William J. Cumming: 

First to Go, First to Die

Bill Cumming was the first man from Ridgefield to enlist in World War I and was the first in the conflict. An ambulance driver, he was “a soldier to the end,” said the headline in the Feb. 5, 1918 Ridgefield Press.

Son of James and Margaret Cumming, William James Cumming was born in 1895 in South Salem, N.Y. His parents, natives of Scotland,  moved between 1906 and 1909  to Ridgefield where his father worked as a gardener on local estates.  

Cumming enlisted on April 3, 1917 — three days before Congress declared war on Germany. He died in less than a year, on Jan. 5, 1918, in a hospital in Vitel, France, where he was being treated for “a serious illness” (which may have been the result of an influenza virus that was soon to cause one of the deadliest pandemics in history).

“I do not think we have a member that was thought more of than Private William J. Cumming and a better boy could not be found,” Private W.E. West wrote to the Rev. John M. Deyo, Cumming’s pastor here. “He was the first one in our company to be taken from us…Even in the end he did not give up and died a brave American.” 

In his sermon at the funeral in the Methodist church, Mr. Deyo used St. George and the Dragon as his theme. “For over three years,” he said, “the foulest dragon of all time has gone forth in his slime and devoured the flower of youth on a gigantic scale. Private Cumming answered the call and went forth to give battle to the foul dragon. Private Cumming has now answered his final summons. Though no longer with us, he conveys to us a message: ‘Carry on.’”

Cumming had been a private first class in the 102nd Ambulance Company and is buried in the American Cemetery, Romagne sur Montfacon, Meuse, France. There is also a monument to him

in the family plot at Fairlawn Cemetery on North Salem Road. “Died in the line of duty,” it says.

The Cumming family lived on Catoonah Street in a green-shingled, 19th-Century house just west of today’s post office.  James and Margaret, Bill’s parents, were known as Jim and Ma. Their son, Henry, also served in World War I, and they themselves were very active on the home front, even after the death of Bill. Jim Cumming was Ridgefield director of  the efforts of local farmers to grow food for the war effort. He also served on the school board.

Ma Cumming “was some kind of a little dynamo,” said town historian Dick Venus. “She was a detachment commandant in the local Red Cross and she and her group performed yeoman’s service. When the local Home Guard was organized, Ma presented the platoon with a flag that she had made.”

After the war, she became the first president of the American Legion Auxiliary and spent countless hours selling poppies to benefit the veterans, Venus said.

“One of our fondest memories is of Jim and Ma, sitting side by side, in their rocking chairs, on the front porch, after their duties for the day were completed,” Venus said. “It kind of gave you the feeling that everything would be all right.”

The Cumming homestead became vacant in 2003 after the death of their daughter in law, Helen Cumming, widow of their son, Donald. In December 2016, the house was torn down and today is an empty lot.

Jacqueline Seligmann: 

The Unhappy Heiress

Jacqueline Seligmann was one of the more unusual people to have lived in Ridgefield. The daughter of a famous Parisian art dealer, she became both an accomplished photographer and a racecar driver in 1930s France, and was known throughout our area in the early 1960s as a skilled bridge player. But her later life in Ridgefield included seemingly endless battles with her family and the IRS, and she died alone with a house full of cats and worried about “detectives.”

Jacqueline Reine Louise Seligmann was born in 1906, a daughter of Jacques and Ella Grunebaum Seligmann. Her father was an internationally famous art dealer, with galleries on the Place Vendôme in Paris and on Fifth Avenue in New York City. His clients included Baron Edmond de Rothschild of France, the Stroganoff family of Russia, and Sir Philip Sassoon of England. In America, he had advised J.P. Morgan and William Randolph Hearst in their art purchases, and had helped Benjamin Altman build a collection that was later given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Jacques Seligmann died in 1923, when Jacqueline was still a teenager.

Her old brother, Germain Seligman (he spelled his name with only one N) was a celebrated hero in World War I, earning the French Croix de Guerre with six citations. He had helped his father in running the business, and continued managing the business after his father’s death.

During the 1930s, Jacqueline Seligmann earned a wide reputation as both a professional photographer and as a professional racecar driver. Even today, her photographs appear in art auctions. 

During her years on the French racing circuit, she met Edmee Chapelle, who was a French writer and amateur race driver. The two women became partners until Emdee’s death in Ridgefield in 1954.

During the early part of World War II, Seligmann and Chapelle volunteered as drivers of trucks that evacuated children from the path of the invading German army.

According to a 1943 interview in The New York Times, the two “left Paris two days before the German invasion, driving 300 miles south to Mont-Dore with other women drivers in their unit.

