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.”

Laura Curie Allee Shields:

Flowers in Her Footsteps

It was a steaming July day in 1920 when Laura Curie Allee got a call from the headquarters of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association, soon to be the League of Women Voters, asking her for help in getting the 36th and last state, Tennessee, to ratify the 19th amendment. 

Mrs. Allee had been a leader in the suffrage movement regionally.  Among the people she frequently worked with was Katharine Houghton Hepburn

Soon, she, Miss Mary Olcott and Mrs. James Stokes headed for Ohio to convince U.S. Senator Warren G. Harding, who was running for president, to get neighboring Tennessee to vote for the amendment. 

At Harding’s office, Miss Olcott was their spokesman and her strong personality apparently led to a clash with a Harding aide, who soon told them to leave the office. But after they had departed, Mrs. Allee realized she had forgotten her gloves and went back to retrieve them. The aide, who had apparently calmed down, looked at her and asked why they had come to see the candidate. Mrs. Allee explained. 

“Why didn’t you just say so?” the aide said, adding that she should never have let Miss Olcott do the speaking.  

The three were then ushered into the office of the senator who, when he learned where the women came from, said: “I have an aunt who lives in Ridgefield. Do you know her? Mrs. Northrop.” Mrs. Allee knew her well – both belonged to the Congregational church. “That was open sesame,”

Mrs. Allee said later. The group explained their mission convincingly and, on July 21, Senator Harding announced that he was urging Tennessee to ratify the Amendment. Tennessee did so Aug. 26, and three months later, Mr. Harding was elected president of the United States – with a plurality that no doubt included three newly enfranchised Ridgefield women. 

Mrs. Allee  and her husband, Dr. William H. Allee, moved to town in 1906 and lived in the house they called Homeland at the corner of Main and Market Streets. The place had been the Hurlbutt homestead and included Hurlbutt’s meat market on Market Street. 

Dr. Allee, who practiced in Wilton, was a leader in improving Ridgefield schools. He was also active in procuring the vote for women (one clever example of which will be described in his profile). He died in 1929. 

In 1933, Laura married James Van Allen Shields (1871-1954), a patent lawyer who was involved in the music recording industry in its early days.

Throughout her life Laura Shields was active in the support of schools, the League of Women Voters, and other community organizations, and helped in the effort to acquire the Keeler Tavern. 

She also wrote a 353-page autobiography, called “Memories,” self-published in 1940.

In 1953, The Press reported a comment about Mrs. Shields on the occasion of her 20th wedding anniversary: “It is said that a good woman does not always find flowers in her footpath, but they are always growing in her footsteps.”

She died in 1968 at the age of 97 and is buried in Paterson, N.J., alongside her first husband.  

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.’”  

Charles Sheeler, 

Precise Painter

One of the leading American painters of the 20th Century lived and worked in a historic Ridgefield building that, like too many other relics of the town’s past, has disappeared.

The Whipstick District schoolhouse stood on the northern corner of Whipstick and Nod Roads. After it closed in 1915, the small building was incorporated into a wing of stucco-covered house. There, American painter and photographer Charles Sheeler lived and worked for 10 years. 

As a painter Sheeler was famous for his “precisionist” style. He was also well known and

respected as a photographer, who was hired by Henry Ford to photograph his factories, and worked many years for such Conde Nast publications as Vogue.

Born in 1883 in Philadelphia, Charles Rettrew Sheeler Jr. studied art with William Merritt Chase, a noted American Impressionist, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and then went off to Europe to study both modern and classical painting. 

Back in Philadelphia, using a Kodak Brownie that cost $5, he taught himself photography. To help his income, he became a freelance commercial photographer. That medium influenced his art, and his paintings began to take on the precision of a photograph. His work for Ford also influenced him, and he became best known as painter of machines and industrial scenes as well as commercial ships. 

Throughout his life, Sheeler continued to both photograph and paint America and Americana, and he was widely considered a master at both media.

“Photography is nature seen from the eyes outward, painting from the eyes inward,” he said in a 1938 interview. 

Several of his paintings use views of the inside or outside of his Ridgefield home, including   “Newhaven” and “An Artist Looks at Nature,” The latter is a 1943 surreal painting in which he incorporates a self-portrait photograph of himself (probably taken in Ridgefield), his house in Ridgefield, and the Hoover Dam, which he had photographed in 1939 while he lived here.  

