Whose Woods?

     Part of my hope in searching the deeds at the Sherman Town Hall Vaults was to understand how the dozens of fields enclosed by stone walls were used by 19th residents on Hardscrabble Road. Alas, the vague descriptions of the era, "a pile of stones," " a soft maple tree," combined with nature's changes to the landscape make this difficult.

     I wanted Marge Josephson, of the Naromi Land Trust, and Gloria Thorne, of the Sherman Historical Society to see this massive stone wall, located at the northern boundary of my father's old place. It may be the zig-zag wall that one of the deeds references. It is eight or ten feet wide, located perpendicular to a perennial wet section between two other fences, its purpose not clear.

     We walked the land which, when Hidden Hollow was subdivided by its new owners, was donated to the Naromi Land Trust. I'm glad that section, with other curious stone structures, possibly a sheep fold, is a conservation area.

Of Boundaries and Bounders

Disputed Territory: Croswell Bowen owned this one acre parcel, across from Hidden Hollow. Helen Tee-Van called it John Worden's Arbutus Swamp and was disturbed when Bowen put up a writing studio which turned out to be on the Tee-Van side of the boundary.

     In describing my father in psycho-analytic terms, his cousin, Dr. Carolyn Mackenzie, observed that he had problems with personal, social boundaries and limits. His relationship with his neighbors at Hidden Hollow is a grand metaphor for this.

    As I've written, the Tee-Vans were great friends of Walter and Isobel Merritt, who presented them with the deed to their house and property at Christmas, 1928. This relation was partly based on a shared love of nature, and partly on both couples' places in New York Society. I've explained Merritt's brilliant success as a pro-management lawyer in labor disputes. The Tee-Van's position in New York was more complicated. Helen Tee-Van was the daughter of Frank Damrosch, a distinguished member of a distinguished family that included musicians Leopold and Walter Damrosch, and David Mannes, and the writer Marya Mannes. Mrs. Tee-Van was an artist, illustrator and author. She met John Tee-Van while both accompanied the New York Zoological Society's expedition to British Guiana with the famous explorer, William Beebe. For decades she continued her career as an illustrator and muralist of wild life in its setting. John Tee-Van's origins were humbler, his skills as impressive. Tee-Van's father came from Ireland and worked on the construction of the Bronx Zoo. John Tee-Van, born in Brooklyn, worked at the Zoo as assistant keeper or cage cleaner in the birdhouse. In 1916,  William Beebe, recognizing his skills in caring for animals, made him his assistant in the Department of Tropical Research. Two dozen expeditions and many publications followed, and he became Director of the Bronx Zoo. 

     The TeeVans named their Hardscrabble Road house Kartabo, after a locale in British Guiana. Helen delighted in the seasonal progression of plants. The couple's first weekend guests were the wife and son of the Former Borough President of New York, George McAneny. Many interesting visitors followed: Frank Damrosch, Warder and Polly Norton, founders of the publishing company, Clifford Pope, who accompanied Roy Chapman Andrews to China and found the first fossilized dinosaur eggs, Eugene Gudger, the foremost expert on whale sharks, Laura Bragg, a pioneer as head of the Charleston Museum, and many other fascinating personalities. Among the most interesting to me would have been Chiang Yee. Chiang Yee, trained as a chemist, but was prolific as a writer, poet and painter of the Silent Traveller series. John Tee-Van and Chiang Yee corresponded about pandas; John Tee-Van was called the panda nurse because he successfully brought two young giant pandas from Chungking, just as Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.

     When Chiang Yee visited the TeeVans in 1953, Hidden Hollow was leased to their friends, Paul Fitzpatrick and Toni Hatvany, and I was seven years old. Three months later, we went for a picnic by the brook opposite the house. I remember it, and evidently it made an impression on Mrs. Tee-Van as well, for she noted in her album that we had behaved noisily in the "Arbutus Swamp." A week later, she discovered my father building a house in which to type, above the Swamp. She contacted the Zoning Board to see if he had permission, and then decided to investigate if in fact the shack was on the TeeVan's land. Sherman's land record and surveying experts were called out to investigate the boundaries. The building was on the Tee-Van's land, although my father claimed he had been told otherwise by Lida Beckwith.