The trucks were crowded with refugees and records of the Ministry of Armament, Mrs. Chapelle related. It had been their plan, she added, to remain in Mont-Dore for the duration, but they had to alter their plans a few days later…Accompanied by a 13-year-old wire-haired terrier named Pouff, and Briquet, an 11-year-old toy Schnauzer, they immediately set out for the Spanish border and finally made Lisbon and a boat to America. The two dogs are still with them and represent their only ties with home.”

However, they also brought with them about 6,000 negatives of pictures taken in various European and North African countries, which were turned over to the U.S Naval Intelligence to help in the war effort.  Seligmann had shot many of the photos.

By 1943, they had settled in New York City where the Seligmann family had many ties through their gallery in Manhattan. There they established the Seligmann-Chapelle Photographic Studio. They also served with a city wartime agency designed to help reunite families — especially children — separated after a bombing attack.

In the 1940s, Seligmann acquired a modest old house on Old West Mountain Road as a country retreat and, with Chapelle, brought along their two dogs that had accompanied them on their escape from France. Over the years they began to acquire many cats “of which they were both very fond,” said Karl S. Nash, publisher of the Ridgefield Press, who often played bridge with Seligmann.

Seligmann’s widely publicized and often bizarre legal battles involving her family and her inheritance began in 1953 when, at the urging of other members of the Seligmann family, a court ordered her to account for the estate of her mother, Ella, who had died in 1940 and for which she was administrator. Missing was a painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, a 19th Century French artist, said to be worth $50,000 ($450,000 in today’s dollars).  She refused to turn over the picture and the court eventually relieved her of her administrator’s position, turning over supervision of the estate  to two banks, including City Trust Company in Bridgeport. In 1963, City Trust sued Seligmann for return of the Ingres painting plus $50,000 damages. A court even had a deputy sheriff search her home, but the painting was never found.

Relations with her family worsened. In 1961, Seligmann wrote President John F. Kennedy, complaining about the “irregularities” in the Internal Revenue Service, the Surrogate Court of New York, and the sheriff’s office in New York, charging that these agencies were mistreating her at the instigation of her relatives. She supplied corroborating documents. White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger, no less, responded and said her documentation was being turned over to “appropriate government officials.”

Two years later — and shortly before he was assassinated — she wrote Kennedy a long,

letter in which she rattled off charges against government agencies, but again blamed it all on her family, especially her brothers Germain and Francois Gerard. The family had duped the agencies, she said, ticking off dozens of examples of how she was placed under attack by the government, banks, individuals, and by hired agents of the family, whom she called “detectives.”

Speaking of herself, she asked the President: “How, in the 20th Century, can any human being be kept prisoner, for years, in her own home, be watched day and night, live under unshingled and leaky roofs which the insurance has not repaired for two years, unable even to have the bare necessary painting done, sadistically being denied any of the style and life she has been accustomed to.” She added that, to prevent her records from being stolen, she constantly carted around a “45-pound bag” full of  documents  that exposed “this incredible conspiracy and embezzlement” by her family.

In another letter to the president, Seligmann recalled a story that her mother used to tell about her father. “When a poor man steals 100 dollars, he is thrown into prison, but when a rich man steals 100 million dollars, people lift their hats and say ‘How do you do, Mr. Seligmann.’” 

“My father may have been unethical, I cannot judge,” Seligmann said. “But he had a grandeur and generosity.” His sons, in-laws and cousins, she said, “are only petty thieves, embezzlers, sadists, and slanderers.” In 1940, she added, Germain had even spread a rumor   that Emdee Chapelle was “a spy.”

By 1967, Seligmann was fighting the Internal Revenue Service, which had notified her that she owed some $100,000 in back taxes ($730,000 today) for the years 1958 through 1964. Acting as her own attorney, Seligmann maintained in a court filing that “plaintiff owes no taxes whatsoever because of her losses which would have to be computed in the billions or more.”

The New York Times reported that she attributed her losses to the opening by her family of “a plethora of financial accounts” all over the world and creation by them of “endless real and fictitious trusts, guardianships, foundations, corporations, and partnerships in 50 states and abroad.” As a result, she alleged, she had 17 IRS numbered accounts in her name, including one listing her as a French citizen and another as a Hungarian (she had become U.S. citizen in the 1940s).

The case dragged on into 1969, an especially sad year for Seligmann. That September, her house on Old West Mountain Road caught fire due to a defective furnace, and was destroyed. Seligmann and 27 cats escaped from the burning house before firemen arrived. 

“The cats were all over the place,” reported Fire Captain Richard McGlynn. Other cats had died in the blaze, he added.

