 1779 in Capt. David Olmsted’s company. He would have been only 17 years old. 

According to The Maryland Gazette, “Captain Keeler was the only son of his mother, and she a widow, a dutiful and affectionate child, beloved by all his acquaintance; having experienced misfortune himself, he was ever ready to succour the wretched. As a seaman he was expert, having followed the business twelve years. He died, aged twenty-nine, lamented by his relations, friends, and acquaintances.”

He is buried in the old Titicus Cemetery. His stone says, as best as we can translate: "In memory of Capt. Benjn. Keeler, who perished by [???] with the whole of his crew, being ten in number, on the night of the 16 of Jan. 1791, on Eaton's Neck, Long Island, in the 29th year of his age. His remains were brought and interred in this place, and his memory will be dear as long as virtue and worth are respected…."