Mary Mallon: 

“Typhoid Mary”

Once called "the most dangerous woman in America," Mary Mallon — or “Typhoid Mary” — was also the subject of one of the most unusual legal debates of the 20th Century. 

She was born in Ireland in 1869, emigrated to the United States as a teenager and became a cook in the homes of several wealthy New York and Connecticut families. 

Around the turn of the century, she contracted typhoid fever, but having suffered only flu-like symptoms, probably didn't know it. However, her body became a carrier of the disease bacterium. 

In 1906, while working for a banker's family, six of 11 people living in the household came down with typhoid fever. The banker hired an investigator who eventually identified Miss Mallon and found 22 other cases of typhoid fever in families where she worked. 

New York City health officials took Mary Mallon into custody in 1907 and, without any charges or trial, kept her in an isolation cottage on North Brother Island in New York Harbor. 

Two years later, a brief story on the front page of the July 22, 1909 Ridgefield Press said: “A woman who worked as cook for Ridgefield people, and who is called 'Typhoid Mary,' has been kept a prisoner in quarantine at North Brother Island for the past two years. It is said she was responsible for six cases of typhoid fever in one family in this town. She is said to be immune herself, but can communicate the disease to others. She is known by several persons in Ridgefield…” 

The Press then cited a New York newspaper story that reported that Miss Mallon had appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court for release, saying she’d done nothing wrong and had been illegally jailed without trial. 

“I never had typhoid in my life and have always been healthy,” she said. “Why should I be banished like a leper and compelled to live in solitary confinement with only a dog for a companion?” 

While she was denied release in 1909, she was freed a year later after swearing she would not cook again. However, in 1915, an investigator tracing typhoid outbreaks at a New Jersey sanatorium and a New York maternity hospital found that Mary Mallon, using aliases to escape detection, had worked in both places. 

She was apprehended and returned to North Brother Island for the rest of her life, dying in 1938 but always maintaining she was not a carrier. 

Health officials linked 51 cases of typhoid — including three deaths — to her. The details of the Ridgefield cases are unknown — many issues of The Press from the era when she was here are no longer extant and it's not known how much — if any — news coverage was given to the outbreak here.

Florene Maine: 

Queen of Antiques

Few people in Ridgefield knew the value of antiques like Florene Maine.

“In addition to their historical importance, antiques are the best investment you can make,” Florene Maine said in a 1976 interview. “I have among my customers stockbrokers who consider a good antique a better investment than the stock market.”  

Born in 1896, she was a native of Indiana. Her mother and grandmother were involved in antiques, and with mom’s help, Florene Cansler sold her first antique at the age of 5 — a jewel box that had belonged to the Duchess de Orleans. The buyer, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, paid 4,000 times what she had paid for it.  

She soon decided that antiques would be her profession. She married Bruno Jalmar Maine, art director of Radio City Music Hall, and came to Ridgefield in 1928, opening a shop on Route 7, and later in life, living and selling at Red Petticoat Antiques on West Lane. 

She eventually became one of New England’s leading antiques dealers, and lectured not only on antiques but early American history. 

She also had many notable clients. When Dean Rusk was secretary of state under Kennedy and Johnson, Mrs. Maine helped furnish the reception rooms in the Department of State. Her customers included Governor and Mrs. Nelson Rockefeller, musician Benny Goodman,  actor Paul Newman, and Sara Ann Delano Roosevelt, mother of President Franklin Roosevelt. 

She retired in 1976 and died in 1980 at the age of 83.

Clare Boothe Luce: 

A Most Admired Woman

Clare Boothe Luce “had those sought-after qualities – good looks, style, a sharp tongue, and great boldness – that made her one of the most popular and admired women of her day,” The Ridgefield Press said in her obituary in 1987. 

She was a famous writer, a congresswoman,  an ambassador,  and the wife of one of the most powerful men in the country, yet Luce was born into near poverty in 1903.  Her musician father soon abandoned her chorus girl mother, who worked hard to see that her daughter was well-educated. 

And Clare Boothe Luce worked hard to use that education. By 1930, she was a $20-a-week writer for Vogue and wrote pieces for the New Yorker; three years later she was managing editor of Vanity Fair. 

She wrote plays, movies and novels, including a 1940 best seller, “Europe in Spring.” Several of her plays were on Broadway, including the smash hit, “The Women,”  which also became a popular movie.

She was nominated for an Academy Award for  “Come to the Stable,” a 1949 film that tells the story of two French nuns who come to a small New England town and involve the townsfolk in helping them to build a children's hospital.

As a Greenwich resident she served as Fourth District congressman from 1943 until 1946. 

She was only the 29th woman to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives, but most of her predecessors took office after the death of a husband or father. Luce was only the 13th to be elected on her own merits.

After she retired from Congress in 1946, she and her husband, Time-Life magazine publisher Henry Luce,  bought the 100-acre former estate of Wadsworth R. Lewis  on Great Hill Road.  She began participating in the Ridgefield community, and was active in St. Mary’s Parish.

