Remembering Strickland Road - Celebrating America's 250th

 

The Waring House, home of Harry Lounsbury, circa 1930. Courtesy of Greenwich Historical Society

By Mary A. Jacobson

Lincoln Steffens, a summer resident of Cos Cob in the early twentieth century, described Cos Cob in his book The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens as “a little old fishing village strung along one side of one long street facing Cos Cob Harbor… It was a paintable spot frequented by artists who worked, painters who actually painted… by writers who wrote… by editors and publishers. It was an ‘art colony.’ We talked art.”

Harry Lounsbury was raised in Cos Cob, in the Waring House at 30 Strickland Road, built by Captain James Waring in 1749. The home was purchased by his grandparents, Frank and Kate Livingston Seymour, in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Their daughter and Harry’s mother, Margaret Seymour Lounsbury, returned to live there with her infant Harry in 1918, after the unfortunate death of her husband from the Spanish flu. Harry was interviewed by OHP volunteer Gertrude Reinhart in 1975.

View of Lower Landing of Cos Cob with Toby’s Tavern on left and post office on right, circa 1900. Courtesy of Greenwich Historical Society.

As Harry related, “This was an art colony frequented by all types of intellectuals… writers, poets, artists.” A significant home in the area was the Bush-Holley House, dating from 1730, at 39 Strickland Road (now a centerpiece of the Greenwich Historical Society and a National Historic Landmark). A center of the Cos Cob Art Colony, it was operated “as a boarding house for artists and writers beginning in 1882 and was run by Constant Holley MacRae and her husband, Elmer Livingston MacRae… She always had ‘paying guests’… The house was very well known throughout the last century for the people who summered there… Willa Cather came here… Childe Hassam, the artist, stayed there.” Family lore included the story of Hassam’s painting of Harry’s mother as a child in front of the Waring house. “I guess she badgered the daylights out of him and finally he put her in the picture.”

As a young boy growing up in Cos Cob, Harry had vivid summertime memories of the iceman arriving in a horse-pulled wagon, lugging a 50-pound block of ice into the wooden refrigerator. “All the kids would gather around, and he would chop off some ice and hand it to us” – a treat for a child to savor on a hot summer’s day. Wintertime scenes included the delivery of milk by horse-drawn sleigh from Round Hill Farms dairy. The horse was very well trained. The milkman never used to have to tell him where to stop; he knew exactly what stops to make.”

The Great Depression of 1929 “hit us. My mother was a teacher, and my grandfather lost his job with the New York World.” In those difficult times, Harry remembered the kindnesses of Michael and Fanny Taylor, who owned the dry goods store located in the Hub, the small central shopping area of Cos Cob. “Mrs. Taylor could always find a piece of clothing in the back of the dry goods store that… she’d sell to my mother for twenty-six cents. She was that kind of person… the kind that couldn’t do enough for everybody else around them.”

Harry Lounsbury also recalled the summers he worked as a teen at Palmer Brothers Engines, Inc. on River Road. “I worked in the machine shop, chipping excess metal off of engine blocks when it came out of the foundry. I can remember they had unbelievable heat in that foundry.” Harry would report to work at seven in the morning, leaving at six o’clock at night. “I used to just get enough time to run home to the house around the pond and get a fast lunch, and right back again…The hours that they work today are not the hours they worked in the early thirties, I can assure you.” According to Harry, the Palmer engine factory “put out some of the finest marine engines for fishing boats that were ever built.”

 

In those days, the view on the water side of Strickland Road, “was nothing but salt marsh, wetlands; and there would be these long ramps set on pilings going out to deep water on the Mianus River. People would moor their boats and that’s where they’d spend their summer nights when it was hot.” Across the street from 43 Strickland Road, there was a coal yard “where the Thruway goes now… Big four-masted coal schooners would come up and moor along the wall.” As for Mill Pond, it “was always silted in. I can remember when it was a lot deeper than it is now, much deeper… It was deep enough so that tugboats were able to get up to the bridge with their barges… You could hear the drawbridge open up (the railroad bridge at that time) and pretty soon you’d hear the tugboat chugging up the river.”

Bush-Holley House, circa 1900. Courtesy of Greenwich Historical Society.

The surprising and destructive Hurricane of September 21, 1938, was devastating. “The hurricane hit here as the tide was rising, which couldn’t have been worse… The water was so high that it was coming over the railing of that bridge over there, just pouring like Niagara over that railing into the pond… We were completely marooned here for quite some time… The only way you could get to the Hub (business district) was by boat. All the stores were flooded out, trees gone.”

The Thruway construction of Interstate 95 occurred in the years 1956-1958. From Harry’s viewpoint, that project “just cut this place to pieces… A succession of houses right down the street are all gone now to make way for the Thruway… The other side of River Road has all changed since the Thruway went through.” Harry recounted one family’s house after another that was removed. Before the Thruway was built, “you’d always find people sitting on the stone wall dipping a hook when the tide was in or going out fishing and crabbing.” Family names of this tight community that Harry recalled included Brush, Ferris, Poucher, Kenyon, Funke, Lockwood, Geiser, Smith, Palmer, Kane, Booth, Sperco, Seitz, Chase, Burke, Hirschberg, Hatheway, and Warren, among others.

Harry Lounsbury was a proud member of the Greatest Generation who served his country during World War II. “I left town when I was twenty-one to go into the Army. I went in the day after Pearl Harbor… I put in five years, two years of it in the Pacific. I was an engineering officer in a bomb squadron in the Army Air Corps… From that time on, my life here in this part of town ended, because I never came back to the house (on Strickland Road). My grandfather died in 1942, and the house was sold.”