     The shack remained on the hillside, unused and becoming more and more of a shack. A few years later, the Fitzpatricks gave up their lease, and we regained Hidden Hollow. Helen Tee-Van had not much like my father, referring to the famous Pedro, aka Piotr Lupinski, as one of Croswell Bowen's tramp friends, and remarking in 1937 that Croswell Bowen, a friend of some of her messier tenants, had bought John Worden's house. I think she valued her privacy and quiet. She had no children of her own, but doted on her Damrosch nieces, taken them to visit the Goldenrod Jungle, across the road. She remained annoyed with my father; her disdain felt even by me.

     My question about this symbolic interaction is whether or not my father intended to discomfit Mrs. Tee-Van by ignoring the boundary, and thus shake loose the Fitzpatricks from the house? Did she dislike him because his quicksilver intelligence flickered too lightly over the scientific analysis of the Tee-Van's world and the artistic seriousness of the Damrosch's?  

     

     

     

     

Why is the 20th of April 1877 a special day?

Graves of Betsy and Franklin Ingersoll, Coburn Cemetery, Sherman, CT

     In late 19th Century wills, the phrase "married since the 20th Day of April 1877" appears repeatedly. Upon further investigation, I learned that was when Connecticut changed its laws such that husbands no longer automatically gained control of property a wife brought to a marriage. Women became legal entities apart from their husbands and could make contracts etc. This didn't apply to Betsy, who married Franklin Ingersoll in 1828, and over the next 20 years bore him 9 children. Before 1860, they moved with 4 of their children from north of Chapel Hill Road to Hardscrabble Road. Nancy died in 1876.

     Franklin remarried, after 1877 but  before 1880. This second wife was Nancy Riggs; she may have been the widow of Stephen Briggs. She must have been wealthy; 53 years old in 1880, she and the 73 year old Franklin lived in the TeeVan's house with a couple, the Richmonds, to help with the housekeeping and farm chores. 

     Nancy died in 1888, Franklin lived two years longer. Because her property was held separately, under the 10 year old law, and because she died without making a will, Franklin's share was half her estate, and her surviving brothers and sisters received the other half. An inventory of the estate was required to make an equitable distribution. This inventory is a window into both the farm and domestic life of Hardscrabble Road.

     Only a foundation now exists where a barn once stood. That barn contained not only a horse, hay, robe and blanket, harness, wagon, 2 sleds, 2 plows, a pole tongue, a stone boat, old wagons, a sleigh and an ox breaching and bells, but also diverse tools of farming.  A scythe, 2 yokes and flails, a fanning mill, a cutting box, 6 forks and 4 rakes, were also counted. Implements like augers, an anvil, chains, an adz, 3 axes, saws, planes, stone augers, and 6 punch lathes were on hand. Although these were generally part of the man's realm on farms, they were all counted in the inventory of Nancy's personal goods. 

The house consisted of no more than 6 rooms, including the kitchen ell. We can imagine how it was furnished. The northern addition probably served as parlor, with an office chair, a parlor rocker, a lounge, a writing desk, a parlor stove and 20 yards of parlor carpet. In the bedrooms there were three bedsteads, 3 straw ticks, 1 feather tick, dutch blankets, blue plaid blankets, 7 pillow cases, 2 quilts, 2 bed pillows and bolsters. There were wash bowls and pitchers and chamber pots with lids.

     In the center room and ell were chairs, a center table, a kitchen table, a bureau which contained white china, yellow china, glass dishes, platters, a piece of majolica, teacups, saucers, pie plates and so on.

     Kerosene had come into use, there was a can of it. It probably made washing a little less tedious. There were wash tubs and boilers, 21 milk pans and stone (ware)  jugs, a tub of lard, a pot of butter, casks of vinegar and cider, barrels of rags and wool. With the 29 fowl in the chicken yard, Nancy's worldly possessions totalled about $322, a third of the value of her real estate, 90 acres and the house and other buildings, valued at $1200. 