His work is in many of the major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Sheeler moved to the Whipstick house in 1932. He wife, Katherine, died a year later. He lived

alone for nine years but socialized often with friends, including the poet William Carlos Williams and photographer Edward Steichen, who lived in nearby Redding.

In 1942, Sheeler married Musya Sokolova, a Russian dancer and photographer, and the couple soon moved to Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y. He died there in 1965. 

In 2013, Sheeler became the seventh Ridgefielder to be commemorated on a U.S. postage stamp. The issue, part of a sheet on “Modern Art in America,” shows his famous 1930 painting, “American Landscape.”

Unfortunately, the schoolhouse-home where he painted and which he used in some of his paintings, was demolished in 2000 to make way for a much larger house.  

The Leatherman: 

Mysterious Vagabond

Many an odd character has set foot in Ridgefield, but few could outdo the Leatherman, a 19th Century vagabond whose strange life has led to many local legends in Connecticut and New York. While countless people saw him, little is known about this man the New York Times once called “uncouth, repulsive and wholly inexplicable,” but who was liked and respected by many people along his long, circular route.

When the Leatherman would arrive in some villages, “it was like the circus coming to town,” said Dan W. DeLuca, author of “The Old Leather Man: Historical Accounts of a Connecticut and New York Legend” (Wesleyan University Press, 2008). “The teachers would dismiss school. All the children would go outside, stand by the fences, and watch him go by.” 

“Everyone wanted to know about the Leatherman,” DeLuca added. “He was a mystery. He didn’t ask or want anything from anybody. People were fascinated by him.”

That he frequented Ridgefield seems certain, even though The Ridgefield Press said in 1884 that the Leatherman “as far as we know, has never included Ridgefield in his habitual route.” That conflicts with other evidence and a lot of oral tradition that says that, in fact, he regularly passed through town.

For instance, Gilbert Burr, who lived on Ridgebury Road and later became a Ridgefield state representative, wrote in his diary on Saturday, Jan 28, 1888: “Pleasant & very cold. S.A. & I went to Danbury. She got me a robe. Went to see Percy about sleigh, took 10 ½ dozen eggs. Eclipse of the moon this eve, saw it. Miss Hull called and Mr. & Mrs. Reynolds here. Jno Ord up & spent the evening. Leather Man along 12 M.”

It was as if he was an expected visitor. 

Later in the year, on Tuesday, Oct. 16, he wrote: “Stormy with clear weather at night. Leather Man along. Giles Bates up in P.M. Around the barn, Thomas J.D. & I cutting wood.”   

A few months after that entry, the Leatherman was dead.

Just who was this mysterious character who has inspired at least one book, a television documentary,  innumerable articles in newspapers and magazines, and even a song by Pearl Jam?

This much is known: 

• From the 1860s until 1889, the Leatherman walked a 365-mile route every 34 days through western Connecticut and southeastern New York.
  
• He spent the nights in natural shelters such as caves — often today called “Leatherman caves” — along his route.
  
• His shirt, trousers, coat, and hat were all made of pieces of leather, sewn together with rawhide. In some ways it looked like a suit of medieval armor. The Connecticut Historical Society reports his outfit weighed 60 pounds. He also carried a leather bag and a cane. “They say that one could hear the leather creak as he walked by, and there were some that also said you could smell the Leatherman coming!” says one account.
  
• He received food and other basic supplies from many people along his route, but did not beg for these; in fact, he often paid cash.
  
• He was so regular in his routine that people along his route would have meals ready for him in advance, knowing he would show up.  The New Haven Daily Palladium reported in 1886: “The Leather Man passed westward Tuesday, an hour and one half later than usual time.”
  

The Leatherman did not speak much. In a 1947 article in The Press, Paul Baker, then a reporter (later a radio journalist) wrote, “Unable to speak English, he would utter an unintelligible sounds and motion to his mouth.” 

Other accounts say he was fluent in French and could speak broken English. When he died in 1889, he was found in the possession of a French prayer book, suggesting that he was born either in Quebec or France. 

This French connection has given rise to one story that maintains he was born Jules Bourglay

in Lyons, France, the son of a prominent leather tanner who went bust after some bad investments. The fact that Jules’s family was broke prompted his fiancee to cancel their impending wedding and she wound up marrying a rival suitor. Crushed in spirit, Bourglay fled to America as a stowaway on a ship.

That account of his early days was apparently invented by a Waterbury newspaper, reports author Dan DeLuca. The fact is, DeLuca said, no one knows who the Leatherman was, where he came from and why he did what he did.

