USA > Connecticut > Fairfield County > New Canaan > Readings in New Canaan history > Part 23
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Dr. Rockwell adds of this substantial farmer, "Besides being jolly, he was jolly fat." Between the two services he often brought the family into his cousin Mrs. Rockwell's house, the academy next the church, to pick the sermon to pieces over a piece of pumpkin pie - a welcome recreation after a week of farming.
STRICT AND JOLLY COMSTOCKS
A contrasting figure to "jolly Sam Comstock" seems to have been his brother, Anthony, a school teacher. His was a regime of strict rules and perfect order, in a school opened each morning with prayer. Evidently heredity and education both contributed to the character of the junior Anthony Comstock, the far famed secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. Described as a "broad-
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shouldered man with mutton-chop whiskers," he himself credited the church with his accomplishments. At the one hundred and fif- tieth anniversary of the Congregational Church in 1883, as one of the speakers of the day, he uttered a solemn warning against the evils which endangered the rising generation, adding that he had tried to do his duty in the line marked out for him, and that if he had done aught to benefit humanity it was due to his early teaching as received in the church. The church might hesitate to shoulder responsibility for the accomplishment of which this old-school reformer boasted in later life: that he had sent enough people to jail to fill a train of sixty-one cars.
DR. SAMUEL NOYES
At the end of the first quarter of the century the oldest and best known member of the profession was Dr. Samuel S. Noyes, a familiar figure jogging around town in a most peculiar vehicle, a sort of buggy with old-style springs and a leather top rounded like a scoop, yet not really a buggy or any known variety of carriage, for the good doctor, too often delayed by the necessity of giving a "lift" to his acquaint- ances, had had this conveyance built to hold himself alone. He sold the original to a patient who must have had a similar taste for solitary drives, but had another built like it, which was for many years kept by the family as a relic, but which went to pieces long ago. Some- times, however, the doctor "straddled the old white horse," and with his saddlebags of medicine started on his rounds.
The old Noyes home (the Guion House), on Park Street, still known by that name, was in those days surrounded by farms and apple orchards extending over to the present site of Weed & Duryea's lumber yard. The lot to the north was a long steep hill where the boys were allowed to slide in winter, uninterrupted by a railroad or a Railroad Avenue. In summer, the apple trees, grape vines and pas- tured cows made the place look like the home of a gentleman-farmer rather than that of a doctor, an impression carried out by the immacu- late and fragrant dairy where his two maiden daughters, Elizabeth and Julia, presided over the milk cans.
HOMEOPATHY HERE
This doctor of the old school was of course contemptuous of the new school of Homeopathy. Its only representative in town in the
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early years was Theodore Roberts, who lived in the house on Cherry Street which now belongs to Dr. Thomas Tunney. Seeing one day some of Dr. Robert's "sugar pills" in Monroe's Drug Store, Dr. Noyes swallowed a few, just to demonstrate his scorn of such remedies. This at least was a tribute to their harmlessness: the same cannot be said of Dr. Willard Parker's dictum in regard to Dr. Noyes. When the latter was ill, the great Dr. Parker, called in on the case, was asked "Do you think you can save him?" "Yes," replied Dr. Parker, "if I can keep him from taking his own medicine."
To this same Dr. Noyes belongs the credit of restoring to life an itinerant shoemaker named Bessom who had wandered into New Canaan after being jilted by a girl in Boston. Deciding to end his life he wrote a note, "I do all for love of you, Mary," swallowed an ounce of laudanum and "cut his throat from ear to ear." Someone, discover- ing Bessom dying in his room, sent for Dr. Noyes who discovered the letter and the empty bottle of laudanum. With a cryptic "we'll see about this", the Doctor pumped out the shoemaker's stomach, sewed up his throat and three weeks later sent him on his way to his Mary in Boston. Bessom however married another lass.
DR. LEWIS RICHARDS
The other town doctor of the early years was Dr. Lewis Richards, son of Jesse Richards, who owned a large farm at the head of Smith Ridge. "Captain Jess" was one of the most energetic men known in these parts, as he had need to be with over two hundred acres of Connecticut soil to till, and his son seems to have inherited his vigor- ous character. He lived on Haynes Ridge in the former home of Rev. Justus Mitchell and Rev. William Bonney (the present Holmewood Inn Annex), for after 1831 the parsonage was, as we have seen, the present Ashwell house on Park Street. The doctor's house was described as an old frame minus paint, in the shade of many maples.
For nearly all his life he practiced in New Canaan, jogging around on horseback with his medicines in a pair of saddlebags which his great granddaughter, Mrs. Michael Lipman, has presented to the New Canaan Historical Society.