     The latter was sold to the widow Jane Ludington, second wife to Lida's grandfather, John Reynolds Worden, also married since April 20, 1877. When she dies, two years after John R, her property is inherited by her children by her first marriage. It is sold, this time to Lida Beckwith's husband. The two houses are still in the hands of relations. Lida and Burton at the TeeVan house and Lida's father John Henry and his wife Arthilla at Hidden Hollow.

     

Farmer Slack and Farmer Snug

From The American Agriculturalist 16 (March 1857):60, found in 

Sally McMurry's Families and Farmhouses in 19th Century America

     If you own or love an 18th Century house, would not a house description, including owner, construction materials, number of stories and windows, dimensions and plot size, of every house in the 16 states that comprised the US in 1798, be of interest to you? The fear of war with the French caused such an inventory to be made. Sadly, only fragments survive. The inventories for Kent and Warren, CT, were rediscovered in 2004-2005.

     Analysis of the housing stock revealed by these inventories came as a shock to Jack Larkin, chief historian of Old Sturbridge Village. He found that 2/3rds of houses in places like central Massachusetts were one story dwellings, much smaller than ever imagined, resembling the home of Farmer Slack, above left. He observes that the grand houses, the ones at house museums, comprised only 10% of early 19th Century housing, but because they tend to survive on the landscape, they dominate our image of New England.

     Quickly tabulating the numbers of Big, Middling and Small houses illustrated in Sherman's venerable The Sentinel Houses (1978-Out of Print) confirms Larkin's observation. Of the roughly 50 houses shown and discussed in the book, more than half fall into the "Better Sort" category, while just a third represent the historically predominate small houses that were more typical, especially of marginal farming areas. 

     Fortunately for those of us whose love affair has been with smaller houses, such as mine with Hidden Hollow, the last 40 years have seen greater interest in vernacular architecture. The folklorist, Henry Glassie, has written a book of that title. Rather that focussing on monumental buildings or individual architects, vernacular architecture examines the patterns visible in common and anonymous building types. From these patterns, we can learn some things about houses like Hidden Hollow, and the TeeVan house, as I call it, around the bend in Hardscrabble Road. (It would still be wonderful, of course, to find the 1798 Direct Tax list of particulars for New Fairfield and Sherman.)

     Both houses began as simple, one or one and 1/2 room, one story buildings, certainly in place before 1856, as they are shown on maps of that date. At that time they were occupied by related families, generations of the Osborns. The TeeVan house has some characteristics which indicate it may be the older of the two, namely a massive chimney and an orientation to the compass rather than the road. But both houses originally shared an asymmetrical arrangement of door and window. Glassie observed this pattern of half houses world wide: it allows the family to add a balancing addition at a later date. And that is precisely what the Osborns, who were carpenters, seem to have done. In the case of the TeeVan house, they appear to have conjoined two buildings to accomplish the symmetrical floorplan. At Hidden Hollow, the older section is made of ax-hewn visible post and beam and oak or chestnut boards; the new additions have pine flooring and no visible posts. Hidden Hollow's center chimney is just that, with only openings for stove pipes. If it ever had a massive hearth, it was removed.

     To me, both houses were snug and comfortable, but perhaps living in them with a half or a dozen other people, as the Osborns, and later the Ingersolls, did in the 19th Century might have been a little too snug. As for Farmer Slack, he reminds me of the story that Lida Beckwith told of her husband saying her she was so slack, if he died first, she'd be in filth up to her waist. He did, and she wasn't!

     

House History

Hidden Hollow c 1982. Original center section with three windows and door.

     When I planned my fall trip to Sherman, CT, my goal was to examine the records in the Town Vaults to see if I could learn more about the families who lived here before mine. I had no idea that I would have the privilege of meeting Lida Beckwith's descendants, Ted Adams 1,2 and 3. Ted 2 had done a great deal of research on the Worden Family. More discoveries about another Hardscrabble Road family were to follow.

     The couple who bought the TeeVan house just up the road graciously invited me to dinner. We poured over a copy of an photo-album-house-diary that the Damrosches, Helen TeeVan's brother's family, had sent them when the bought the house. Then they told me that a descendant of the Ingersoll family had called, and gave me her address. I could hardly believe it; the Ingersolls sold the house more than 100 years ago, But there she was, living near Hartford. I spent an afternoon with her, and learned that she had done all the hard genealogical work, and knew what happened to the Ingersoll children and grandchildren. 