Also destroyed in the fire were 14,000 rare books, antiques, paintings, Oriental wood carvings, sculptures, and a valuable daguerreotype collection as well as Seligmann’s negatives and cameras.

 One month after the fire, she was due in U.S. Tax Court in New York City. In advance, she placed a small advertisement in The New York Times, saying “REQUEST LARGEST POSSIBLE ATTENDANCE AT MY TRIAL Monday, October 6 … for non-payment income taxes.  I WILL REPRESENT MYSELF. No lawyer retained by me. I can be recognized by 4 missing front teeth and dislocated left shoulder. I am staying temporarily at Stonehenge Inn, Ridgefield, Conn. MISS JACQUELINE SELIGMANN of Ridgefield, Conn, of the art dealers family.”

Four people — three supporters and one New York Post reporter — showed up that October Monday.

In court, Seligmann blamed her house fire on her family. She had called a repair service for her defective furnace, but none had shown up. “The detectives hired by my family prevented the repairman from coming,” Seligmann told the court. “They are always doing things like that. Look at my little Triumph. After 18,000 miles, they started pouring acid on the chassis. At 20,000 miles, it broke in two.”

She repeated her contention that she owed the government nothing. “My money has all been embezzled,” she said. “That’s why they’ve (her family) hired the detectives, because there’s so much money involved. There have been endless forgeries. They even used a computer to forge my name. When this case is over, it’ll turn into something like billions.”

She charged that “my family has even hired a girl to impersonate me. Now she can go places where I’m not supposed to go, and I can’t go anywhere at all.”

Outside the courtroom after the session, Seligmann asked The Post reporter where she could get a new muffler to replace the one that had fallen off her car.

“They loosened it,” she said.

“The detectives?” asked the reporter.

“Yes,” she said.

Seligmann and the IRS eventually agreed to an undisclosed settlement.

She continued to live in Ridgefield with her cats, eventually acquiring a home on Barrack Hill Road. She was a familiar sight in town, driving a classic Buick Skylark convertible that often had cases of cat food in the back seat. She continued to maintain that “detectives” hired by her family were following her, even spying on her from cameras they had secretly mounted on utility poles outside her house.

She died in 1979 at the age of 73 and is buried in Fairlawn Cemetery, alongside Emdee Chapelle.
“How sad it is to be an heiress,” she had said in her 1963 letter to President Kennedy.

Charles Cobelle: 

Painting Joy and Happiness

Thousands of people enjoy the art of Charles Cobelle every day without going to a gallery or museum — his colorful murals of French scenes enliven the walls in buildings across the country, and even in ships that sail the seas.

And the scenes are always bright. “He didn’t want a rainy day — he only wanted happy days,” said a Pennsylvania art gallery owner.  “You’ll never see a rainy, dark day in any of his pieces.” 

Born Charles Edelman in Germany in 1902, Cobelle was trained as an architect at the University of Munich. He changed his name to simply “Cobelle” after moving to Paris where he

began studying at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. More important for his art, however, were the many hours he spent working privately with Marc Chagall and Raoul Dufy.

Even after moving to the United states in the late 1920s, his work was filled with Parisian street scenes, impressions of the Riviera, French race tracks, and casinos — but almost always, showing people having fun.

One writer described Cobelle’s work this way: “The subjects in Cobelle’s paintings were not

of actual locations or events, but they nevertheless convey the excitement of the places that they depict. This imagery, combined with a vibrant palette of expressive colors, creates a world full of verve and wit that effortlessly transcends reality.

“His paintings are characterized by thin, descriptive line-work over broad patches of bold color. First, Cobelle would map out a scene in blocks of bold, expressive color. Then, he would

define the imagery with spontaneous, fluid line work.

“Many of his paintings were painted on canvas with mixed media — oils, acrylics, tempera, conte crayon, ink, whatever was at hand.”

In the United States, Cobelle became a prolific and popular artist and muralist. His murals could be found throughout the country at such places as the Henry Ford Museum, the offices of

Neiman Marcus, Gimbels, and Bloomingdale’s, hotels like The Desert Inn in Las Vegas and Mark Hopkins in San Francisco, and the ships of Holland American Lines.

He also did murals for the 1939 World’s Fair. 

In Ridgefield, his murals can be found at Bernard’s Inn on West Lane and at Boehringer

Ingelheim’s headquarters.

Cobelle did commercial art for the likes of Milton Bradley, Helena Rubenstein, and American Artists Group Greeting Cards, and his paintings appeared on the covers of many

magazines, including Town and Country. He also did pottery designs for such companies as Midwinter Stylecraft, Universal Potteries and Homer Laughlin China.

