Rev. Hugh Shields:

A Two-Church Pastor

For most of his long career in Ridgefield, the Rev. Hugh Shields served two congregations. He also served the needs of both the church and state, and he once served as a star of the Hoosier stage. 

Born in 1890, the Indiana native helped earn his way through drama school at Butler University by giving readings of famous people like James Whitcomb Riley, the Indiana poet. Performing under the name of “The Hoosier Impersonator,” Shields even had a management bureau that booked and promoted his appearances. 

“He will, in the course of an evening, vividly bring scores of ... characters before the audience and in his own masterful way, make the audience feel that these children of the poet’s fancy are actually standing before it,” said the bureau’s promotional brochure for him. The promotion also reprinted many reviews of praise, including one from the head of the Indiana Anti-Saloon League, who called Shields  “a reader of rare ability and any community is fortunate that secures him for a series of readings.”

Despite his training and critical praise, Shields soon felt a calling to the pulpit instead of the stage. He graduated from Yale Divinity School and became minister of the First Congregational Church here in 1919. He remained its minister until 1956 after which he was pastor emeritus until his death in 1971 at the age of 80. 

Among his accomplishments was the acquisition of the old Ridgefield Club building, converted to a church hall (it burned down in 1978 and was replaced by today’s Lund Hall), and the resurrection of the failing Ridgebury Congregational Church, which had been closed for some time. He was its pastor from 1923 until 1962. 

His being pastor of two churches created a busy Sunday schedule. He had hoped that he could do First Congregational services in the morning, and Ridgebury in the afternoon, but since most members of the Ridgebury congregation were farmers, they wanted a morning service.  So on a typical Sunday, Ridgebury service was at 8 a.m., Sunday school at First Congregational at 9:30 and the service at 11. At 4 p.m., there was a junior high fellowship, and at 7, a senior high fellowship meeting. For each event, his wife, Alberta Reed Shields, was at his side. 

Shields was the only Ridgefield minister to represent the town in the Connecticut Legislature, and was elected to two terms starting in 1928. 

He was a popular speaker at community events and organizations, and belonged to Rotary, Lions and the Masons. His son, Reed, was a well-known Ridgefield attorney and probate judge for many years. 

In 1963, when he was named Rotary Citizen of the Year, Shields observed, “I love Ridgefield and its people, and find as each year goes by that I love them more.”

In 1966, The Ridgefield Press received a handwritten note, signed “Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Shields,” asking that their subscription be discontinued. “Neither of us has the eyesight to read very much,” the note said, adding that they had enjoyed the paper for much of their lives. “We have been subscribers for almost fifty years, but there surely is an end to all things.”

Karl S. Nash, Ridgefield native and Press publisher (who was 13 years old when the Rev. Shields came to town), sent a note back to the couple, expressing his thanks for their loyal patronage and offering good wishes for the future, but adding: “We cannot agree, though, that ‘there is surely an end to all things.’”  

Alice V. Rowland: 

Leader on Many Fronts

In an era when women in politics were uncommon, Alice V. Rowland stood out as a leader on many fronts. 

In 1931, she was the second woman elected a state representative from Ridgefield. Twelve years later, she became the first woman state senator from Ridgefield, was elected to three more terms, and, according to The Press, “wielded considerable influence in the Capitol … As a legislator she promoted the development of Sherwood Island State Park, larger state aid grants for schools, and the construction of state-owned technical schools.” 

Around 1950, Mrs. Rowland also became Connecticut’s first woman deputy sheriff, a job she held four years. 

A native of New York City, Alice V. MacSherry was born in 1894. While still a child, both her parents died within a few months of each other, and she was taken in by an aunt who lived in Easton.

In 1910, when she was only 16, she began teaching school in Easton, and education became a lifelong interest. 

She came to Ridgefield with her carpenter husband, Joseph, in the 1920s, immediately became immersed in the civic, political and social life of the community, and remained a major figure in many organizations over more than 40 years. 