This doctor of the old school is described as "a sincere friend of the poor - a good doctor and of sound judgment." With a character so respected and a calling so indispensable the doctor could afford to have some eccentricities. His voice was at times husky and rasping
LLOYDS NECK.
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MATINICOCK POINT. S
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LONE TREE.
D PUTNAM BRINLEY. A.N.A.
THE LONE TREE - still standing on Lone Tree Hill (Brushy Ridge), with a magnificent view of the Sound. It was a famous landmark widely visible when farm fields rather than trees covered the ridges.
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and his manner, to say the least, uncompromising. To be late to church is a doctor's privilege, but Dr. Richards would march all the way up the aisle to the "Amen pews" in his heavy riding boots, no matter how late, stand there long enough to take a good look at the minister with his one good eye, and if he chanced to be a stranger whose appearance he didn't care for he would turn around and stump out again.
A story told by Mr. H. G. Benedict shows that his patients had at least nothing to fear from the doctor's medicines. "I remember," he writes, "being one day in the home of Uncle John Benedict, who lived in the house that stood for many years on the site of the Public Library. An old enfeebled gentleman who had a room there was a patient of Dr. Richards. He called to leave some medicine and I saw him open the old saddlebag, take out two or three small parcels wrap- ped in grocery-store brown paper. He bit off a piece from two of the lumps and tasted them in deep thought, he having only one good eye, to see which was the right one to give as a dose." It may have cured; at any rate it did not kill.
OTHER ST. JOHNS
To other branches of the St. John family belong several pictur- esque careers. Another Samuel St. John attained the enviable title of "Samuel the Benefactor." He was the seventh son in a family of eleven children of Matthias and Naomi Weed St. John, the mother being a daughter of Abraham and Naomi Pond Weed. Their home on the south side of "ye upper Canoe Hill," was later known as the Deacon Ferris place and the hill renamed Ferris Hill after the Deacon's family. Dying in 1844, he established a trust fund to pro- vide for the education at Yale of any St. John who wanted a college education. The fund has since been divided and is no longer operative. His elder brother, Colonel Enoch, the fifth son, lived in the Hanford Davenport house on Oenoke Avenue, now Dr. Nathan Green's, and the sixth son was Benjamin who owned the present Russell house (1949, F. A. Van Loan) in Silvermine. Another brother was Nathan, father of Newton St. John.
"HANDSOMEST HAND"
Newton St. John was educated in the little red schoolhouse on Park Street and his grounding in the three R's must have been thorough, for we hear of him next as employed in a bank in New
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York, where he "wrote the handsomest hand of any bank clerk" in the city. He went later to Mobile, Alabama, and there made a for- tune in cotton. Leaving for Europe just before the Civil War, he returned at the end to find his fortune wrecked. He was able, how- ever, to pay off every dollar of indebtedness of the firm. It was his daughter, Mrs. L. Dade Alexander, who built the house on Wahack- me Road now owned by Mr. Harold Phelps Stokes (1949, Arthur Szyk).
FIRST LIFE INSURANCE
Still another Samuel of a later generation, the son of another Enoch, is of interest to New Canaan and the whole insurance world - it was for him that the first life insurance policy in the United States was issued, on the life of another man, whose name, however, is not known. He it was who furnished Texas with the last fifty thousand dollars needed to accomplish her independence from Mexico. He advanced to that territory a little steam transport loaded with gro- ceries, clothing and other supplies, including powder, shot and mus- kets for the army besides five thousand dollars in cash to pay the soldiers. This was significant as being the last aid Texas received.
Furthermore, Miss Julia Noyes told Mrs. Demerritt that she re- membered seeing at the house of Benjamin St. John's daughter, Mary Naomi, (now Miss T. G. Russel's house in Silvermine) (1949, F. A. Van Loan) on an antique mahogany sideboard, a gold tea service presented to Samuel St. John by the citizens of San Francisco for his distinguished services in aiding Texas.
"UNCLE JOE" SCOFIELD
Across the green from the David and William St. John houses lived a neighbor whose life span covered the whole century-long period of New Canaan - "Uncle Joe" Scofield, as many still remem- ber him, who lived in the house next below the Episcopal Church. He was for many years a clerk in the Jennings and Hall store (1949, Rosen's Store) where the Village Hall now stands. He was "a very small man, but with lots of grit" - a description which fits the anec- dote we have of an encounter at one of those stormy village district school meetings, where we are told "trouble was always expected." When, on this occasion, a large man named George Foote got into a dispute with someone, "Uncle Joe stepped up in front of him and smote him over the head with his umbrella." "It made me think,"
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adds the writer, "of a bantam rooster facing a tom turkey." Joseph Scofield lived to participate in the festive parade in 1901 celebrating the rooth anniversary of the incorporation of New Canaan.