Cobelle lived in Westport  before moving to Ridgefield where he lived for 32 years, first on

Barlow Mountain Road and then Seth Low Mountain Road .

In 1965, he lost most of his early work as well as records and correspondence when a fire destroyed his studio on Barlow Mountain Road.

Cobelle died in 1994 at the age of 92 and is buried in St. Mary Cemetery.

His love of color and bright city scenes live today in the paintings of his daughter, Christina “Tina” Cobelle-Sturges, who grew up in Ridgefield and whose oils and watercolors,  well-known on the regional art scene, were influenced by her father.

“As Cobelle’s child, I would see him constantly creating and painting everything that would bring joy and happiness to the world around him,” she once said. “The reason for Cobelle’s popular success is the joie de vivre that characterizes all of his work.”

Arthur J. Carnall: 

A Shropshire Lad

Arthur J. Carnall was a boy of nine, fresh off the boat from England, when he arrived in Ridgefield in 1904. He made the town his home for the next 67 years and helped change the face and function of the community in many ways. 

A native of Shropshire, England, Arthur James Carnall was born in 1895. His family sailed to Boston and immediately came to Ridgefield; they chose the town on the recommendation of William Harrison Bradley of Ridgefield, who was then serving with the American consulate in England and lived across the road from the Carnalls. 

He graduated from the old Center School on Bailey Avenue and attended a preparatory school in Virginia. (His sister, Marjorie Agnes Carnall, married John W. “Jack” Smith, the well-known Ridgefield orchid grower and estate superintendent, who was also born in England and who is also profiled in Who Was Who). 

During World War I, Arthur Carnall served in the U.S. Navy.

In 1922, he joined the real estate and insurance business of Thaddeus Crane, located about where Dr. George Amatuzzi’s office is on Main Street. Crane (who will be profiled in a future “Who Was Who”) died in a spectacular car-vs.-train accident in 1928 and two years later, Carnall took over the business, renaming it A.J. Carnall Inc. It became Ridgefield’s largest insurance business and, in 1965, moved into the second floor of a new office building at the corner of Main and Catoonah Streets — what became popularly known as “the Carnall Building.”

Throughout his life here, Carnall was involved in efforts to improve the community.  “Mr. Carnall’s love of Ridgefield and devotion to its welfare marked his public life,” The Ridgefield Press said when he died. 

One of his first big projects was amassing 270 acres in the late 1920s to create the Silver Spring Country Club, which opened in 1932. Throughout his life he was an active member of the club and at his death in 1972, was its treasurer and a governor. He was, needless to say, an ardent golfer, but was also a good one, winning a number of tournaments in the region over the years.

In the late 1930s, he almost single-handedly conducted a bond-selling drive that, in 1940, created Ridgefield’s first movie theater, the Ridgefield Playhouse, on the site of today’s Prospector Theater. Before then, Ridgefielders had to travel to one of three theaters in Danbury to see a movie. The Playhouse was also used for various stage productions.

A few years later his enthusiasm and salesmanship resulted in the town’s buying the Lounsbury block, now Veterans Park, along with its mansion, now the Community Center. He also helped organize the Community Center operations.

He also dabbled in development – the “car” of Marcardon Avenue is he, partners with Francis D. Martin and Joseph H. Donnelly (Martin, then also a boy, was one of the first people Carnell met when he came to Ridgefield in 1904, and they became lifelong friends.

For 15 years starting in 1941, Carnall was the town tax collector. He was a founder of the Lions Club and of the Danbury and Ridgefield Boards of Realtors, belonged to the Ridgefield Grange and Danbury Elks, was on the Wadsworth R. Lewis Fund advisory committee, and volunteered on countless boards and committees — including serving on the Ration Board during World War II.

He and and Agnes Kelly were married in 1930 and lived on Gilbert Street for their entire   life together. Both took pride in their beautiful gardens. He was 76 years old when he died at his winter home in Florida in 1972. She died in 1996 at the age of 92 in Florida where she had moved after her husband’s death.

In 1999, Ridgefield Bank, now Fairfield County Bank, bought A.J. Carnall Inc., and 10 years later renamed it Fairfield County Bank Insurance Services. It still operates out of the “Carnall Building.” Carnall, incidentally, had held several offices in the old Ridgefield Savings Bank, predecessor of Fairfield County Bank, starting as an incorporator in 1941 and ending as vice president at the time of his death.