She was active in the PTA (there was only one for all the schools), the Grange, the League of Women Voters, Republican Women’s Club, Red Cross, 4-H, American Legion Auxiliary, and many World War II home-front efforts. 

She was also active at St. Mary’s where she was a member of the Rosary Society for 40 years, many as its president, and was active in the National Council of Catholic Women.

In 1943, Gov. Raymond E. Baldwin appointed her to a six-year term on the state Board of Education. She was also a vice president of the Connecticut PTA.

She served a term on the Republican State Central Committee and, in 1954, party leaders asked her to run for secretary of the state; after eight ballots at the convention, she lost to another woman whom party leaders decided had a better chance of winning. 

Mrs. Rowland retired from politics in 1964 and eventually moved to Florida where she died in 1971 at the age of 75. 

Rowland Lane, off East Ridge, was named for her and her husband.

Elizabeth Leonard: 

The First First 

In a town where men had been the managers for more than two and a half centuries, Elizabeth Mary Nowotarski Leonard made local history in 1981 when she was elected the first woman first selectman. And her election wasn’t even close, for Mrs. Leonard was already widely popular, famed for her devotion to Ridgefield and its people.  But ironically, the Democrat she beat was also a woman— and a pioneer in her own right.

The New York City native arrived here in 1958, and worked for a decade as the Ridgefield reporter for The Danbury News-Times, often turning out six or seven stories a day. 

Around 1970, she turned the tables; instead of covering politicians, she became one. She left the newspaper and joined the Republican Town Committee, serving as its secretary, and also became vice president of  the Fifth Congressional District Women’s Republican Club. She was named to a Charter Revision Commission, and began a long stint as a lively and witty moderator of Town Meetings. 

In 1976, she overcame opponents on her own town committee, in a caucus and at a primary, to win the nomination for state representative, and went on to defeat Lillian Moorhead in the election.

She served in the State House till 1981, earning the nickname “Studs” for her support of legislation allowing studded snow tires. 

Because of her efforts for improved rail service on the Danbury line, a self-propelled Budd car was named Lizzy in her honor. 

In 1981 she was elected first selectman (she always preferred to be called first selectMAN because that was the traditional title for the job). The woman she beat was Lillian Moorhead again. Moorhead had been a member of the Board of Selectmen since 1973, and was the first woman to serve on that board since the town was founded 258 years earlier.

During Leonard’s six years as chief executive, the town began paramedic service, built more housing for the elderly at Ballard Green, added a sewage treatment plant for Route 7, refurbished athletic fields, rebuilt schools, and began work on the Prospect Ridge congregate housing for the elderly. When she left office, the town had a $700,000 budget surplus.

Ill health, including severe arthritis, forced her to retire from office in 1987, but not from the volunteer Board of Selectmen, where she continued to serve until her death in 1992 at the age of 56. 

Hiram Davis: 

The Last Blue

 When Hiram Davis died in 1947, he was one of only two Connecticut veterans of the Civil War still living and one of only 47 survivors of the war in the nation who were listed on the Veterans Pension Rolls in Washington. He had also been the last living Civil War veteran from Ridgefield.

But perhaps even more significant — and often overlooked — was the fact that Hiram was just one of four brothers who all served in the Civil War.

One of them never returned.

Hiram Davis was born in 1849 on the Davis family farm in Wilton, right on the Ridgefield border, along Nod Road. A twin brother, Henry, died as an infant.

 When he was only 15 years old, Hiram enlisted in the 25th Regiment of the New York Cavalry. He served as a drummer boy in Sheridan’s army in the Shenandoah Valley and was with the general on his 20-mile dash from Winchester, immortalized in the Thomas Buchanan Reed poem, “Sheridan’s Ride.” 

After the war, he moved to Ridgefield, living here until 1929 when he retired to Florida.

He was a stonemason and, according to The Ridgefield Press, “it was said there was scarcely a chimney in Ridgefield…which had not been built or repaired by him.” 