Among the few facts known about the Leatherman was his cause of death: Cancer of the mouth, said to have been brought about by love of tobacco.  On Friday, January 25, 1889, The Danbury Evening News reported “The Leather Man was in Redding and called early in the morning at the residence of Dr. J. H. Benedict, where he asked for a breakfast. 

“He was readily recognized by Mrs. Benedict from his leather clothing, and she invited him into the kitchen. As Mrs. Benedict can speak French, she soon learned his wants, which were simply coffee and she furnished him with all he desired. He drank the full of two large bowls, into each of which he put a teacupful of sugar.

“He explained that he was unable to partake of solid food on account of his cancer, which prevented chewing. He conversed for a short time with Mrs. Benedict in French, until she asked him of his antecedents and then he became suddenly and stubbornly silent and spoke in his broken English. 

“His cancer is rapidly eating away his life. The right cheek is entirely gone, including a portion of the lower lip. He would not allow Dr. Benedict to dress it or Mrs. Benedict to do anything for his comfort, save to give him the coffee and a bottle of milk. 

“He now seems very shaky and is evidently drawing near his end. It seems as if the Humane Society should look after him, and care of him, even if it was necessary to do so by force, or else some day he will be found a corpse in some out of the way place, the victim of a-craze, want, neglect and exposure.” (A-craze or acraze was a term for infirmity.)

He had, in fact, undergone brief treatment, but not willingly. The previous year, 1888, the Connecticut Humane Society had him arrested and placed in a Hartford hospital. But because he was diagnosed as “sane except for an emotional affliction,” had money and wanted to get out, he was released.

Where did he get his money? Paul Baker wrote in his 1947 story that after he had arrived in America, the Leatherman received a small  legacy from a relative. “He deposited the money in a bank in Port Chester, N.Y.,  and from time to time while on his travels, would go there to draw upon his account.” Like so much else about the Leatherman, this report could not be confirmed.

The Leatherman often followed railroad lines in his travels and it is known that he had visited the Branchville area, though not necessarily on his regular route. Redding historian Brent Colley says a cave north of the Branchville station was likely one of his stopping places. “The back end of the cave has a natural chimney, which is common in other Leatherman caves and is not easily found (another key feature),” he said. 

After the Leatherman was found dead  in his cave on a farm in Briarcliff, Westchester County, in March 1889, a coroner’s inquest was held because he was such a famous character. According to one account, “The Leatherman’s bag was examined at this inquest and was found to

contain leather working equipment such as scissors and awls, wedges, and a small axe, an extra axe head, and other equipment that made the sack unusually heavy considering that the Leatherman carried this burden as he walked. Of much interest is the fact that the bag contained a small prayer book, which was in French. This piece of information combined with the French style footwear may allow us to conclude that the Leatherman may well have been a Frenchman.”

He was buried in Sparta Cemetery in Ossining. In 1953, a local historical society placed a headstone on the grave that incorrectly said he was Jules Bourglay of Lyons, France.

Because it was only a few feet from the busy U.S. Route 9 highway, the Leatherman’s grave was moved in 2011 to another spot in the same cemetery — this time with a marker that says only “The Leatherman.” The only remains found were a few nails, possibly from the coffin. The dirt and nails were placed in a new pine box for the reburial.

Much would surprise the Leatherman about the modern world and the fact that he is still remembered in a book, Connecticut Public Television documentary and countless articles. Perhaps he would be most surprised by a song recorded by Pearl Jam in 1998. Its lyrics include:

Here he comes. He’s a man of the land. He’s leatherman

Smile on his face. Axe in his pack. 

He’s Leatherman. Leatherman. Leatherman. 

Comes out of the caves once a day to be fed.

He wasn’t known to say much but “Thanks for the bread.”

Dr. James Sheehan: 

The First Pediatrician

The day has long gone when doctors made house calls. One of the last of Ridgefield’s “old-fashioned physicians” was Dr. James Sheehan, Ridgefield’s first pediatrician, who ministered to the health needs of countless young Ridgefielders over a 43-year career.

James Ennis Sheehan was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1922, one of 14 children — his father was a physician and a brother, Dr. George Sheehan, was a marathoner who wrote eight books on running and fitness. He grew up in Brooklyn, graduated from Manhattan College and joined the U.S. Navy, which sent him to medical school. He served as a physician in the Navy at the end of World War II and during the Korean War. 