Olinto Carboni:  

‘Battling Bones’

Olinto “Lynce” Carboni must have held some sort of record for an active life. He did not retire from working until he was 91, would hit the dance floor at 95, and was still mowing his lawn well into his 90s.  “Why should I pay someone when I can do it myself?” he told an interviewer

A Ridgefield native, Olinto P. Carboni was born in 1909, a son of Benvenuto and Assunta Carboni (Benvenuto is already profiled in Who Was Who). He had four brothers, Adrian (“Ade”), Octavius (“Tabby”), Navio (“Pete”), and Reno (“Renz”), and a sister, Mary Carboni Michell, who all became well known in town.

As a boy he got his first job carrying water to thirsty workers building Branchville Road into one of the region’s first paved highways. He also caddied at Silver Spring Country Club, when carrying two bags for 18 holes would earn $2. “I had to give the money to my mother and she let me keep 10 cents,” he recalled in 2004.

While he was attending Ridgefield High School, he worked before and after school doing bookkeeping and deliveries for “Jimmy Joe” Joseph’s store at the intersection of Main Street and North Salem Road (“Joe’s Corner”).

He was a star athlete at RHS, captaining the baseball and basketball teams and playing football. After he graduated in 1927,  he played for Ridgefield’s baseball and football Spartans and its basketball team, The Millionaires, in the region’s popular inter-town sports leagues. 

Town historian Dick Venus wrote in 1983 that Lynce Carboni “was probably one of the very best all-around athletes that Ridgefield ever had. Though he was good at baseball, like his brother Pete, Lynce excelled in basketball and was very exciting to watch. Many of us thought he could have played with any of the professional teams” — even though he was not very tall and “would probably not stand much above the belts on some of the gigantic basketball players of today.”

For many years he served as a high school basketball referee, with legs strong enough to work two games in one night.

As “Battling Bones,” Carboni was also a successful boxer, fighting in his late teens as a featherweight in bouts in throughout the area. He never lost a fight.

He, his father and his brothers all conspired to keep his boxing a secret from his mother, who opposed her son’s participation in the sport. 

Charles “Chip” Bliss, his nephew,  told how Carboni’s undefeated boxing career came to an end.  “His mother didn’t want him to box — he never told her,” Bliss said. “He used to sneak out the windows from home. One day the iceman came early, and he had a big fight that night, and his mother asked the iceman why’d he’d come early, and he told her, ‘I’ve got to get through my route early so I can go see Lynce box tonight.’”

Assunta Carboni threw all of Lynce’s clothes out the window and said “You’re not going anywhere.” “And that,” said Bliss, “was the end of his boxing career.”

In the late 1920s Carboni began courting Dorothy “Dot” Bennett,  whose brother, artist Harry Bennett, had been a close friend. “He was my brother, he was my father,” Harry Bennett said. “I had no father, he died before I was born, so I had Lynce. I leaned on him,” 

Bennett was about 12 and Carboni 22 when Bennett’s dog Duke was killed by a car.  “Lynce came, helped that dog up, picked him up, brought him into the yard, called the vet, had him declared dead, got a shovel, made a box, and buried him, then made a tombstone,”  Bennett said. “He found a piece of rock and chiseled it so it had a semblance of a tombstone and then chiseled the word ‘Duke’ into it. He could do anything.”

Carboni and Dot Bennett eloped in 1931. Both loved to dance and were famous throughout their lives for their prowess on the dance floor. When they were courting, Lynce would take her dancing at Peach Lake, in Danbury, Bridgeport and even New York in his Model A Ford. They marked their 65th wedding anniversary in 1996, the year she died.

Carboni began his career as a plumber. “He was a great plumber — marvelous,” said brother-in-law Bennett. “Anything he did was like brand new, just perfect. He was meticulous, he was reliable, and he had lots of knowledge. And anybody could call him, and he’d just rush to help them.”

“He was a hard worker,” said Chip Bliss. “He single-handedly built the foundation on his house — dug it out. He had it all done and a terrible rainstorm caved in two walls and he had to rebuild it. That just shows the persistence he had.” That house on Pound Street was his home for some six decades, but in his last years, he lived on Prospect Street.

Carboni served in the Navy during World War II aboard the U.S.S. Astoria, a light cruiser, in the Pacific. He thought his knowledge of pumps would land him a job in damage control, but he could also type and was made yeoman to the executive officer, the ship’s second-in-command.

He was on the Astoria in the China Sea in December 1944 when it survived a huge typhoon that capsized and sank three U.S. Navy destroyers. “They ran out of fuel and were at the mercy of the sea,” he reminisced in 2000.

His ship was the target of kamikaze pilots during the invasion of Okinawa, and he recalled one crashing so close it shook the entire ship. He was on the Astoria in Tokyo Harbor when the Japanese surrender was signed aboard the U.S.S. Missouri.