Active in the community, Hiram served as a state representative in 1908, as a borough warden, and in the fire department. He was a Mason, Odd Fellow, and the last member of the Edwin D. Pickett Post of the Grand Army of the Republic, Ridgefield’s organization for Civil War veterans.

When he died in 1947, he was 98 years old.

Hiram was one of at least eight children of Hiram and Catherine Hoyt Davis. Three brothers, James W. Davis (1844-1927), Albert N. Davis (1929-1864), and Madison Davis, all served in the war. James and Albert enlisted from Ridgefield, Madison from Wilton.

Albert died of dysentery in a Washington, D.C., hospital nearly a year after enlisting in the Connecticut First Regiment of Heavy Artillery.

James was in the 12th Regiment, enlisting at the age of 16. He served under General B. F. Butler with Admiral Farragut and was at the surrender of New Orleans, and in the Battles of Georgia Landing and Pattersonville. He was with General Sheridan at the Battle of Winchester, and through the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and was reportedly wounded at least once during combat. James became a minister and, in 1925, was the commander of Connecticut’s Grand Army of the Republic organization when he spoke at the dedication of the War Memorial on Main Street at the head of Branchville Road. According to one account, he “made a stirring address telling of the trials and tribulations of service in the Civil War.”

Madison also served in the 12th Regiment, was captured at Cedar Creek, Va., in 1864, and was held for several months at the infamous Andersonville prisoner-of-war camp. Among Madison’s grandchildren was Harold O. Davis (1905-1986), longtime tax assessor of the town of Ridgefield.

Hiram’s mother did not live to see her sons go off to war — she died in 1854, about 45 years old. His father, on the other hand, was like Hiram himself — long-lived. He died in 1893, 93 years old.

William O. Seymour:

Bridges and Oil for the Waters

William O. Seymour was one of Ridgefield’s leading citizens at the turn of the 20th Century, so perhaps the Ridgefield Press obituary writer was a bit flustered by Seymour’s importance when he wrote on the front page Jan. 26, 1911: “He was a man among men, a consistent Christian, a good citizen, one of the few whom our town could afford to lose.” 

A man known for his calm and warm demeanor, Seymour might have smiled at the gaffe.

Born in 1833 in Ridgefield, William Oscar Seymour got his early education in local schoolhouses. He then attended the Amenia (N.Y.) Seminary, a Methodist secondary school that was well respected and produced several university presidents and bishops. 

Seymour returned to Ridgefield to become a grammar school teacher, but seeing the need for a “high school” in town, established the High Ridge Institute in the late 1850s. Seymour’s school, which had both boarding and day students, served up to 40 boys. At the time Seymour lived in the “Peter Parley house” — the childhood home of author Samuel G. Goodrich — on High Ridge, from which he also ran the school.

By 1869, Seymour was looking at an entirely new career:  civil engineering, a subject he had previously taught to young men. Railroads were expanding at a rapid rate. Before 1871, about 45,000 miles of track had been laid in the United States. Between 1871 and 1900, another 170,000 miles were added. Seymour saw an opportunity not only for profitable work but perhaps also for adventure. 

In 1873, he began working for the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, which at the

time was the largest road in New England. He started out as a “rodman” — a menial job involving carrying and holding a rod used during the process of surveying for a new line. By 1877, he was the railroad’s chief engineer.

He left in 1881 to join a Massachusetts railroad, but soon decided to head west. He spent nearly five years designing and building railroads for the Wisconsin Central in Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota. His projects included building a 104-mile line from Chippewa Falls, Wisc., to St. Paul, Minn, crossing the St. Croix River with a 2,239-foot long iron bridge on stone abutments (years later the bridge was later abandoned but the abutments still stand in the river). Another line he built ran 124 miles from Chicago, Ill., to Schleisingerville, Wisc.