     Inspired by information these wonderful people provided me, far beyond my expectations for the trip,  I began to sort out the tangled web of Wills and Deeds, and absorb the world of Hardscrabble Road in the 19th Century. I literally must not see the forests that now surround these houses. The fear of forests in an ancient one, and in the case of these second growth wood lots, obscures the neighborly nature of the houses on Hardscrabble Road. Absent the trees, the houses are in sight of the others, and their adjoining fields contiguous. Moreover in 1850, just a mile's walk down the hill, was a gaggle of small industries, mill, tannery, harness shop and two blacksmiths. A mile and half north, on what's now a "ghost road," were school, shop and chapel. Less than two miles west, in New York State was another school and a store.

     I must also dispense with the idea that these stony fields were the only source of income for the residents. Farm they did, but the first documented occupants, the Osborns, had a shoe shop, and various members of the family were carpenters, sawyers and millers as well. In fact, the built history of the houses, with their additions, two to Hidden Hollow, and the conjoined nature of the TeeVan's house, was possibly the result of the Osborn's skills and their expanding families in the early 19th Century.

     Sometimes the houses seemed to serve as retirement homes, for elderly couples, each marrying for the second time, their chlidren living nest door. Connecticut changed its statutes to allow women to contract and hold property independent of their husbands in 1877. Two of the residents, Nancy Ingersoll and Jane Ludington Worden, were wealthy widows, who remarried after the change. In both cases, their real estate is sold to satisfy the claims of all heirs, not just their husband and his heirs.

     The largest of the landowners of the area was Joel Durga, who lived up what's now called Parker road, but was, according to Mrs. TeeVan's notes, called "Jayville Road," possibly because most of the Durga children had names starting with J: James, John, Joel. Although much of the land that he acquired remained in the family's hands into the 20th Century, the portion of their lands which was to make up my father's 20 odd acres had a strange history. It seems to have been the portion of Joel's son John Durga. John married in 1853 and had two children. By 1880 he was living alone; his wife and children living in Macon, Missouri. In 1897 he as declared an insane pauper by the Selectmen, and sent to the Connecticut Retreat for the Insane in Middletown. 6 months later, he was dead, leaving only his house, acreage, a pair of boots, a flynet for his horse, an Indian blanket an anvil and a plow. The real estate was sold by his estate to Lida Beckwith's father, John Henry Worden.

     Death, divorce, diapers. 

     

Another Man and His Horses

Mauweehoo Hill On the Left 

     If you can imagine Mauweehoo Hill as fields terraced by stone walls, you see it as it was in the early 1960s. At the top of the hill was a large field, and there, every summer weekend afternoon, Colvin Farley and the other adult men played polo. It was the children's job to ride his horses from the Timber Trails stables along Pepper Pond and Lake Mauweehoo to the field, and to cool the horses between chukkhas.

     Ward Moss was the only young man invited to play. Farley was impressed with Ward's horse skills, let him ride and train his horses. Ward also recalls Farley's  stableman, Bill Nardeen, a former Sargeant in the Calvary. Farley at one time played polo professionally.

     His family's money came from real estate development. In the early 20th Century, his father developed Westchester's tonier suburb, Scarsdale. His family are listed in the 1931 Westchester Social Register (Includes Greenwich), along with their college and club affiliations. In that era, wealthy suburban families might have a retreat further in the country. Buying up a clutch of former farms in 1930, Farley created Timber Trails, A Restricted Community, for such families. Cottages were built of stone and craftsman style beams. The former Diamon Durgy diary barn became the stables, a lake was created from Jenning's Pond, and a steep pasture outfitted with a tow-rope for skiing. Former farm roads were kept clear of brush for trail rides.

     Farley died before putting in place any strategy to preserve what he had so lovingly created. As Nick Paumgarten writes in The New Yorker, real estate sales are precipitated by the 3 D's, Death, Divorce and Diapers. Farley's death, previous divorce and his children by his ex-wife played their parts, but Paumgarten forgot the 2 L's, Lawyers and Lawsuits. The property had already became the subject of a much cited case, Plimpton v Mattakeunk Cabin Colony in 1934.