At a PTA meeting here in 1950, she urged more federal support of schools, particularly “Negro” schools in the South. 

A devout Catholic, she also favored public support of non-public schools. “To deny aid to private and parochial schools seems to me to be class legislation,” she told the PTA.

Mrs. Luce also followed local politics and among other events, attended a famous 1950s GOP caucus in town in which six people — four of them women — sought the party endorsement to run for state representative (Nancy Carroll Draper won).

During the Eisenhower administration, Mrs. Luce, a staunch Republican, was appointed U.S. ambassador to Italy. In 1962, she was a rumored U.S. Senate candidate from Connecticut, but the Luces both changed their voting address to New York and she ran unsuccessfully for the Senate there on the Conservative ticket. 

In 1966 the Luces sold their 22-room mansion; Henry Luce died a year later. Clare Luce eventually moved to Hawaii and late in life still held such stature in the party that when George H.W. Bush was first running for president, he visited her in Honolulu  to get her support. 

She died in 1987 at the age of 84.

Clare Boothe Luce was very quotable, and among the most famous – and pointed – observations was, “A man’s home may seem to be his castle on the outside; inside is more often his nursery.”

George Lounsbury:

The Plain and Simple

One doesn’t usually find a finely dressed gentleman — much less a state governor — leading a team of field oxen. The man photographed with a whip and a yoke is George E. Lounsbury, 58th governor of Connecticut (1899-1901), and the scene is his farm, The Hickories, in Farmingville, about 1900. 

Governor Lounsbury had lived on the Lounsbury Road farm since he was two years old and, though a Yale graduate and prominent businessman, retained it as his lifelong home. When he died in 1904, The Ridgefield Press observed, “Wealth and public position, when attained, often cause men to ignore those who have contributed to their success. Not so with him. He was fond of the plain, simple, unconventional customs of rural life and always kept himself in close touch with the rural people of the town.” 

In 1964, after the picture had appeared in The Press for a history feature, Katharine Bell Russell of Columbus, Ohio, formerly of Pin Pack Road, wrote the editors: “I was five years old and remember well when that picture was taken, as I was there. My grandmother was the widow of the Rev. John Swinburne Whedon, who died while he was minister of the Methodist Church in Ridgefield, and a year later she married Governor Lounsbury. That was in 1894. We spent all our summers at The Hickories from 1896 to 1915. The oxen were Bill and Star, and the white collie was Snowland.”

Today, The Hickories, owned by the Brewster family, is Ridgefield’s only working farm. In 1996, the town bought the development rights to 101 acres of its farmland.

George Edward Lounsbury was one of the town’s most influential citizens. In fact,  his Press obituary reported, “he wielded a greater influence over his fellow townsmen than any other single person.”  

He was born in Pound Ridge, N.Y., in 1838, but his parents moved to Farmingville two years 

later, and it was at the Farmingville Schoolhouse that he received his early education (around 1899, he donated a brand, new schoolhouse to the district; after it closed in 1940, it wassold and moved to North Salem, N.Y., where it served many years as an artist’s studio).

He graduated from Yale  in 1863 and from Berkeley Divinity School three years later. He began his career as an Episcopal priest, serving in a couple of Connecticut congregations, but because of throat problems, left the ministry and entered the family business,  operating shoe factories in Norwalk for the rest of his life. 

An active Republican, he was elected a state senator in 1895 and 1897, and governor from 1899 to 1901. (His brother, Phineas, had been governor 12 years earlier.)  He was a popular candidate; according to an 1899 history, the Republicans swept the state “with a majority which has been exceeded only twice in the history of that party.” 

He had a quiet two years in office. The Hartford Courant put it this way: “In looks, manner and oratory, there was a decided suggestion of the South in George E. Lounsbury...At the state house, he was a useful and ornamental senator, and if no hard problems came his way as governor, he at least performed the routine and ceremonial duties of the office with ease and a becoming dignity.”

After his retirement, he became president of the First National Bank here (an ancestor of the Wells Fargo branch on Main Street). 

“Although he was more than ordinarily successful and acquired wealth, position and prominence, he always retained an interest in the common people, with whom he mingled freely and in whose welfare he was deeply interested, as he often showed in many practical ways, unknown to the general public,” his obituary said. 

Otto Lippolt: 

Collector and Lover of Land

Otto Lippolt was a man who loved the land and collected what he loved. Most of what he collected is now town parkland.

A native of Massachusetts,  Otto F. Lippolt was born in 1891 and moved in the 1920s to a 100-acre farm at the corner of Ridgebury Road and George Washington Highway (the farmhouse later became the Ridgebury Congregational Church parsonage). 

A well-known and respected well driller and well serviceman,  Lippolt was on call 24/7. 

“His generosity was fabulous,” said his friend Carl Baumhart in a 1965 tribute after Lippolt had died at the age of 74.  “Let anyone call and say they were out of water and even if the hour be 3 a.m., he dressed and went to find out why. A cry for water was, to him, a cry of distress.”