In 1887, Seymour returned to his home town where Gov. Phineas Lounsbury, a fellow Ridgefielder, appointed him one of the state’s three railroad commissioners — a post of considerable importance in that era when the state was served by more than two dozen railroads and streetcar companies. He remained a commissioner until his death 24 years later.

He was also a leading citizen in local government, serving as a probate judge, a state representative, a borough warden, and a member of the Board of Estimate (predecessor to the Board of Finance),  He was vice-president of the First National Bank of Ridgefield, which he helped found in 1900. 

In 1908, Seymour was chairman of the town’s Bicentennial celebration, which included a parade, speeches, other special events, and the publication of a book that offered many pictures of

people and places of Ridgefield along with essays about the town. Fifty years later, Seymour’s great-grandson, Ridgefield Press publisher Karl Seymour Nash, was chairman of the town’s 250th anniversary celebration.

When he had returned to Ridgefield, Seymour built a sizable house on Parley Lane, just down the hill a few hundred feet from the Peter Parley house he had earlier owned.  The house is still standing, though it underwent a major rebuilding and expansion in the 1990s.

William O. Seymour was 77 years old when he died. Writing the next week from Montreal, where he was a consular official, historian George L. Rockwell said in a tribute to Seymour : “The welfare of the town was always uppermost with him. Office sought him and not he the office. In public meetings, when debate at times waxed to the point of bitterness, with a few chosen words would he pour oil upon the troubled waters.”

George L. Rockwell:

Mr. History

For George Rockwell, a man of several careers, history was a hobby. But it is not for his vocations, but for his “History of Ridgefield” that Rockwell is remembered today. Its 583 pages, published in 1927, provide a comprehensive look at the town’s first two centuries.

“That history is a reflection of the man, his interests, his family, his devotion to his beloved community,” Press Editor Karl S. Nash once wrote. 

A descendant of Jonathan Rockwell, one of the founders of the town, George Lounsbury Rockwell was born in 1869 in New Haven, but came to Farmingville as a boy. He lived with his uncle and aunt, Mr. and Mrs. George E. Lounsbury — George was to become a Connecticut governor. The Lounsbury house and farm, The Hickories, later became Rockwell’s own home and is today still a working farm.

In 1888, Rockwell went to work for his uncle’s shoe factory in South Norwalk, remaining there 21 years and serving as a partner the last 16 years. 

By the turn of the 20th Century, he was active in town and state politics. He served as state representative in 1904 and in 1937, as town treasurer,  as a member of the first Board of Finance in 1921, and as a justice of the peace. In 1904, he was a Connecticut delegate to the Republican National Convention that nominated Theodore Roosevelt. 

His work for the GOP won him appointments as Ridgefield postmaster from 1912 to 1916 and again from 1924 to 1935 (his son, George L. Jr., was postmaster from 1949 to 1953). 

President Taft named him U.S. deputy consulate general at Montreal in 1910 and he served there two years. 

In 1938, he made an unsuccessful bid to be Fourth District congressman on the Republican ticket. 

His “History of Ridgefield” was published in 1927, the same year the town marked the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Ridgefield. The book contains much information on the early settlement of the town, the Revolution, the community’s churches, schools, industries, and notable people. Some sections of the book had originally appeared as features by Rockwell in The Ridgefield Press over the first quarter of the century. 

“He left no avenue unexplored, and considerable effort went into correspondence, personal interviews, examination of old records, and the study of countless tombstones,” wrote Smithsonian historian Silvio A. Bedini, author of “Ridgefield in Review.”

Rockwell’s history is also known for its extensive and detailed listings of Ridgefield veterans of all the wars from the French and Indian through World War I. Rockwell also provides many early

1700s birth, marriage and death records, as well as listings of town officials from Ridgefield’s founding onward.

The volume is extensively illustrated with photos, mostly taken by Joseph Hartmann.