     I've looked at the deeds purchasers were required to sign in buying a house in Timber Trails, and they are certainly restrictive in nature. No social restriction is spelled out, but I think Farley was a snob, of the Anglophile variety. Northeastern Connecticut had been isolated for a 100 years from the wave of Southern European immigrants found in Connecticut's central valley and coastal manufacturing cities. If Farley didn't like to associate with non-WASPs, he no doubt twirled in his grave at what happened next. The lawyer, of Italian extraction, got it all and,  accustomed to Greenwich, Connecticut density, wanted to develop it. To Plimpton were added Timber Trails Corporation v Planning and Zoning in 1992, and Timber Trails Associates et al v Planning and Zoning in 2006. Massive development was forestalled, but the community as such was shattered.

     An aura of decay hovers over the place today, tennis courts ploughed under, docks removed. 100 years from now, will anyone remember the reservoir of resentment real estate created?

     

     

     

The Mysterious Walter Gordon Merritt

   The National Hat Factory, Danbury, CT

     I never met Walter Gordon Merritt, yet he looms large in my memory of Sherman, CT, almost like a bogeyman. As we approached Route 37 on Haviland Hollow Road, his house and tidy orchards were on the left, and the Gerow's dairy farm  on the right. His land faced Hidden Hollow across the brook. Somehow, my father conveyed to me did not much care for Walter Gordon Merritt, but then he didn't care for lawyers in general. I decided to learn more about this man.

     

     The rest of the world may have forgotten Walter Gordon Merritt, but people in the Great Hollow still remember him. Debbie Goldsmith, who lives in Minnie Barnum and Otis Durga's place on the old Haviland Hollow Road remembers him riding the many trails on his property with his dogs. Once Florence Gerow saw him on his white horse and mistook him for George Washington. Mrs. Beagle thinks he discovered a cure for the mercury poisoning of Danbury hatters. He was astonishingly generous to our neighbors, the TeeVans, presenting them with a house and 15 acres as a Christmas present. Helen TeeVan, an illustrator, gave him a map of his property, illuminated with resident birds.

     Walter Gordon Merritt's family owned a successful hat factory in Danbury; he was sent to Harvard Law School. Around 1902, Merritt wrote that the recently enacted Sherman Anti-Trust Law could be used against labor, by arguing that organizing workers for higher wages was restraint of free trade. When the Loewe Company wouldn't permit its factory to be organized by the United Hatters of North America, the Union organized a boycott of Loewe's hats. 

     

     Guided by Merritt, D.E. Loewe and Company sued the Union, claiming triple damages from the boycott. The Union members found their bank accounts attached and liens placed against their homes. The Supreme Court found in favor of Loewe. (The Union was more successful in obtaining an agreement to end the use of mercury in the hat making process; thereby ending the endemic "hatter's shakes.")

     My old friend Sam Showah used to say that Merritt got his money from the foreclosures of the hatter's homes. I imagine it was pocket change; he went onto a long career on the side of management in labor disputes. In 1921, he debated "The Open Shop" with the President of the International Seamen's Union in a broadway theatre; Henry Morgenthau presiding. Merritt was brilliant, an early 20th Century Harvard Law version of William F. Buckley. 

     In the late 1920s, he began buying up farmland at the southern end of the Oblong, on both sides of the border between New York and Connecticut. The valley lands were kept open, the hillsides grew back their forest cover, laced with bridle trails, his own private domain. As he grew older, he was concerned to preserve the thousands of acres he had assembled. He died in 1967, and is buried in the Gerow Cemetery. 

     Like Charlemagne's Holy Roman Empire, his fiefdom did not remain intact after his death. The New York State lands were taken for unpaid taxes and became a conservation area which bore his name for a few years. A modern domain builder, William Ziff, Jr. allegedly raided the land for granite boulders to place on his 1000+ acre property on Quaker Hill. On the Connecticut side, where Merritt savored his privacy, his isolation from the laboring masses, the Y.M.C.A. brings bus-loads of city school children.

     I wonder what will be the fate of Mr. Ziff's domain, 100 years from now?