The Oral History Project is proud to present blogs derived from its collection of recorded interviews. Visit the website at glohistory.org. Interviews may also be read in their entirety or checked out at the main library. Our narrators’ recollections are personal and have not been subjected to factual scrutiny. Mary Jacobson serves as blog editor.

Daniel Barrett and the Art of Teaching - Celebrating America's 250th

by Mary A. Jacobson

ABOVE: Daniel Barrett and students collecting a plankton tow in Long Island Sound. Courtesy of Daniel Barrett.

 

What makes a good teacher? Every September, thoughts of school and books and teachers and assignments come to mind to people of all ages. Some are young and anticipatory of the beginning of a new year; others are older and nostalgic for teachers of a bygone time.

This September, it seems fitting to highlight an unforgettable science teacher of Greenwich High School, Daniel V. Barrett, who was interviewed by Oral History Project volunteer Marian Phillips in 2007. His love of his pupils and his dedication to teaching were apparent in his interview. In addition, his ability to make hard work and constant inquiry “fun” are a testament to his mastery of the art of teaching.

It was the year 1958 when Daniel Barrett came to the “old” Greenwich High School (now Town Hall) to apply for a science position. “That was an interesting experience.” Barrett was brought to Charlie Wilcox’s biology classroom by Andrew Bella, GHS principal, who said, “Charlie, here’s someone who’s interested in teaching at Greenwich High.” Wilcox asked Barrett what he was learning at the time; Barrett replied, “the female reproductive system.” Wilcox responded, “Well, teach it. Why don’t you tell the class all about it.” As the half-hour lesson concluded, the bell rang. Barrett recalled, “It was perfect timing. The kids left and Wilcox said, ‘Come with me.’ We went down to see Bella and he said, ‘Andy, hire him!’… It was an on-the-spot interview, and an experience under fire, and I was hired. I’ve never forgotten.” Thus began a career of thirty-eight years at GHS.

The fall of 1958 marked one year after Russia launched the first artificial Earth satellite, Sputnik, on October 4, 1957. It orbited for three months, circling the Earth 1,440 times. The successful launch of Sputnik sparked new efforts on the part of the United States to encourage the enrichment of science education with more novel approaches. Barrett was selected to test one of the new curriculums emphasizing ecology and field studies.

Barrett and Principal Bella formed a weekly early-morning breakfast seminar with about twenty highly motivated science students. Each week, noted scientists would come “talking about science and how you get into science.” Barrett also began a twice-weekly marine biology seminar. Ever the experimental teacher, Barrett recognized the importance of field study. “My whole concept had to do with hands-on, after you would study it from a cerebral point of view.” A favorite trip was to the Fulton Fish Market. “It was a whole experience of knowing about fish, and their requirements in the ocean… on how you sell fish and keep it fresh. Then we’d bring it back and how you prepare fish, and then you’d enjoy it.” It helped that Barrett had two ovens in his classroom.

“We needed equipment and we needed a little boat which, of course, wasn’t fitting into our budget.” An unknown community “angel” was happy to supply one. “I’ve never found out who the angel was.” However, that initial investment eventually led to the formation of the Educational Oceanographic Foundation in 1967, “a tax-exempt group that can raise money, allow people to donate, and support the marine program.” Donations included boats which could be used or sold for funds for equipment and scholarships in the marine-related sciences. In addition, “We’ve had speakers and we’ve helped the school take field trips.”

At one point, the science and physical education departments were able to procure a van which enabled Barrett to take students to Greenwich Point for field studies. “My lab at that time ended up at the Queen Anne Building (now the Floren Family Environmental Center).” The building was “an old civil defense tower where people used to look for airplanes during the war. So that became my lab to put equipment in.” The Educational Oceanographic Foundation helped by installing sinks and a heating element for the winter. “We would do studies in the water with hip boots and run in and warm up in the building.” After a few years, Barrett “was able to get permission to use the upper level of the Chimes Building. For a number of years that was our next lab.”

How, might you wonder, could a high school schedule enable the kind of laboratory experiences that Barrett provided? “In the 1970s, I was able to get my morning classes to meet for double periods, two hours at a time… because you can’t function under a forty-five minute class and do what I used to do… I had a van; I had a lab at the beach; and I had two hours. It took a while for the town and curriculum development to give me that.” On occasion, when studying beaches, sand structure, groins and jetties, longer field trips of a day or two were required. “We’d look at maybe six beaches. I’d go all the way down to Lighthouse Point at New Haven, Hammonassett Beach, beaches in Rhode Island, and what the towns in each beach were doing or could be doing.”

Students kept journals in which they analyzed what they had experienced.

Towards the end of each year, Barrett devised a project that required the removal of all the furniture from the classroom. “I would mark off big four-foot squares on the floor… and we would form teams. I would in a hat pick the teams. And each team had to design a beach community.” Then, probably to the dismay of the school custodians, buckets of sand would be brought in along with “little grasses. Everything in miniature. They had to build groins, jetties, boardwalks.” When the student teams were finished designing their beachfront communities and meeting the required criteria, “they would have to stand up, and we’d all gather around their community, and they have to defend it and, of course, everyone would argue and say, ‘Well, that wouldn’t work.’ And we’d go to the next community” and analyze that one. Barrett would videotape it. “I still have some of those videotapes.” Barrett was quick to confirm that “when we were all done, we put everything away, swept up the (linoleum) floor, and brought the furniture back in.”

To summarize his view of his profession, Barrett stated, “I loved teaching. I loved it. I had great students… In the school setting, I found I had lots of support to get out in the wild and do things. I’ve always felt hands-on, feeling, smelling, walking in a marsh, smelling the sulfur… That’s where my strength came, to get students to dig in. And touch it.”