After the war Carboni joined John Tulipani in forming a plumbing business. In 1959, he did a plumbing job at the Board of Education offices in what is now St. Stephen’s South Hall, and his work caught the eye of school administrators. He was offered the job as the only “maintenance mechanic” for the Ridgefield Public Schools, which then had only two buildings, Veterans Park and the old high school. When he retired in 1976, the district had grown to eight school buildings and he headed a crew of five men who kept them all in repair.

But he didn’t really retire that year. He continued to work as the schools’ “courier,” ferrying documents and other deliveries among the various schools and administrative headquarters. He continued courier services until finally retiring in 2000, nearly 92 years old. And he continued driving until he was 95. 

Over the years, Carboni encouraged and inspired many young athletes and coached Little League baseball for many seasons. 

He was a life member of the Ridgefield Volunteer Fire Department and the Italian American Mutual Aid Society — he continued to serve at the club’s monthly men’s and women’s dinner nights into his  90s. He was also a founding member of the Ridgefield Old Timers Association and was honored by the Danbury Old Timers.

Lynce Carboni died in 2006 at the age of 97 and is buried beside his wife in the Bennett family plot in Fairview Cemetery.

“He was a man of few words,” Chip Bliss said. “He never had a bad thing to say about anybody. He was always upbeat. Everybody liked him — didn’t have an enemy in the world.” 

Capt. David Olmstead: 

The Tale of the Red Petticoat

Capt. David Olmsted was a leading citizen in the last third of the 18th Century. He was a Revolutionary War hero, longtime state representative, and friend of the makers and shakers of Ridgefield. His father was descended from the founders of the town and his mother was the daughter of Col. David Goodrich, who fought in Queen Anne’s War. His wife was the daughter of the town’s second minister, whose nephew helped write the United States Constitution.

But if David Olmsted is remembered at all today, it for a few angry words he allegedly shouted at his wife after the Battle of Ridgefield.

David Olmsted was born in Ridgefield in 1748, a son of Deacon Nathan Olmsted and Millicent Goodrich Olmsted. He grew up in Ridgefield and, in 1769, married Abigail Ingersoll, daughter of the Rev. Jonathan Ingersoll, minister of the First Congregational Church and a cousin of Jared Ingersoll, who worked on and signed the Constitution. He was 20, she 18. The couple had eight children.

Unlike his father-in-law, who opposed the Continental Congress in 1775, David Olmsted was all for the cause of the revolution. As a captain in the continental army, he led companies of volunteers at West Point, in the defense of Greenwich, and at the alarm at Fairfield. But he is most important locally for his participation in the Battle of Ridgefield on April 27, 1777.

In his book, “Farmers Against the Crown,” Keith Jones describes major players at the battle scene and observes: “Nearby was Captain David Olmsted, whose little one-and-a-half story ‘saltbox’

home still stands in the south end of town along (what else) Olmstead Lane. Olmsted...was one of the first Ridgefield men to commit to the Patriot cause, having led a company to Washington’s army in early ’76. The commander-in-chief must have made a forceful impression on the 27-year-old captain, for on this very day one year earlier (April 27, 1776), he named a newly born son George Washington Olmsted! In addition to defending his home and four young children, Captain Olmstead had scores to settle with the Redcoats — cousin Roger fell in action in 1775, and cousin David was killed Jan. 4, 1777, in Washington’s victory at Princeton.”

But it was after the battle and presumably after the British left town when the story of the Red Petticoat finds its origin.

Smithsonian historian Silvio A. Bedini was the first person to recount the tale in print. In his 1958 history of the town, “Ridgefield in Review,” Bedini wrote: “The Red Petticoat story exists in

several versions in the local lore of the Battle of Ridgefield, which has been handed down by word of mouth from generation to generation. One account told of Mrs. David Olmsted, who lived in either the original Olmsted homestead … on Olmsted Lane, or  in the Olmsted house [just to the south]. Captain David Olmsted, the owner of the homestead, fought at the barricade and took shelter in the woods when the British advanced through the town.

“His wife remained at home with her children, anxiously awaiting word of her husband and of the progress of the conflict. When the detachment of British troops came marching along Olmstead Lane to the camp site [on Wilton Road West], she feared that her home would suffer the fate of others that had been burned by the British during the day. Looking about for some means of saving it, she thought of posing as a Tory. Having no other suitable symbol at her disposal, she removed her red petticoat and waved it from the house as the British soldiers came marching off West Lane Road and along the lane. The British, thinking it was a Tory house, left it unharmed.

“When her husband arrived home at last during the night or on the following day, Mrs. Olmsted proudly recounted the incident, pleased with her presence of mind. Not so her husband. Livid with rage, Captain Olmstead thundered: ‘Woman, if I had seen you, I would have shot you dead!’ Far better it would have been to have this home destroyed than to have his wife suspected of being a Tory.”

