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?