The Oral History Project is proud to present blogs derived from its collection of recorded interviews. Visit the website at glohistory.org. Interviews may also be read in their entirety or checked out at the main library. Our narrator’s recollections are personal and have not been subjected to factual scrutiny. Mary Jacobson serves as blog editor.

Sleepy Cat Farm:A Garden for the Ages - Celebrating America's 250th

 

Garden views with a reflecting pool. Photo by Brian Jones. Courtesy of the Garden Conservancy.

By Mary A. Jacobson

The word “garden” is an understatement when used to describe Sleepy Cat Farm, a wondrous thirteen-and-a-half-acre delight in Greenwich. It is more of an experience, an enchanted setting, a cultivated landscape utopia.

What was the inspiration behind this horticultural gem? Pat Norcross, a volunteer with the Oral History Project, interviewed owner Fred Landman in 2024 to document the history of Sleepy Cat Farm. It all started in 1994 when Fred Landman bought a home on six acres on Clapboard Ridge Road in Greenwich. At that time, updating the house was his focus. “A wonderful house, brick Georgian house, and that sort of became fun to do, working with an architect, working with a decorator.”

As work continued, a landscape architect was engaged to help answer the question, “How does this house relate to the landscape?” In time, the vision of the property became the creation of a sense of harmony between the two. “I said, well, we’ve got this whole woodland area; we can do something there… And then we did the Golden Path with the Spirit Walk (a raised walkway made of Spanish cedar) through the Iris Garden, and it was great fun.” The Golden Path is a gold colored decomposed granite pathway, inspired by the Golden Path designed by landscape architect Russell Page in 1980 for PepsiCo’s one-hundred acre Donald M. Kendall Sculpture Gardens in Purchase, NY. The Golden Path at Sleepy Cat Farm leads the stroller to an adventure of discovery.

Serendipitously, four years later, a neighbor asked Landman, “Would you like to buy two (adjacent) acres?” And I said, “Sure… It was the excitement of what we could do.” This new, enlarged acreage resulted in “making a big vegetable garden, a walled vegetable garden and a big greenhouse… and then, we ended up building what we call the barn, which is a wonderful entertaining space. And the whole new vocabulary is French-Norman.” Visitors were often surprised to learn that the additions, which “were meant to look like they had been here forever,” were only four years old.

Part of Landman’s personal education for the design of his gardens came through his long-term association with Charles Stick, a renowned landscape architect, prized nationally for his work. “Whenever I’d go somewhere, he (Stick) said, ‘You know, you should see this garden, this garden, and this garden in this area.’” Landman has visited gardens in Italy, England, Ireland, France, China, and Japan, among others. The ones he appreciates the most “are the ones that draw you in. You get lost. Your sense of self has disappeared and you’re just in there.”

Landman views Sleepy Cat Farm as a series of rooms. “Some are rather formal with very clipped hedges. One has that undulating hornbeam hedge… and behind that, that’s an ilex hedge, which you can see crenulated. Those are adjacent rooms.” At last rendering, Landman could count eight different projects at Sleepy Cat Farm in which Stick had been engaged. “I’m not a gardener. I had no formal training, but I’ve spent thirty years listening carefully to some very good people… I listened and they listened.”

Landman regards his garden as a continuing creation. “Gardens are never done. They’re always evolving.” In 2012, when presented with the opportunity to acquire another three-and-a-half acres Landman created a limonaia, a controlled environment for lemon cultivation, where an abandoned storehouse had previously existed. Inspired by limonaias he had viewed in Italy, this rebuilt structure provided for a unique and architecturally distinct setting for Meyer lemon cultivation, as well as a place for quiet reflection.

What does Landman want others to experience as they stroll through his garden? “A sense of wonder. People say, ‘Every time I turn, you had something else for me to see.’ The pathway’s meant to draw you down… you hear the sound of water, but you don’t know where it’s coming from. As you come around the bend… there’s a grotto and a water-babbling brook that goes into a pond where Venus is looking at her reflection… It’s just sort of great fun.” Over thirty statuaries have been placed throughout the, now, thirteen-and-a-half-acre property. Landman recalled, “People always say, ‘Oh, I just don’t have a garden like this.’ And I say well, you don’t need a garden like this. Do something you really like, that pleases you aesthetically, and that’s your garden.”

Sleepy Cat Farm has a close affiliation with the Garden Conservancy, a non-profit organization dedicated to “preserving, sharing, and celebrating America’s gardens and diverse gardening traditions for the education and inspiration of the public.” Since 1995, the Open Days program of the Garden Conservancy has enabled thousands of private gardens across the country to be visited by the public. For approximately the past twenty years, Sleepy Cat Farm has participated in these scheduled open garden tour days. The most recent occurred on June 7; the next one is scheduled for August 29. As the most well-attended tour in the Garden Conservancy national garden visiting program, tickets for Sleepy Cat Farm are capped at 900 visitors per day.

In July 2026, the Garden Conservancy relocated its headquarters from Garrison, New York, to 4 Greenwich Office Park and a closer collaboration with the Sleepy Cat Farm Foundation. The goal of the Foundation is to endow Sleepy Cat Farm with sufficient funds to allow it to be maintained for many decades to come. It would remain private, open to Garden Conservancy tours and to other garden interest groups. When the main house on the property is no longer occupied, the plan is for it to transition into the headquarters of the Garden Conservancy, with continuing educational and cultural programs.

As Fred Landman says, “I want this to go on forever… I can’t think of a better organization to be here.”