     

     

     

Lake Mauwehoo, Timber Trails and Haviland Hollow Remembered

White House on Haviland Hollow Road, Lake Mauwehoo, Stone House at Timber Lake

     When I arrived at Vassar in 1964, I was delighted to find that one of my new classmates was Karen Thorsen, whom I had known in Sherman as Heidi. She still lives in Connecticut and made the journey to revisit her old haunts with me. After another great breakfast at The American Pie Company, we began with a visit to Lake Mauwehoo, which both of us remember as the heart of our summers. The polo fields we remembered at the top of Mauweehoo Hill are gone to houses. Then on to Timber Lake, and then Haviland Hollow Road, to see the houses she'd lived in.

     As I drove, we talked about our summer experiences. To my surprise, I learned that the still glamorous Karen, a documentary film-maker, felt an outsider in the Timber Trails Club. That, I suppose,  was the intention of a place which advertised itself as "Timber Trails-A Restricted Community," and whose pages of deed restrictions I had seen in the Sherman Town Records. I , too, felt an outsider. 

     Restricted from what? Timber Trails now seems rather like the palace in Poe's The Masque of the Red Death. Death can't be restricted, and what it doesn't take away, divorce and lawyers will. In any case, Timber Trails is now a piece of suburbia, placed remotely, on a hill above a eutrophic pond, with bad roads. 

Perennial Harvest

     Perennial Harvest is the title of a memoir by Philip Hillyer Smith, another of Sherman's writers. Thoreau like, he describes his experience living in a house, much like Hidden Hollow, but with no modernization. After emailing back and forth with his grandson, I determined the location of the long road to it, but alas, encountered the gate you see on the left.

     I continued on to my appointment at the Akin Free Library on Quaker Hill. There the librarian, Jim Manchachia, let me study the Merritt and Toffey Store ledgers. Sure enough I found that the Hidden Hollow families crossed the hilltops to trade there.

The final event of the day was a celebration of the 40th year of Sherman's Naromi Land Trust. Their President, Marge Josephson, had invited me and let my former Hidden Hollow next-door-neighbors know I would be there. It was great fun, although the only other person I recognized was an octogenarian, the last of the farm families. Naromi has worked at the complicated task of maintaining the rural nature of the town.

To my surprize, the food was from The Cookhouse in New Milford, a bar-b-que place I'd been longing to try. Once again, "Who knew?" There is great bar-b-que in Connecticut; probably the best ribs ever.

Testing the Literary Waters

     One beautiful October morning, I sat down with Gloria Thorne, President of the Sherman Historical Society, and Ann Price, Warren Wilson's grand-daughter. Ann grew up in Sherman, with its stories of Robber Rocks, and woodlands swallowing the remaining farms.

     I had asked if they would let me read them the draft of my Introduction to Hidden Hollow, a description of hearing the legends of the 1920s Bohemians from my father. Patiently, and with some laughter, they listened. Both added pieces of information, and made connections for me.

     They pointed me to the house pictured above, Lida and Burton Beckwith's, when they moved to Sherman, Center. This is the house that Lida's grandchildren and great grandchildren remember visiting. The delightful garden is the product of the current owner, a professional gardener, Robin Zitter. 

     Gloria invited me to give a reading in Sherman when my book is completed, and I promised to send her the results of my research on the families of Hidden Hollow. Ann and I planned a meeting for the next week, so that she could show me some of her mother's research notes. I once thought I would never resolve the mysteries of Hidden Hollow. I should have known that there is no substitute for field work!

     

The Town Clerk's Office is the Center of the Sherman Universe

Barbara Boone

     

     As I studied the documents in the Vault it seemed that the whole world was passing through the Town Clerk's Office. It's true that it was two weeks before the election, and many, many folk came in to pick up absentee ballots, but serendipity abounded.

     I heard someone speak of Barbara Boone, a name I hadn't heard in 20 years. There she was, an old friend from summers long ago. Much to my delight she told me wonderful stories of two of my favorite characters from the era of Hart Crane at Robber Rocks: Eva Parker and Marguerite Agniel. Barbara remembered both of them from their visits to her family's house on Timber Lake, over the hills and through the woods from Hidden Hollow. Eva, the adopted daughter of the Adams family on Hardscrabble Road, did a man's chores. Marguerite, the famed "Body Beautiful," or Marguerite-Wash-Your-Feet to Barbara, was famous for being photographed in the nude, and depicted in Slater Brown's The Burning Wheel as overly fond of young country men.