Lippolt also collected Ridgebury land, especially during the Depression, when many large and long-unused  tracks would come up at tax sales. 

“Any man who loved trees and nature so much was bound to obtain as much of it as possible,” Baumhart said.  “So he acquired a considerable part of the Ridgebury area.”

By the 1950s he had amassed more than 700 acres, and began slowly subdividing a small portion that he called Hemlock Hills, which included Old Mill and Bear Mountain Roads. But he was not a cut-and-slash developer. 

“He knew there’d eventually be a population explosion and that Ridgebury would participate,” wrote  Baumhart, a former newspaperman and Famous Writers School teacher. “He meant to see to it that the lovely land he owned went to those who felt much as he did about it. He wouldn’t sell to just anybody. 

“He had an outdoorsman’s love of the land. You could almost see his keen, far-seeing eyes stroking the surrounding hills gently as he gazed across them. He liked to detour now and then just to take a look at a particular giant of a tree that had become almost a personality to him.” 

Lippolt developed only a small portion of his vast holdings. As it turned out, two years after he died, his widow Marion Washburn Lippolt, a Ridgebury native, sold 570 acres to the town at the modest price of around $5,000 an acre; she could have sold to a developer, but she knew her husband  loved the land. Mrs. Lippolt died in 1984.

The “Lippolt property,” as it was first known, became the Hemlock Hills and Pine Mountain refuges. The Hemlock Hills section included a few dirt roads that Otto Lippolt had created in preparation for subdividing; some roads even had drainage culverts that still function more than a half century later. Wildflowers, including rare Bottle Gentians and Ladies’ Tresses orchids, sprang up in the middle of some of these dirt roads and at an old sand quarry.

The main dirt road through the Hemlock Hills tract existed long before Lippolt. Bogus Road, the northern part of which is now a paved town road, ran down to the area of Lake Windwing, and was used by the British as they marched from the burning of Danbury south to Ridgefield village and the Battle of Ridgefield on their back back to their ships at Compo in Westport.

Today,  Hemlock Hills and the Pine Mountain Refuges are part of the largest contiguous piece of open space in Ridgefield and one of the largest in Fairfield County. Its trails connect to a large parkland in Danbury and Bethel. 

Benjamin Levy: 

Good Scents

Ridgefielders  who’ve seen or visited Levy Park along the east side of Barrack Hill Road may have wondered just who “Levy” was. The 48-acre refuge recalls a man of not only good sense, but good scents.

Born around 1879 in Rheims, France., Benjamin E. Levy joined Coty, the French cosmetic company, in 1910, and a couple years later, established the American branch of Coty.  In 1934, while founder François Coty was still president, Levy was elected chairman of the board of directors.  He later took over as company president, resigning in 1940.

During his leadership Coty had one of the major pavilions at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, visited by well over a million people.  Coty’s perfume products were shown in the Hall of Perfumes and displays demonstrated the role of decorative arts in cosmetic packaging.

Levy also led another major cosmetic producer, Charles of the Ritz. That company was founded by a Frenchman, Charles Jundt, who in 1919, took over the beauty salon at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in New York, fashioning it after one he had run in Paris. A few years later, he began selling a line of cosmetics to retail outlets. In 1936, Jundt sold his interest to Benjamin Levy and Levy’s nephew, Richard B. Salomon. Salomon ran the company until it was sold to Squibb in 1971. Levy served as chairman of the board.

Levy and his wife, Regine, moved to Ridgefield in 1940, acquiring 80 acres along Barrack Hill Road. Over the years he served as a member of the board of managers of the Ridgefield Boys Club and was on the Board of Incorporators of the Ridgefield Library. The Levys were also “quiet philanthropists,” whose good deeds were largely unpublicized. Among their donations was Renoir’s painting, Woman with A Cat, which they gave the National Gallery of Art in 1950.

Levy died in 1952 at the age of 73; his wife had died five months earlier.  Nephew Richard Salomon inherited the 80-acre estate, selling off the house and surrounding land to another Frenchman,  Jean LeGrand and his wife, Nina; Jean was a Schlumberger-Doll executive. (A few years later the LeGrandes sold much of the land to Peter Lorenzini and Norman Craig who developed Grand View Drive — a perfect pun reflecting the location and the former owner.) 

Some 38 acres were left and in 1968, Salomon decided to give the land to the town of Ridgefield as open space, to be officially known as “The B. E. and Regine Levy Park and Recreational Area and Wildlife Refuge.” Since then, another 10 acres have been added to the park, which today has many trails through meadowland, woods, and wetlands.

 Salomon had a long history as a philanthropist. He was a major benefactor of the New York Public Library, where he was chairman of the Board of Trustees. He was also on the boards of Brown University,  Lincoln Center, WNET Channel 13, and Stamford Hospital. He had lived in Stamford and died there in 1994 at the age of 82. 

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.