IO TO 20 APPLES A DAY
Next below, in the old Fayerweather house, now owned by Mr. Bridgman, (1949, Ewing) lived Comstock, who died in 1902 at the great age of ninety-nine. He was an uncle of Dr. Alphonso David Rockwell, whose "Rambling Recollections" furnished us with remi- niscences of his father's Church Hill Institute. Dr. Rockwell ascribes his uncle Seymour's longevity partly to his habit of eating ten to twenty apples a day.
His son Albert Comstock lived in the next house south, the present home of Mr. A. V. Bensen. Mrs. Cornelia Carter Comstock, his wife, was one of New Canaan's ablest and most public-spirited citizens. One of the nine daughters of Thomas Carter, son of that Ebenezer who had lived in New Canaan's oldest house, she was the organizer and first regent of the Hannah Benedict Chapter of the D. A. R. in 1894. She cooperated with her husband in organizing the New Canaan Historical Society and collecting a great deal of material about the early town history.
Another woman immortal in New Canaan annals was that "grand dame" of an earlier period, Miss Diana Richards, who lived not far from the Comstock farm on the road to Ridgefield. Her home is the house now occupied by Mr. Edward Langley, (1949, David Haw- kins) just north of the old Stephen Keeler place (now Dr. Wads- worth's house). Miss Diana was just 2 1 when New Canaan became a town, and lived to be 85. It was her father who drove the first "wagon" in town. She herself kept a school, and strange as may seem such an appurtenance to one of that calling, she owned a slave named Grace, who used to follow Miss Diana every Sunday to the Episco- pal Church. In later years she not only gave old Grace her freedom but built a little house for her on the road to the Poorhouse (Laurel Road) woods, remnants of the foundations of which are still visible.
TEMPERANCE LEADER
The testimony that she was "a remarkable woman of strong charac- ter and exercised great influence in the town" is born out by an example of her temperance activities. She once expostulated with two
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of the principal men in town because they sold liquor in their stores, and succeeded in extracting a promise from one of them to discon- tinue the practice. In this case virtue must have been the reward - for the other man.
DR. WILLARD PARKER
It was through his friendship with Professor Samuel St. John that Dr. Willard Parker chose New Canaan as his place of residence. He sent his son to be educated at the "Academy Junior" on Park Street, of which the Rev. Mr. Wyckoff was then the principal. Then coming here to live about the time of the Civil War, he purchased very near his friend a home - the former Church Hill Institute, now the Con- gregational parsonage, together with a large tract of land on Oenoke Avenue. His alterations, as already related, included the moving of the central or connecting part of the building, over to form his lodge, now the Episcopal Rectory.
OUTSTANDING SURGEON
Thus was installed in our little town, New York's most noted surgeon - the originator of the operation for appendicitis, the founder of the Willard Parker Hospital for Contagious Diseases, the first of its kind, which is now a part of Bellevue Hospital.
Willard Parker, Junior, also a doctor, built the home (recently torn down) far back from Oenoke Avenue behind the land where the Greenleaf residence now stands. His local fame was largely dependent on his fine horses and smart tallyhos.
The elder Dr. Parker was the first, Dr. Edward Lambert the second in a succession of distinguished New York physicians who have selected New Canaan or the surrounding ridges for their sum- mer or year-round residences.
DR. LAMBERT BUILDS
Dr. Lambert, coming here in the eighties, built a summer home on Oenoke Avenue (the present Hampton Inn). At the end of his life he was the head medical examiner of the New York Life Insurance Company. His large family included three sons who have followed in the footsteps of their father by becoming themselves distinguished physicians: Dr. Samuel W. Lambert, New York heart specialist; Dr. Alexander Lambert, Theodore Roosevelt's doctor, who accom-
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panied him on his western trip and attended him while he was Presi- dent; and Dr. Adrian Lambert, one-eyed surgeon.
Dr. Lambert, senior, was greatly beloved here especially for his keen interest in the health of the town and his charitable services to those who could not afford to pay. The breadth of his interest is indi- cated by the fact that he was the founder of the Country Club of New Canaan and it is fitting that the road leading to the grounds should bear his name.
REAL RACES FOR TRAIN
In those days when the medical profession had progressed beyond horse-back and saddle bags, but before the roads were given over to motor travel, the two eminent doctors, driving their carriages to Darien to catch the New York train, occasionally staged a race along South Avenue.