The Oral History Project is proud to present blogs derived from its collection of recorded interviews as part of the Project’s celebration “America’s 250th|Greenwich: Greenwich History is American History.” Visit the website at glohistory.org. Interviews may also be read in their entirety or checked out at the main library. Our narrator’s recollections are personal and have not been subjected to factual scrutiny. Mary Jacobson serves as blog editor.

Chinese Pavilion surrounded by a koi pond. Photo by Kathy Landman. Courtesy of Sleepy Cat Farm.

Greenhouse and walled vegetable garden. Photo by Kathy Landman. Courtesy of Sleepy Cat Farm.

Beautifying Greenwich - Celebrating America's 250th

 By Mary A. Jacobson

A living flower flag – collaborative project by three garden clubs: Hortulus, Greenwich Garden Club, and Green Fingers Garden Club. Depicted as the Betsy Ross flag of 1776. On Flag Day, to reflect the Star-Spangled Banner flag of 1813. On July 4, it will depict our present flag. Photo by Christopher Shields. Courtesy of Greenwich Historical Society.

Greenwich is fortunate to have a number of local garden clubs and organizations whose membership contributes tirelessly to the beautification of our town. This year, in celebration of America’s | 250th Greenwich, three of them – Hortulus, Greenwich Garden Club, and Green Fingers Garden Club have collaborated in creating an American flag of flowers to be displayed beside the Bush-Holley House on the grounds of the Greenwich Historical Society. This patriotic floral display will reflect, from June to September, three versions of the flag which have been featured in our country’s history.

Riverside Garden Club turned to Putnam Cottage, also known as Knapp’s Tavern, for their unique contribution to our nation’s semi quincentennial. There, at the site of a former tavern that served lunch to George Washington and was later named in honor of General Israel Putnam of Revolutionary War fame, the Riverside Garden Club restored a colonial herb garden. Hops plants were discovered, possibly similar to those used to brew ale in Washington’s time. On June 7, it is anticipated that visitors will have the opportunity to taste the ale made from these hops, a contribution donated by Two Roads Brewery of Stamford.

This year, Greenwich Green and Clean is celebrating its fortieth anniversary enhancing the parks, streetscapes, and natural spaces of Greenwich. One of their most visible and welcome contributions has been to Greenwich Avenue with its seasonal hanging baskets that adorn lampposts throughout the year, fashioned and hung gratis by Sam Bridge Nursery and Greenhouses. This year, in celebration of America’s 250th, these iconic and well-loved baskets will be adorned with red, white, and blue plantings throughout the town.

While these examples are just “a drop in the bucket” of the many people who work in service of beautifying the town, the Oral History Project would like to highlight one of its earlier narrators, Gertrude duPont Howland, who focused her efforts on Greenwich Avenue when there were few trees which adorned it. Her almost “one-woman” effort, as a member of Green Fingers Garden Club in midcentury, helped to translate the Avenue to the leafy street it is today. Interviewed in 1987 by Oral History Project volunteer Margaret French, Howland described the “absolutely bare looking” condition of the Avenue of the 1940s.

According to Howland, the onslaught of Dutch elm disease had infected “the beautiful elm trees that used to be up and down the Avenue. (They) were being taken down one by one… They were cutting off the trunk as low as they could get it, and then cementing over the area, and that was it. Nothing new was being planted. And as one tree after another came down, there was nothing.”

Therein, began an eight-year crusade on the part of Howland, to bring trees back to Greenwich Avenue. With each step of seeming progress, another obstacle appeared, which only strengthened Gertrude Howland’s resolve. When informed that planting trees on the Avenue could disrupt electric, telephone, water, and/or gas utility services, she set about with volunteer help from the local engineering firm S. E. Minor to map out the utility lines from each building on the Avenue in order to record where the various utilities entered from the outside. However, that information only marked the beginning of an often-frustratingly long mission to get more trees planted on Greenwich Avenue.

Howland had to deal with many governmental and landlord concerns: namely, that tree roots would make the pavement uneven; that citizens might then fall and sue the town; that tree roots would break the water mains; that the flow of air to overhead apartments would be disrupted; that the owner of each building would need to give permission; that trees might disrupt window displays; that dropping leaves would become slippery when wet, and so on. It was not until Howland obtained the support of Mayer H. Cohen, then president of the local merchants’ association, that these concerns were mollified. “Somebody told us that if we could get him to let us plant trees in front of his buildings, it would make a great difference… Not only did he permit us to plant trees, he spoke to the others at some merchants’ meeting and, in no time at all, permissions were flowing in.” In addition, Joseph Dietrich, Tree Warden of Greenwich at that time, “was enthusiastic about the idea. And he agreed that Greenwich Avenue should have trees all up and down.”

According to Howland, “There were so many obstacles to overcome, and each time I thought it was the last hurdle. But, of course, it never was.” After eight years of efforts there was finally an official celebratory planting of pin oaks, with a gathering of garden club members, the press, and Joseph Dietrich to mark the occasion. Local garden club contributions and private donations helped “to keep it going.” In 1987, Green Fingers Garden Club awarded Howland with a citation that read, “But for her, the trees on Greenwich Avenue would not exist.”

The Oral History Project is proud to present blogs derived from its collection of recorded interviews as part of the Project’s celebration “America’s 250th |Greenwich: Greenwich History is American History.” Visit the website at glohistory.org. Interviews may also be read in their entirety or checked out at the main library. Our narrator’s recollections are personal and have not been subjected to factual scrutiny. Mary Jacobson serves as blog editor.

Tree replanting on Greenwich Avenue, circa 1950s. Photo by John Gotch. Courtesy of Greenwich Library local history collection.

