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.