After completing service and interning in New York, Dr. Sheehan and his wife, artist Patricia Sheehan, came to Ridgefield in 1955, drawn by the recommendation of fellow naval officer, Dr. Theodore Safford, who had come here in 1951. There were only four doctors in town then; now there are dozens. 

He set up his practice in his home on Main Street,  just north of the Ridgefield Library, where the Sheehans also raised 11 children. (In 1978, he sold the homestead to the library which tore it down to make way for its 1980 expansion; the footprint of the house is now under the parking lot, lawn and the north end of the new library.)

When he came to town, Dr. Sheehan was Ridgefield’s first and only pediatrician. But Ridgefield’s population was growing quickly, and with it the number of children. In 1965, Dr. Sheehan took on Dr. Christine Guigui as a partner to help handle the increasing need for pediatric care. 

“He was very happy when I came,” Dr. Guigui recalled later. “He was overworked.  At one point he had practically all of Ridgefield. There were a few general practitioners who saw children, but he practically had them all.” 

Before she arrived, Dr. Guigui said, “he must have seen 40 patients a day.”

At that time, Dr. Sheehan was charging $7 for an office visit and $12 for a house call. “He didn’t care about money.” Dr Guigui said. “One of his most famous sayings was ‘as long as I have a roof over my head.’ ”

While he may have been overworked and underpaid, he never neglected his patients. Far from it. Attorney Rex Gustafson remembers that, as a child of six or seven, he was hospitalized with pneumonia in the days before hospitals had TVs in the rooms. “I was staring at the four walls,” he said — until Dr. Sheehan showed up with his own family’s portable TV set for him to watch.

Dr. Sheehan was affiliated with both Danbury and Norwalk Hospitals, and at the latter, was a founder of the Pediatric Unit and served as director of pediatrics. For several decades, he was also Ridgefield’s school physician.

He retired in 1996. For his last years of practicing, he was a partner in Ridgefield Pediatric Associates. 

Over his four decades practicing medicine, “the biggest change is that doctors don’t set up on their own anymore,” he said in the 1996 interview. “Everyone goes into a group.” 

A physician could no longer afford to start out solo, seeing a handful of patients a day, because of the costs of maintaining a modern office, he said. “It’s a loss to patients in that they don’t always see the same doctor. On the other hand, there’s always a doctor for a patient to see.”

He also observed that 40 years before, “doctors were always on call — not like policemen or firemen, who are on duty in shifts. We had one shift that lasted forever.” 

“Doctors refuse to do that any more. Now there are more doctors in a group so nights and weekends can be covered.”

He died in 2003 at the age of 80. 

Thomas Shaughnessy alone at the last meeting of the club

Thomas Shaughnessy: 

The Last Man

One of Ridgefield’s most unusual social organizations began on March 15, 1938. Thirty-one veterans of World War I sat down to dinner at the old Kane Inn (now Bernard’s) on West Lane. It was the first meeting of the Last Man’s Club, and it would be 51 years till the last meeting.

Harry E. Hull, longtime grand marshal of the Memorial Day Parade and the town’s first selectman for several terms, was elected the first president of the club, the only organization of its kind in Connecticut, though similar clubs were found elsewhere, and were also established for World War II veterans.

Each year, on March 15—the anniversary of the founding of the American Legion—members would meet at a table set for 31 people. When a member died, his plate was turned upside down and a toast was drunk in his memory: “To our dear departed comrade, may God and this club preserve his memory.”

The banquets were to continue until the last man died.

Though gradually decreasing in members, the club continued to meet annually and by 1975, only five of the 31 were able to make it to the dinner. Many were dead, some were ill, and others lived too far away to attend. By 1985, two men sat at Last Man’s Club banquet table with 27 overturned plates. Only Mr. Hull and Thomas F. Shaughnessy could attend the dinner. Almost all the other members were dead. In 1989, Thomas Shaughnessy became the last man.  

Born in New Canaan in 1900, Mr. Shaughnessy had sailed the world as a radio operator in the U.S. Navy and later on freighters and ocean liners.  By 1930, he had settled on shore, buying a house on High Ridge, opening a tree surgery business, and serving as Ridgefield’s tree warden until 1976. 

He became a commander of the American Legion, and belonged to Rotary and the Knights of Columbus. 

And he continued to keep in touch with the world of his youth through ham radio.

In a 1974 interview, Mr. Shaughnessy reflected on his world travels and his Ridgefield years, saying, “I wouldn’t want a life unless it was interesting.” 

He died at 92 in 1992—having for three years lived the life of the last man.