Festive hanging baskets celebrating Greenwich 250th provided by Greenwich Green & Clean. Photo by Sally Davies. Courtesy of Greenwich Green & Clean.

On George Washington: Father of Our Country – Celebrating America’s 250th

by Mary A. Jacobson

Wyatt Bennett with a painting by Emanuel Leutze visualizing Washington Crossing the Delaware.
Photo by Anne W. Semmes

George Washington – patriot, soldier, president, Father of our Country – a man for the times who helped shape our country at a critical period in its history.

Wyatt Bennett has had a fascination with George Washington for fifty years. This year, at eighty-three years of age, he shared his knowledge and admiration of Washington with Mary Ellen LeBien of the Oral History Project, co-chair of the America 250th|Greenwich Community Partners Committee. Bennett was interviewed at Bennett Jewelers, his family store in Old Greenwich.

“Without Washington and without the French help that we got, it could very well have been an extended period before we achieved our freedom. Or it might never have occurred, and we might have had a situation like Canada has, where they peacefully separated from England, and there was no war to speak of… we just don’t know.”

According to Bennett, Washington “was a wonderful soldier in the Seven Years War (1756-1763), and the British were very haughty about how they treated colonials… probably that helped his decision to… become head of the Continental Army” in 1775. Washington, a Virginian, was considered a good choice. “A lot of the disruption that was occurring at this time, in the 1770s was in New England. So, the Second Continental Congress, I think, said, ‘Look, we have to get a Southern man in here who can do the job.’ And he was a very good choice.”

Washington did not experience only victorious outcomes in battles. “I think he might have been involved in seven battles during the Revolutionary War, five of which he lost.” According to Bennett, Washington was determined “to keep the army together... because, if the army dissolved, there would be nobody to oppose the British… That’s why many of those losses were more tactical retreats than anything. In 1776, he was chased across New Jersey into Philadelphia. And he just kept a step ahead of the British at that time, keeping the colonials together.”

At that point, as Bennett described, Washington made a brave and risky decision. He would have his troops cross the Delaware River in the middle of a brutal winter in a raging storm, and make the attack on Trenton, New Jersey. “The night was terrible. He lost a couple of his men through freezing to death. But during the battle, he lost nobody… Normally soldiers in the eighteenth century took a break in the winter and started fighting in the spring… Twenty-four hundred soldiers, I think, he put together to cross the Delaware.”

Once the garrison crossed the river, they then had to march nine miles to get to Trenton. Two supporting contingents of soldiers that were supposed to meet them were unable to, so “Washington had to do it on his own… They (the Hessians) were completely surprised by it (the attack). The Hessians were busy celebrating Christmas. This was the day after Christmas, actually the 26th … And he (Washington) took nine hundred prisoners and killed thirty or forty of them.” A week later, “he went up to Princeton and won a battle there also.” These battles in 1777 with exceptional outcomes were pivotal for the troops and the War effort which did not end until 1781 at the Battle of Yorktown, led by Washington with support from the Marquis de Lafayette and French army troops.

From 1781 “we had a set of rules that we were going to abide by (the Articles of Confederation)” but “the big thing at that time also was keeping the thirteen colonies together, not having them balkanize and each state fighting another state. It was very important to Washington… He believed in a strong federal government.” The drafting of our constitution was completed at the Constitutional Convention at Independence Hall in Philadelphia in 1787. “So, the representatives were sent back to the various states to get their approval… nine was the number you had to have to have full approval.”

In 1789, George Washington was elected president of the United States with unanimous support from each participating state. A national hero and favorite son of Virginia, the largest state at the time, he had been president of the Constitutional Convention and Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army. “I think he would have preferred not being president. He loved Mount Vernon and his mules and his crops and he would rather have done that as a private citizen, but he was highly respected and trusted… The things he decided to do on his own set precedents for many years to come… The fact that he was so highly respected made a big difference to how we got off to a fairly good start as a country.”

As to what Bennett thinks young people should know about Washington? “I think it varies depending on the age of the student…. Early on emphasizing patriotism is rather a good thing… and then work from there. As you get older, you become critical of what you’ve been told…. you have to be careful how you treat things that were not so good back then by our standards…. You have to look through the eyes of an eighteenth-century politician, when they were making their decisions, not through the eyes of a twenty-first century one… As I say, in the long run, I think our constitution is set up pretty well; it’s aspirational. We’re trying to make it better all the time, which is encouraging, I hope.”

A truly historic event for America 250th|Greenwich will occur at Greenwich Library on June 20. On that day, the George Washington Inaugural Bible will be displayed there from 11 a.m. until 3 p.m. This Bible was supplied to Washington when it was discovered that there was none for him to lay his hand upon as he was about to be sworn in as president in 1789. The Bible has been kept under guard at the Masonic Lodge in lower Manhattan; its safe keeping will continue to be monitored as it travels to Greenwich.

The Oral History Project is proud to present blogs derived from its collection of recorded interviews as part of the Project’s celebration of “America’s 250th|Greenwich – Greenwich History is American History.” The OHP is sponsored by Friends of Greenwich Library. Visit the website at glohistory.org. Interviews may also be read in their entirety or checked out at the main library. They are also available for purchase by contacting the OHP office. Our narrator’s recollections are personal and have not been subjected to factual scrutiny. Mary Jacobson serves as blog editor.

A plaque from 1932, located on exterior of Second Congregational Church, commemorating 143rd anniversary of day George Washington stopped to admire scenery from nearby Post Road in 1789. Photo by Anne W. Semmes.

 
A visualization entitled “Washington’s Crossing” on a Durham boat with men and cannons by Mort Kunstler, painted in 2011.
Photo by Anne W. Semmes.