 Could the story be true and could Olmsted have really uttered such strong and offensive words to his wife? Possibly; he would probably have been exhausted and perhaps discouraged from the encounter with the British, and may have blurted out his frustration in the unkind words. If he said it, did he mean it? Probably not. It is quite likely that Abigail Olmsted was a strong, highly intelligent woman who would not have put up with a husband who said he would kill her. Since she and David went on to have four more children and remained together for the rest of her life, it seems likely that he would have apologized for his outburst — if it happened at all.

Adding some doubt to the veracity of the whole story is the fact that his homestead did, in fact,  suffer fairly substantial damage from the British. Property owners who suffered losses due to enemy action in the Revolution could seek compensation from the Connecticut government, and many did. According to research done by Keith Jones, “a reimbursement request exceeding £54 appears under Captain Olmsted’s name on the summary of damages submitted by town selectmen to the General Assembly.” £54 was a good deal of money back then.

Both town historian Dick Venus and battle historian Keith Jones said the house standing today at 91 Olmstead Lane is likely the Captain David Olmsted place. It was so marked with a sign during the town’s celebration of the Bicentennial in 1776, and Silvio Bedini said he thought of the three old Olmsted houses on the road, #91 was most likely the one owned by David. 

While the legend has no basis in historical records, it did inspire a 1969 book for youngsters. In “The Red Petticoat,” by Joan Palmer of South Salem, a girl named Eliza Bouton waves a red petticoat out the window while her father and grandfather are off fighting the British on Main Street. However, she did so not to save her house, but to protect a young, wounded patriot, carrying a desperately needed message for General Washington, who had collapsed on her home’s doorstep. Needless to say, no one talked of shooting her for her petticoat trickery.

Toward the end of the war, Olmsted was promoted to lieutenant colonel — but local history and perhaps his local contemporaries continued to call him Captain Olmsted. After the war he became active in the government, serving as a member of the Board of Selectmen and holding other offices. From 1781 until 1798, he was often elected one of Ridgefield’s representatives to the state Legislature — helping Connecticut and Ridgefield to recovery during the post-war years. He often served in the legislature alongside Col. Philip Burr Bradley or Lt. Joshua King, two veterans of the Revolution and leading Ridgefield citizens.

However, around the beginning of the 19th Century, Olmsted did what many New England

farmers were doing: He went west. Good land was becoming scarce here and western New York promised new possibilities. He and Abigail and their family moved to Onondaga County, N.Y., , becoming one of the first settlers of the area around Jamesville, now part of the town of DeWitt. There, he was known as Colonel Olmsted. By 1806, he owned a tavern, which a local history reported was “popularly considered the best hostelry west of Utica.” (This was a community that knew about spirits; Jamesville area was settled between 1790 and 1800 and, in 1798, one Matthew Dumfrie was already building a distillery, malt house and brewery there, producing the first beer and whiskey made in Onondaga County — a territory that includes Syracuse.)

Abigail died in 1805. Olmsted subsequently married Abiah Keeler, a native of Norwalk who, like others, had headed west. They had no children.

Olmsted died in 1815 at the age of 66. He is buried alongside Abigail in the Walnut Grove Cemetery, Jamesville, Onondaga County, N.Y.

John Scott: 

A Hands-On Journalist

When journalist John Scott worked with his hands, it was not just to type his eight books, scores of white papers, and countless Time magazine articles. Scott began his career a welder in Russia, and later, when he came to Ridgefield in 1948, built his stone-and-wood Peaceable Ridge home with his own hands. 

The son of the liberal social reformer, Scott Nearing, John Scott Nearing was born in Philadelphia in 1912. He dropped his father’s name after a disagreement and left the University of Wisconsin after two years because of financial problems. It was during the Depression and, intrigued by communism and socialism, he decided to learn electric welding at the General Electric school in Schenectady, N.Y., and, after unraveling a lot of red tape, headed for Russia. There, at age 20, he began working in a Urals factory as a welder. After several years, he became a foreman and finally a chemist.

It was in the Urals that he met and married his wife, Maria “Masha” Dikareva, the daughter of illiterate peasant parents. Thanks to the free education system in Russia, Masha Scott had studied mathematics and chemistry at a Moscow institute and her siblings included two teachers, two engineers, two doctors, an economist, and a college dean. Throughout her life, along with raising two daughters, Masha Scott continued her studies and taught in many places, including at the University of Connecticut and Norwich University in Vermont. She had earned a master’s degree and, late in

life, was working on a doctorate in Russian language.