Rockwell had 1,500 copies of his book printed, some bound in leather, but most in cloth. Original copies today are rare, and can cost hundreds of dollars. A 1979 hardbound reprint of the book can be found used for anywhere from $25 to $175.

Rockwell died in 1947 at the age of 78. His first wife, Grace Frances Greaves Rockwell, died in 1903 at the age of 26, and his second wife, Anna D. Ryan Rockwell, was an aunt of Pat Ryan Nixon, wife of the president. She died in 1943.

Though history was an avocation,  George Rockwell was well-known and respected for his knowledge of Connecticut’s past, so much so that Duquesne University in Pittsburgh invited him to speak on the Western Reserve, originally part of Connecticut, at its 1938 commencement. Though he had never gone to college, the university awarded him an honorary doctor of laws degree.

Daniel Adams: 

‘True Father of Baseball’

In 1857, Dr. Daniel Adams sat down, picked up a pen and wrote a document called  “Laws of Base Ball.” Nearly 150 years later, those long-forgotten sheets of paper sold at an auction for $3.3

million and added significant evidence to the belief that Doc Adams was, more than most early players, the man behind of modern-day baseball. The sale also set a new record for the highest-priced document in baseball history.

“He’s the true father of baseball and you’ve never heard of him,” said John Thorn, a noted baseball historian who was a consultant on the sale. 

In Ridgefield,  Daniel Adams was well known to most folk in the mid-19th Century as a prominent citizen who was the first president of the Ridgefield Savings Bank. The retired New York City physician came to town in 1865 and bought the former home of Col. Philip Burr Bradley — a house later owned by the Biglow and Ballard families that stood in what is now Ballard Park. 

By then, he had pretty much retired from the “national sport” he helped to establish. And few here knew of his prominence in fashioning the game.

Daniel Lucius Adams was born in a small town in New Hampshire in 1814. His father was a country doctor but unlike his Dartmouth graduate dad, Daniel went to Yale, Class of 1835. Three years later he earned his medical degree from Harvard and began practicing in New York City. 

There Dr. Adams’ interest in athletics was whetted by the formation of the New York Base Ball Club in 1840. Five years later, he joined the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, which is said to have played the first full game of baseball as we know it today, on June 19, 1846, at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, N.J., with a team called the New York Nine. Adams continued to play for the Knickerbockers well into his 40s. 

In “Total Baseball: The Ultimate Baseball Encyclopedia,” John Thorn has called Adams “first among the fathers of baseball.” He and other baseball historians credit Adams with setting up essentials of today’s game.

Adams was an early president of the Knickerbocker club, and served as its president six times between 1847 and 1861. While president he promoted rules changes that resulted in nine-man teams

and nine-inning games. He is said to have created the position of shortstop.

He headed the rules and regulations committee when the National Association of Base Ball Players was formed in 1858. Among the changes he instigated were that bases should be 90 feet apart.

A savvy businessman, he was also involved in manufacturing both baseballs and bats.

Adams retired as Knickerbocker president and as a physician before he moved to Ridgefield. A few years earlier, in 1861, he had married Cornelia A. Cook and the couple had four children while living here; the last, a son, Roger, was born in 1874 when Daniel was 60 years old.

Here he became active in all aspects of the community.

In 1870, he was elected a Ridgefield representative to the State House of Representatives. A year later, in 1871, he helped form and became the first president of the Ridgefield Savings Bank  — clearly it was a wise move, for the bank grew steadily and is now the Fairfield County Bank with $1.6 billion in assets. He led the bank from 1871 to 1879 and again, from 1884 to 1886. Adams’s picture hangs in the bank’s main office on Danbury Road.

In 1876 Adams served on the building committee that erected the new “town house,” a building we now call the town hall. Unfortunately but not surprisingly, the structure was built of wood, the material most buildings were made of then. Less than 20 years later, the town house burned to the ground in the great fire of 1895 that destroyed much of the village. Its replacement was fireproof brick.

In 1880, he was elected the first president of the Ridgefield Library.