Missy Wolfe: Greenwich Historian -- Celebrating America 250

 By Mary A. Jacobson

A 1649 Dutch Visscher map showing Greenwich (Groeobis) and Stamford (Stamfort). The misspelled Dutch name for Greenwich should be Groenwits. Greenwich was a Dutch territory, a part of New Netherlands for its first sixteen years. Courtesy of Missy Wolfe.

Historian: “a scholar who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events.” (Wikipedia)

What, one may wonder, are the qualities and influences which might propel a person to make the study of history a life’s passion? Curiosity? The joy of discovery? Perseverance? Inspiration?

Missy Wolfe, a Greenwich resident, is considered a preeminent Greenwich historian. In 2024, Oral History Project volunteer Caroline Atkins interviewed her to enlighten us about the person behind her work.

Missy Wolfe’s family moved to Greenwich from Louisville, Kentucky, when she was of middle-school age and was enrolled at Central Middle School. “I loved reading and always did; I love nonfiction and biography… I always found nonfiction far more fascinating than fiction because you can’t make this stuff up; it really happened. And that it really happened was intriguing to me.”

After receiving her undergraduate degree in economics and psychology at Indiana University, Wolfe joined her dad, who had a career in advertising, in developing a marketing strategy consulting firm. Their focus was on the concept of creativity, and how their uniquely developed materials could enable consumers of goods or services to create what they wanted to buy. “The creativity process we sold became very successful…Our clients, the companies, would then ask their manufacturers to create our recommendations and their advertising agency to relay our findings.” Missy credits that experience with developing her writing skills. “How do you take a large amount of information, sort it, organize it, structure it, make conclusions about it, and report it in a very efficient way?… So, I guess that really established my ability to organize a lot of data.”

Missy also credits several writers as being major influences on her. They include Antonia Fraser, “famous for her non-fiction histories of female European royalty and the geopolitical games they played and why;” Alison Weir, author of numerous historical biographies of British royalty and personages; and Barbara Tuchman, local author, historian, and Pulitzer Prize winner. “And those were my inspirations… I was always reading them.”

Over the next twelve or so intervening years, Missy obtained an MBA from Columbia Business School, was employed by Ogilvy and Mathers, married, worked additional years with her dad, and had three children. Her husband, an orthopedic surgeon, was also an academic writer. “He taught me the importance of publishing in academic journals to present important discoveries… He is the one who pushed me to write my first academic article on the original Dutch jurisdiction of Greenwich… So that jelled with my love of nonfiction that requires a lot of citation. My great interest in genealogy links with this too.”

Missy’s hypothesis was that, in its first years, Greenwich was a Dutch territory, that it was not founded by the New Haven Colony. “It was a myth that we were English originally.” She presented her theory to Debra Mecky, then Executive Director and CEO of Greenwich Historical Society. Mecky’s response was, “’Well, do your research and present your proposition,’ which I did.”

Missy Wolfe portrait. Courtesy of Missy Wolfe.

Missy Wolfe’s research took her to the New York State Library in Albany, New York, which “has many of the earliest records concerning Greenwich because of this original (Dutch) jurisdiction; another reason we didn’t know our earliest history very well…These records sat on ships during the American Revolution. They put them on ships because they didn’t want the Dutch or British to burn them. . . getting moldier and wet. It’s amazing they survived.” Later, in the 1800s, the records were retrieved from The Hague, where they had been stored, and were brought back to New York State. Luckily, one man transcribed some records and created an index for most of them, storing them in the New York State Library. Unfortunately, in 1911, a fire damaged or destroyed much of these old 1600s records. “All the original documents that have been transcribed to this day, up there at New Netherland project, all the original documents are burned around the edges.”

In the 1970s these records were conserved and cleaned by Josephine Conboy, founder of the Greenwich Preservation Trust in 2008. “Fifty years after Jo Conboy’s prescient work, I had the technology to digitize them, and in this way, they could be restored to chronological order once again after three hundred and fifty years… It is also amazing that our town archives of Greenwich, that live down in our town hall, that we have them at all is a truly wonderful thing!”

In 2015, Missy’s article The First Dutch Jurisdiction of Greenwich was published in the Connecticut History Review. “So now it is accepted by all of academia that that is true. We were (initially) a part of New Netherland; a part of Dutch New York.” Missy further stated, “People were upset because they had invested in the English heritage of Greenwich… Everything I’ve written is cited. You can refer to the original source document where this information comes from.”

Missy Wolfe’s publications include Insubordinate Spirit, chronicling the history of early settlers Elizabeth Feake Winthrop Hallett and family when Greenwich was still part of New Netherland; The Hidden History of Colonial Greenwich, describing the creation of the community of Greenwich in early American colonial times; and The Great Ledger Records of the Town of Greenwich, Connecticut 1640-1742, a two-volume “transcription of town hall records… a very large project of photographing, transcribing, ordering, and indexing hundreds and hundreds of colonial records.” Missy is now working on volume three and is up to 1768. The factual information and historical revelations presented in these books have added immeasurably to the knowledge that we now have about our local history.

For Missy Wolfe, the fascination of Greenwich is of “the lost Greenwich, the Greenwich that we never knew, radically different from today.” And the inner propulsion to uncover its history? “I can’t explain it. It’s like an obsession that just came over me. It was like I was teed up because of my life experiences to be the person to do this work.”

The Oral History Project is proud to present blogs derived from its collection of recorded interviews as part of the Project’s celebration “America’s 250th|Greenwich – Greenwich History is American History.” Visit the website at glohistory.org. Interviews may also be read in their entirety or checked out at the main library. They are also available for purchase by contacting the OHP office. Our narrator’s recollections are personal and have not been subjected to factual scrutiny. Mary Jacobson serves as blog editor.