      Scott lost his job in Stalin’s 1937 purge, but he remained in Russia as a French and British news correspondent. Two weeks before the German attack on the USSR in 1940, he was expelled from the country for “slandering” Soviet foreign policy and “inventing” reports of Soviet-German tension. 

He soon began covering World War II as a correspondent for Time magazine, and was in Japan in 1941, just before Pearl Harbor. 

In 1942, Scott became a staff writer for Time’s foreign news section and during much of the war, headed Time-Life’s bureau in Stockholm.  After the armistice he reopened the Central European bureau, covering the aftermath of the war. There are reports that especially early in the war, Scott worked for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency, and had supplied the government with information on the Soviet war industry.

Throughout and after the war,  he delivered many lectures on world affairs, speaking before such groups as the Foreign Policy Association. 

In 1948, he moved to Time’s Manhattan offices and came to Ridgefield where he took a year’s break and began building his Peaceable Ridge home. He later confessed that “I was going to run for the senate and write the great novel. Those projects flopped ignominiously, but I did get my house built.” 

Peaceable Ridge back then was called Standpipe Road, had only one house along it, and was

a narrow, dirt path that was treacherous in bad weather. But the view from his place offered a wide sweep of the Hudson Valley; on a clear day, one could see the Empire State Building.  He bought three acres from Harold O. Davis, who was the longtime town tax assessor, but, he said,  “later, when we got it surveyed, we found out we had five acres which is something that was very fortuitous — something for which I don’t think Harold has ever forgiven me.”

Scott decided to use the parcel’s natural resources — rocks and trees — to build his home, which wound up as an eclectic four-story structure along the side of a hill. The house had many walls of rock, beams from local trees, and no nails — Scott employed the colonial technique of using wooden pegs with mortise and tenon joints. He built most of the furniture, also without nails, including four large oak tables, one of which was so large that it could never be removed from the room in which it was fashioned. He took pains to make sure any “store-bought” furniture matched the hand-made look of the interior. “That was a regular Steinway,” he told a visitor in 1974, pointing to a piano, “but we sanded it down and stained it the same color as the rest of the stuff in the room.”

The grounds included many stone walls, a swimming pool and a tennis court.

The Scotts often entertained friends and associates at dinner parties and outdoor poolside gatherings — Vice President Henry Wallace of South Salem was a frequent visitor.

In 1951 he joined the close staff of Time-Life publisher Henry R. Luce, also of Ridgefield, and began in-depth reporting on crisis areas such as Latin America, the Soviet Union and the Middle East. Over 17 years he turned out 12 reports that Time distributed to leaders in government, education and business. 

He also lectured widely, especially at colleges and universities. A gifted speaker (he won an oratory contest as a child at the Quaker school he attended in Pennsylvania), Scott never used prepared text or even notes for his addresses. His many talks were often spiced with good humor. Lecturing, he said in 1973, is largely a matter of “mastering diaphragmatic breathing. I’ve been told that if you breathe right, it doesn’t matter what you say.”

His first book, published in 1942, was “Beyond the Urals,” the story of his experiences in the Soviet steel mill, which the New York Times called “a genuine grassroots account of Soviet life” and “a rich portrait of daily life under Stalin.” It is still in print.

 Other books were “Duel for Europe” (1942), “Europe in Revolution” (1945), “Political Warfare” (1955), “Democracy Is Not Enough” (1960), “China, The Hungry Dragon” (1967), “Hunger: Man’s Struggle to Feed Himself” (1969), “Divided They Stand” (about East and West Germany) (1973), “Detente Through Soviet Eyes” (1974), and “Millions Will Starve” (1975). 

Despite his work at Time and at his home, Scott still had time for his hometown, especially its political side. He belonged at first to the Ridgefield Democratic Club.  But he later became a Republican and promoted more conservative policies. He often spoke here, and in 1966, delivered the

Memorial Day address, supporting the United States’ involvement in the fast-expanding war in Vietnam.

After his retirement from Time in 1973, he became vice president of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, where he would also sometimes appear on the air.  In 1974, he made “five broadcasts in Russian on hunger, beamed to millions of listeners from Leningrad to Odessa,” he told an interviewer.

He also continued to lecture around the country. And it was while on a speaking tour in 1976 that he suffered a stroke at the Lake Shore Club in Chicago and died at the age of 64.

“He wanted to build the structure of a better world,” said the Rev. Clayton R. Lund of the First Congregational Church at his funeral. “Such optimism never left him because he had such access to human weakness and nobility; he was obsessed with the triumph of the human spirit.”

Masha Scott survived her husband by 28 years. She died in 2004 at the age of 92.