JOHN ROGERS, SCULPTOR
John Rogers, the sculptor, one of New Canaan's most eminent resi- dents, had his home near Parker's on Oenoke Avenue (1949, home of his children, Miss Katherine and Mr. Derby Rogers). Coming to New Canaan in 1868, he first built his studio and barn, finishing the house in 1878.
The Rogers groups done in plaster were to be seen in nearly every parlor in the country in the nineteenth century. Collections of these groups have been made by museums, one being in the Essex Museum at Salem, Mass., where he was born. Mr. Rogers was brought up in Boston, working later for seven years in a machine shop in Man- chester, N. H. Then going west for a few years, he finally came to New York when he was about thirty years old.
The seated statue of Lincoln by Rogers is well known throughout the country. Exhibited at the Columbian Exposition in 1893, Mr. Rogers afterwards presented it to the City of Manchester, N. H., where the G. A. R. had it cast in bronze.
Mr. and Mrs. Rogers had two daughters and five sons, all of the latter rowing on Yale crews, Dr. John Rogers, New York thyroid specialist and surgeon, being captain of the famous crew of '88. The other sons are Charles, Derby, Alec, and David.
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CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION
New Canaan celebrated the culmination of the century which we have traced in this history with an elaborate four-day celebration lasting from June 16 through June 19 in 1901. A third of a' century has elapsed since that celebration but many of the people who fig- ured in the hundredth anniversary of the incorporation of New Canaan, are prominent in the town today. Some brief resume of the celebration should be of interest to both the participants and those who know them now.
On Sunday, June sixteenth, the first day of the celebration, a union service was held in the morning in the Congregational Church, with the local pastors, Rev. Dr. R. H. Neide, of St. Mark's; Rev. Ed- ward Bell of the Baptist Church; Rev. Dr. J. Howard Hoyt, of the Congregational Church; Rev. B. C. Pillsbury, of the Methodist Epis- copal Church taking part. Father Byrne gave an historical address at the morning service at St. Aloysius Church then located on Forest Street. Music for the union service was sung by a grand chorus trained by Mr. H. R. Humphries, leader of the New York Banks Glee Club, whose summer home was the present Snow house on Canoe Hill Road.
With all the Sunday Schools represented, 600 children paraded in the afternoon led by their respective teachers. The latter included Frank Gleason, salesman for H. B. Rogers & Co., who now lives in Corpus Christi, Texas, superintendent of the Congregational Sun- day School, and his assistant, Edward A. Burdett. Mr. Burdett was then in partnership with A. M. Doremus in the dry goods business on Main Street which Mr. Burdett conducted on the same site until two years ago. They had bought out the business run by Raymond and Sutton, Mr. Sutton now being warden of the Borough ..
LEADERS IN PARADE
Henry S. Curtis, who lived in the L. P. Frothingham house on St. John Place and was a cousin of the Ernest Green's on Carter Street, was head of St. Mark's Sunday School with William F. Weed, a partner in Weed & Duryea, coal dealers, as assistant superintendent. Charles L. Hall, who with his brother Russell, were the only under- takers in New Canaan, having a furniture store and funeral estab-
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lishment on the site of Lipman's store on Main Street, headed the Methodist delegation, with Frank L. Comstock, the Warden of the Borough, now assistant to the tax collector, Alec McKendrick, as his assistant. Leading the Roman Catholic children was John E .Hersam, present editor of the New Canaan Advertiser, then "comp" on the Messenger, with Harry Kelley, the assistant superintendent. Mr. Kelley, then working for Stephen Hoyt's Nursery, is now clerk of the school board, chairman of the Park Commission, director of the Fairfield County Planning Association, former Democratic town chairman and onetime postmaster for New Canaan. S. B. Walkley and C. J. Prescott headed the Silvermine Sunday School while Sivori Selleck, the basket manufacturer and Stanley D. Ogden, whose shop is at the head of Oenoke Ridge at the Pound Ridge Road, led the Selleck's Corners group.
ANNIVERSARY SPEAKERS
The parade ended at the Congregational Church where Henry B. Rogers, the clothing manufacturer, who had been superintendent of the Sunday School for thirty years presided at the meeting. His- torical sketches of the Sunday Schools were read, Benjamin Mead, Jr., now a prominent Stamford lawyer, speaking for the Congregational Church, Stephen Keeler, Jr., now the Bishop of Minnesota spoke for St. Mark's; Chester Nichols, whose father owned the Nichols Opera House, the present Village Hall, for the Methodist Church, Miss Sadie Cody, niece of William Conklin, superintendent for Mr. John R. Downey, who owned the Fischer's house on Brushy Ridge Road, for St. Aloysius, and John A. Weed, for the Baptist Church which was later converted into the Masonic Temple. This John Weed ran a grocery store on the site of the New Canaan Fish Market, the . other John Weed was the Borough's night watchman, a big man upon whom Borough residents depended to quell their slightest fears. He was wounded a few years later in the attempted robbery at the Post Office when it was in the Raymond Building.