Dictating the 1600s records in Greenwich Town Hall Vital Records Vault in 2015. Courtesy of Missy Wolfe.

WWII Veterans and Tod’s Point -- Celebrating America 250

By Mary A. Jacobson

Veteran tenant families renovating the mansion to accommodate thirteen families. Courtesy of Life Magazine, June 17, 1946.

While thousands of people enjoy the beauty and sanctuary of Tod’s Point, known now as Greenwich Point, few are aware of its connection to our WWII veterans. The longtime owners of Tod’s Point were Mr. and Mrs. J. Kennedy Tod. From 1946 to 1961, their former mansion served as a residence for WWII veterans and their families.

To preserve the history of Tod’s Point for present and future generations, the Oral History Project interviewed 67 narrators and published its book Tod’s’ Point, An Oral History in 1981. It is from this rich trove that the stories of the WWII veterans are excerpted.

In 1945 the Town of Greenwich purchased the 148acre property of Tod’s Point from Presbyterian Hospital, to whom it had been bequeathed upon J. Kennedy Tod’s death, for the sum of $550,000. The mansion on the property had not been used as a residence since 1939. Concurrently, with the end of WWII, veterans were returning home to Greenwich to a severe housing shortage. Approval was given by the Town of Greenwich to lease the mansion to thirteen veteran families for one dollar a year.

Before these families could move into the mansion in 1946, its thirty-nine rooms needed to be converted into thirteen apartments. The veterans formed an independent nonprofit corporation called Vetaptco (Veterans’ Apartment Corporation) and each family floated a $1,000 loan from The Greenwich Trust Company. According to resident Thiel Ficker, “We paid (monthly) rent to our own corporation. I think forty dollars was the cheapest and seventy dollars was the most expensive. Of that, twentynine dollars went to the bank. The balance went into our Vetaptco account, and from that we paid for our oil, our heat, our electric, and so forth.”

The original Tod home was beautifully appointed. “You would find lovely casement windows in certain areas with just lovely hardware, the kind that would be very, very expensive; leaded glass, that sort of thing.” To ready the apartments for thirteen families, Ficker continued, “This contractor (Peter Danziger) did the basic work and we did all the finishing work. We did all the painting and some of the plastering and a lot of the carpentry.” When the job was done, “and everybody’s apartment was finally fixed up, we decided we ought to have an open house because people all over town were curious about this… Hordes of people came down and walked through the whole place… and were quite astounded at what had been done.”

Thiel Ficker reminisced, “Because practically every woman in the place was pregnant, we called it “Stork Point” for a while… None of us would ever choose to go back to that time again, of course, but for that particular time -we were all young, just out of the army – it was fun. It was sort of communal living in a way. We kept the integrity and privacy of each individual family.”

Wintertime living at Tod’s Point had its challenges. The Town agreed to only plow snow to the entrance of the Point. On December 26, 1947, one of the worst blizzards occurred in Greenwich with 26.5 inches of snow. Ficker recalled, “Well, we didn’t have any snow shovels… so we took these sheets of aluminum and cut them up and made long wooden handles, and nailed these rectangular pieces of aluminum to the wooden handles and made about thirteen shovels…We shoveled all day long, and at six o’clock at night, we finally broke through to Shore Road where they had plowed it.”

Another emergency requiring a communal response was the inadequate septic system that gave out on Thanksgiving Day, 1946. As Ficker described it, “There was a poor old septic tank, and it just couldn’t take it any longer.” That day the men dug a whole dry field. “We dug trenches through that. We honeycombed that whole field, laid tiles, filled in gravel, and connected it in with the septic tank which was across the road. All that on Thanksgiving Day. We worked up an appetite for turkey. Although some of us didn’t have much of an appetite.”

Demolition of the mansion, 1961. Courtesy of the Oral History Project.

Summertime was a busy time. “You can imagine it was like living on Coney Island on a Sunday. On a nice day in July, it was a steady stream of cars, and people used to drive up the driveway and right around the big circle there. So, we were happy when fall came and they closed the beach. Then it was peaceful and quiet.” Joseph Callachan remembered fondly the flock of snowy white egrets that would return to Tod’s Point in the fall. “Of course, Tod’s Point is, and was then, a sort of paradise for bird watchers.” Thiel Ficker remembered Sunday mornings down at the pond with his two sons. “We had a big net on the end of a long pole and we’d catch blue crabs Oh, boy! Blue crabs were all over the place!”

By 1961, the last family moved out. According to Ficker, “I think it ended simply because time had run out on it… The Town had said they wouldn’t renew the lease, and there was good reason… It was really starting to get run down. It would have taken a tremendous amount of money to put it into any shape at all… And then there was the decision to demolish the house. Of course, we were sad to see it go.” Joseph Callachan heartily agreed. “It was just a simply marvelous experience.”

On May 9, as part of the celebration of “America’s 250th|Greenwich,” Seaside Gardens at Greenwich Point will be the site of a festival of handbell choirs, featuring a commissioned work by Jonathan Vaughn entitled “Let Freedom Ring!” One might muse of the connection from the theme of this music to the brave American WWII veterans who moved to Greenwich Point eighty years ago, after their years of dedicated service in the defense of freedom.

The Oral History Project is proud to present blogs derived from its collection of recorded interviews as part of the Project’s celebration of “America’s 250th|Greenwich – Greenwich History is American History.” The OHP is sponsored by Friends of Greenwich Library. Visit the website at glohistory.org. Interviews may also be read in their entirety or checked out at the main library. They are also available for purchase by contacting the OHP office.