     One of Sherman's contemporary authors, Michael Quadland, also visited. I realized that he has restored one of the landmark houses of the literary era of the 1920s and 30s, the house that belonged to Guggenheim Foundation Director Henry Allen Moe, and before that to Charlie Jennings, immortalized in Slater Brown's novel as the cider drinking pig butcher. Michael invited me to see the house and its lovely pond, a special treat in its fall setting. His novel, 

That Was Then, is set in a small Connecticut town like Sherman.

Into the Lake and the Town Vaults

Squantz Pond from Candlelight Cottages

     In October of 2007, I spent some steamy October days in New Haven, Ct, visiting the Beinecke Library to look at my father's papers there. This year I determined to take advantage of Global Warming and swim in Connecticut's wonderful lakes. One morning, as I drove to Squantz Pond State Park from the motel, I noticed a sign for lakeside cottages. I decided they should be my home for the next two weeks. I called and Shirley answered and all was arranged, no credit card, word of mouth. After I arrived, Shirley brought sheets, towels, a heater and a cashmere "house sweater." Now that is Yankee Hospitality!

     

     After settling in and swimming across Squantz Pond and back, I drove the few miles to breakfast at The American Pie Company. Who knew that great biscuits and gravy would come to Sherman? Then on to the Town Clerk's Office. I wanted to see if I could learn anything more about the chain of ownership of Hidden Hollow and the surrounding properties. Vassar College teaches you there's nothing like original sources, and soon I was immersed in the grantor and grantee indexes and deed books. Sherman used to be the northern section of New Fairfield; records here begin with the separation in 1802. A telephone call with my farm banker sister, Molly, alerted me to the truth that I was going about this backward: tax maps and recent deeds should have a chain of possession that would save time. 

    

     Sorting out the descriptions of real estate, with their piles of stones, white oak and soft maple as corners will take months, but their was immediate satisfaction in the wills inventories of estates Probate Records. As best I can determine, Lida's father acquired Hidden Hollow from the Estate of John Durgy. According to the Probate Records, John had been declared an insane pauper and committed to the Insane Retreat at Middletown just six months before his death. The probate of his estate indicates that at his death his wife and children were living in Missouri, and the Census confirmed this. 

     Lida's husband, Burton Beckwith, acquired the house and 90 acres next door when first John Reynolds Worden and then his widow, Jane Ludington Worden died. Her heirs were her children by her first marriage, and the land had to be sold to satisfy their claims. 

     In my training as an anthropologist, I studied the system of inheritance of Jamaica, where each heir receives title to a portion of land. The land stays in the family, but is broken into smaller and smaller pieces. In Hidden Hollow, the properties remained more or less intact, and insanity and death broke the family ties to the land. 

    

     

     

      

    

Lida Beckwith's Husband, Father, Daughter and Grandson

Photographer Unknown

     Soon after my afternoon with Ted Adams 2 and 3, I had breakfast with Ted Adams 1, and he kindly allowed me to view his mother's scrap book, and make copies of these photographs. Ted I is retired from his career as New Milford's Sheriff. To say that I never expected to meet him is an understatement; I wanted to know more about Lida, but I could not have imagined this find. Ted's mother, Mary Beckwith, appears only in one census, because she married Ted and her father, Burton Beckwith. These photographs show Hidden Hollow in the midst of the Depression. The front porch and clear view up the hillside were gone by 1938.

     I contemplate these photographs and puzzle out how they explain Hidden Hollow's history. It seems to me that the sale of Hidden Hollow was almost over-determined. Lida and Burton had no sons, and their daughter's husbands had careers outside of farming. In any case, erosion of the hillside and market conditions made this farm not profitable. When both her father and Burton died, Lida was living in Sherman Center. She was making a home there for her second child, Frances, and probably needed cash more than she needed land, although she was generous in extending a mortgage to my father for a third of the selling price.