SCHOOL CELEBRATION
Monday was the day of the celebration devoted to the schools and school children and opened with the welcome accorded the band from the Connecticut School for Boys at Meriden. Twenty-two boys
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from the reform school came to New Canaan for the day at the invitation of Hon. B. P. Mead, president of the school board, then serving the first of two terms as state comptroller. First town clerk, then first selectman for seven years, Mr. Mead had been New Canaan's representative for two terms, state senator for two terms and state auditor.
On his school committee of 1901 were John F. Bliss, whose home was on the site of the present Post Office; George F. Lockwood, then treasurer of the New Canaan Savings Bank later to be president of the first National Bank and Trust Company; Dr. C. H. Scoville, physician who lived in the Schweppe house on north Main Street; Cornelius G. Taylor, who lived at the foot of Weed Street in Tal- madge Hill; B. F. Hoyt, a book-keeper in the Rogers Clothing firm; and Henry Kelley, now clerk of the school board.
CADETS MEET BAND
The New Canaan Cadet Corps met the boys at the 1 1 : 15 train and then marched to the house of Mrs. Dr. Willard Parker, Jr., who pre- sented them with a blue silk flag entrusted to Corporal George E. Kellogg, Jr., now a New York electrical merchant, to carry in the parade. E. A. Burdett, the drygoods merchant, was captain of the cadet corps which trained on Railroad Avenue and enlivened the winter months with frequent plays at the Nichols Opera House. The Meriden Boys were presented with flag canes by Dr. Scoville and had their picture taken marching along Main Street by F. C. Benger, who ran a shoe store where Murphy's Five and Ten now stands.
With their new flag, the Cadets marched to the green where services were presided over by Mr. Mead. The morning's speakers were: the Rev. George S. Pine, Dr. Neide's predecessor at St. Mark's, Mrs. Parker, Mrs. Neide, Mrs. Daisy Fitzhugh Ayres, daughter-in- law of Mrs. E. F. Ayres whose school was on Seminary Street, Rev. J. Howard Hoyt and Anthony Comstock, the vice-crusader, a son of New Canaan.
1901 SCHOOL COMMENCEMENT
During the afternoon there was an exhibit of school work at the opera house and in the evening the annual commencement exercises of Center School were held there. Henry W. Saxe, now superintend- ent emeritus of New Canaan Schools, was then principal of Center
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School. The members of the graduating class included the following who had a part in the exercises: Stanley C. Bartram, of Talmadge Hill; an officer in the Diamond Ice Company, Stamford; Margaret L. Henry, class historian, now Mrs. Philip Bisbee, of Vermont; Les- ter B. Scofield, who lives now in Glenbrook and is connected with a New York bank. He afterwards married his classmate, Annie Brower; Julia Lahey, now Mrs. Horace Johnson, of Hoyt Street; Clarence Arnold, at present a photographer in Norwalk; Clifton Jelliff, who lived and died at the Jelliff homestead in Talmadge Hill; Harold H. Mead, New Canaan contractor; John E. Seeley, class pro- phet, now living in Stamford; Helen Dayton, now Mrs. William Bryans of Hastings-on-Hudson; and Sadie Cody, mentioned above.
TEN THOUSAND SPECTATORS
The big day of the celebration came on Tuesday, June 18, when 4,500 tickets were sold on the New Canaan Railroad and people came in from all the outlying districts until there were nearly 10,000 spec- tators when the parade began. Railroad Avenue and Main Street were spanned at intervals by strings of tri-colored bunting and near the intersection was an arch of laurel with "welcome" on it in big gold letters. All the stores and many of the residences were decorated for the day, the fire house being hidden behind red, white and blue streamers. The first firehouse stood on Forest Street next door to Raymond & Brant's carriage and blacksmith shop, where First Select- man George E. Raymond, of Seminary Street, was a partner. Across the street from Bristows was Gilbert Stevens' livery stable which supplied horses for the fire trucks. Mr. Stevens' father, Franklin Stevens, was running the livery stable which stood in those days on the site of the present Stevens garage and taxi company. On the corner of East Avenue, where Johnson's garage is now, was John- son's Carriage Works, run by three brothers, Henry, Elias and George, the last being the father of Horace and Herbert, the present owners, and Howard.
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