Recollections are personal and have not been subjected to factual scrutiny. Mary Jacobson serves as blog editor.

Lease extension granted by RTM in 1957. Aerial photo of by Cal Hood. Courtesy of The Village Gazette.

Greenwich Winters Through the Ages -- Celebrating America 250

by Mary A. Jacobson

Oxen used to help clear lower Greenwich Avenue, 1888. Courtesy of Greenwich Library.

By Mary A. Jacobson

The winter of 2025-2026 is one of the harshest ones remembered by many Greenwich residents in a very long time. With thermometers reading zero degrees and wind chill temperatures in the negative double-digits, with ice and over a foot of snow lingering seemingly endlessly, it is a winter. With that in mind, it seems fitting to resurrect the remembrances of numerous past Oral History Project narrators who can recount their winter recollections and perhaps give ours a different perspective.

Horace Bassett, a Greenwich dentist born in 1905, was interviewed in 1976 by OHP volunteer Richard W. Howell. He reminisced about the winter of 1918, one of the harshest in his memory. At that time, coal to heat homes “was delivered to Greenwich by barges, not by railroad… Greenwich harbor was completely frozen, so the barges couldn’t get in (to Steamboat Road). The schools were closed because they ran out of fuel… It froze all the way out to the Captain’s Islands.” Horses pulling sleighs traveled on the ice to the stranded barges to transport coal to Maher Brothers, a coal importer on Steamboat Road.

Being young and carefree, Horace and some friends walked over the ice that year to Island Beach to visit its caretaker there, Fred Metzger. Metzger asked the boys to return the next day with his mail from the Post Office and the teens readily agreed. The next day “it must have been towards the end of the cold spell, because the ice was rather weak. My dad happened to be down around Indian Harbor. He saw us out there, met us halfway, and just reprimanded us very severely… Even today I think of what might have been if that ice had caved in.”

Another remarkable year was 1934. William Erdmann, captain of the Island Beach ferry for thirty years, was interviewed in 1975 by OHP volunteer Marge Curtis. As a young man of 24, he recalled that “in 1934 we had a particularly severe winter. It was a combination of real cold weather and no wind, so the Sound was frozen over.” The ice “got real thick at that time. I skated out to the island Ice boating in Greenwich Harbor. Courtesy of Greenwich Library. (Island Beach) to visit the Metzger family who were very low on food supplies. I thought to myself, ‘Boy, I’m a dope for ever being out here on skates all alone.’”

The next time he went to Island Beach, in order to deliver food to the Metzgers, Erdmann put his rowboat on a sled. “I’d pull the boat up on the ice and put the sled underneath it, and I’d walk the rest of the way back in, towing the boat.”

Erdmann had a theory to explain that “awful, heavy ice… That was Depression days, and they just didn’t have much boat traffic, either. So, as long as there was no boat traffic to keep the ice broken up, the ice just got stronger and thicker and thicker and stronger.”

Hugh Dougherty served as dockmaster at Tod’s Point for many years. He was interviewed by Esther H. Smith in 1975 at the age of 72. “We seemed to have much more bitter winters in those days than what you have today, and the Sound would freeze up almost every winter.” He described how, at high tide, along the shore, the ice would “break into cakes and you had what we called ‘cakey.’ Then to get back and forth you had to walk the cakes. I do remember my father being on one and the cake turned over and dumped him in the water… Luckily, we had very few drownings… Old Captain Gardner, who was a very cautious man, warned us if we ever went out to the lighthouse, be sure and take a long sled with us so that if the ice started to get weak at all, you could get on the sled and spread your weight out over a greater area. Then you’d push it along until you got back onto hard ice again.” One of Dougherty’s favorite pastimes was on an iceboat with “a very light frame, with runners on it and a goodsized sail. It did go very fast and it was bitter cold riding on it.”

Cherry Grafton Taylor had somewhat less dramatic, but no less memorable times skating on icy ponds, which she related to OHP volunteer Marjorie Schwier in 1989. “It seemed to me that we had many, many weeks of ice skating and we would take lanterns and skate at night in the moonlight. There’s a pond we used to call Shop Pond where there was an old mill. That was a beautiful place to skate at night when the moon was full and the ice was very thick and black. “Sometimes we would make sails out of an old bedsheet and let the wind take us from one end of the pond to the other.” She, too, had memories of the Blizzard of 1934 “skiing down to Glenville to get milk and eggs.” There was purportedly more than three feet of snow that year in Greenwich and the snowplows couldn’t maneuver. “It was quite a horrendous blizzard.”

Space does not allow us to include the classic nor’easter of 1888 with snowdrifts of twenty feet, or the storm fiftynine years later in 1947, which dumped 25 inches of snow, again stranding residents with dwindling fuel and food. Yet, with these harsh winters and others to follow, the sense of community and the kindness of Greenwich neighbors to one another have remained notable, steadfast, and true.

The Oral History Project is proud to present blogs derived from its collection of recorded interviews as part of the Project’s celebration of “America’s 250th | Greenwich – Greenwich History is American History.” The OHP is sponsored by Friends of Greenwich Library. Visit the website at glohistory.org. Interviews may also be read in their entirety or checked out at the main library. They are also available for purchase by contacting the OHP office. Our narrators’ recollections are personal and have not been subjected to factual scrutiny. Mary Jacobson serves as blog editor.

Milkman Francis Connally delivers in the snow to his customers. Courtesy of Greenwich Library.

Ice boating in Greenwich Harbor. Courtesy of Greenwich Library.