Adams also helped form the Land Improvement Association of Ridgefield, serving as its

president. The 1877 Ridgefield Press article announcing the organization “did not state what improvements were to be made in Ridgefield lands,” wrote Karl S. Nash in a 1971 profile of Adams. (Nash was not a fan of baseball or other sports, and devoted relatively few words to Adams’s baseball past, but he did note that the Doc dug two cannonballs from a retaining wall on his Main Street property. “Presumably, they were fired at the Battle of Ridgefield on April 27, 1777,” Nash said.)

In 1971, one of those cannonballs was owned by Adams’s grandson, Daniel Putnam Adams, who happened to live in nearby Wilton. He himself was a retired banker, from New York City.

Doc Adams played his last formal round of “base ball” on Sept. 27, 1875, in an oldtimers game that was arranged by a longtime fellow Knickerbocker star, James Whyte Davis. However, he continued to play “backyard ball” with his sons even when he was in his 80s.

     In 1888, Adams, age 74, moved his family to New Haven, the city of his alma mater. There he died in 1899.

     Daniel Adams was an amazingly modest man who one baseball historian said “didn’t like to brag.” In 1881, Yale asked him for a biography for a historical record of the Class of 1835, and Adams wrote not a word about his leadership in creating the by-then popular sport of baseball. “The current of my life has been very quiet and uniform, neither distinguished by any great successes, or disturbed by serious reverses,” he said. “I have been content to consider myself one of the ordinary, every-day workers of the world, with no ambition to fill its high positions, and have no reason to complain of the results of my labor.”

Peter McManus: 

Judge and Legislator

In 1945, during the second of his six terms as representative from Ridgefield in the General Assembly, Peter McManus helped draft the State Labor Relations Act. The Republican’s post that year as chairman of the House labor committee was rated the “toughest assignment” of the session by a Hartford newspaper columnist. 

The act established a three-member Board of Labor Relations, aimed at protecting the rights of citizens to join unions and bargain collectively. 

When Governor Raymond E. Baldwin was ready to sign the bill, he called  McManus and other sponsors to the ceremony. It was April 12, 1945. Just then the phone rang with news of Franklin Roosevelt's death, and the signing was postponed.  McManus often observed in later years that he had an edge of Democrats who didn’t remember the exact date on which President Roosevelt died.

Once the bill became law, the governor named McManus to the board, a post the Republican held through Democratic and Republican administrations until his retirement in 1967. 

A native of Scotland, Peter A. McManus was born in 1889 and was trained as a builder and architect. He came to Ridgefield as a young man, at first working for “Big Jim” Kennedy, the town’s major builder.  One of his first significant jobs was construction of the sunken gardens at Casagmo in 1911-12. (After Miss Mary Olcott died in 1962, McManus proposed that the town purchase the Casagmo estate and use the mansion as a town hall, a proposal that did not gain much support.)

McManus eventually started his own construction company, and many men who were to become top carpenters in town got their training under him, including Dan Tobin, Terry Knoche, Gus Venus, and John P. Leary.

When the town had a Trial Justice Court, he was a judge for many years. The court handled  smaller offenses such as  breaches of the peace, domestic disputes, bootlegging, and traffic violations. It was the last that took up most of the court’s time, and one of the most frequent offenses back in the 1920s was driving without a license. One day, McManus heard 16 cases of people caught without a license — he gave the opinion afterwards that half of Ridgefielders on the road had no license. “Some of these people reasoned that because a license was not needed to drive old Dobbin,” said historian Dick Venus, “they should not have to get one to drive the family car.”

McManus served six terms  in the Connecticut legislature from 1941 until 1953, and was also on the Board of Assessors. He was active for more than half a century in the Knights of Columbus.

Two of his three sons also became active in the community — James, as the town’s building inspector in the 1970s and 80s, and Joseph, as a sheriff and volunteer fireman.

He died in 1970 at the age of 80.