A Visit with Robert Cowley

    One of Rob's collections of alternative history. 

     I haven't lived in Sherman, CT in about 30 years, and yet old friends and new were generous with their time and hospitality. An example is the writer, editor and historian Rob Cowley. I had telephoned Rob to see if he recalled my father the old days in New York and Sherman, and he did. He invited me to visit him in Sherman after his morning's writing was complete.       

     Bearing the traditional Connecticut social calling treat of a strawberry-rhubarb pie from Sherman's own wonderful American Pie Restaurant, I visited with him for several hours. Rob told me a story about my father that was news to me: After his return from North Africa, Croswell Bowen spoke about the war at Sherman's old town hall. Afterwards, Rob's father, the writer and critic, Malcolm Cowley introduced him to dad. He also worked with Dad on a profile of Charles Revson, the founder of Revlon Cosmetics. There is a threatening letter from Revson's lawyer in Dad's papers at the Beinecke Library at Yale, and I remember, as a make-up aspiring teenager, being fascinated by this particular profile. 

     Rob is currently at work on a new book of military history. He loaned me a copy of fellow Sherman author James Lincoln Collier's  history of the 1920s Bohemians of Robber Rocks (Hart Crane, the Slater Browns, Malcolm and Peggy Cowley, the Josephsons), and when I returned it, gave me another about incorporating suspense into narrative. I felt privileged to be talking about writing with a real writer.

Borders and Boundaries

     Hidden Hollow is located in the southwest corner of Sherman, CT. The town border with New Fairfield, and the State border with the New York towns of Patterson in Putnam County and Pawling in Dutchess County are all close by. The theme of my book is that this geography influenced those who lived there from the beginning of settlement in the 18th Century. Documenting this required visits to all four town's record offices. 

     The Putnam County Courier columns showed the extent of the neighborhood across the towns and states in the 20th Century, so I visited to the Putnam County Historian's Office, in Brewster, NY, to read the file of materials collected by Minnie Barnum Durga. She was the wife of mustachioed Otis Durga of the photograph with John Henry Worden, from my previous post, and is often mentioned in the Maple Glenn column, visiting friends, or hosting a Chruch gathering. She is a figure of delight for historians and genealogists, living well into the 20th Century, but collecting materials that documented an earlier time. She was an oral historian before the term had been invented, collecting reminisces of the oldest residents. I put her down as a candidate for the author of the Maple Glenn column.

The Historian's Office held other treasures: Reg White and his group of knowledgeable volunteers. Reg told me of a presentation that would be made at the Patterson Historical Society about Haviland Hollow Road, which has long been the route through the hills, connecting Danbury, Ct with New York State. One of the presenters, Judy Kelly-Moberg spoke with me at length, and I looked forward to the presentation. Indeed, it fostered more than I imagined. 

http://www.putnamcountyny.com/historian/

     

     

     

Old Friends

Marion and Dan Gerow, Dan's sister Emily Gerow and her husband, 1943.

photograph by Croswell Bowen. 

      My father described Marion and Dan Gerow as the Salt of the Earth. Last summer, my sister Molly and I visited them, and heard how my father photographed their double wedding. On this visit I heard how he  wondered onto their dairy farm and introduced himself. Dan's father invited him in. Marion says " It was his Irish charm. We loved him. Everybody loved Croswell." He loved them, too. He's buried in their Quaker Cemetery across the valley, looking down on their farm. My sister Molly and I feel the same.

     I have a surprise for the Gerows. I've brought copies of the old "Maple Glenn" column that speak of Dan and his sister Emily's youth. Dan and Marion had never seen them, and their knowledge of the history of the area is vast. The mystery of who wrote them deepens. Over the next few days, Dan puzzles it out, talks to Emily in Albuquerque, NM, and finally announces that it must have been Mrs. B. , over in Putnam County, who shared a party line with her Great Hollow neighbors, and Dan suspects, listened in. The place name, "Maple Glenn," remains unsolved. 

     The Gerow's farm has been in their family for many generations. When I contemplate "Nutmeggers," as Connecticut folk are sometimes called, who stayed, and did not yield to the lure of Western land, the Gerows seem an obvious example. I will learn that it is not so simple.