I saw an old Ridgefield map with a road called Jagger Lane that I never knew existed. What’s a jagger?
Jagger Lane, an “abandoned highway,” ran from behind Pamby Motors on Route 7 to Bennett’s Farm Road, opposite Bennett’s Pond State Park.
A well-known and colorful character of his era, Joseph Jagger came to town in 1774, buying 2.5 acres “with dwelling house” on the hill southeasterly of Bennett’s Farm Road overlooking the valley of today’s Route 7 (a road that did not exist then). Mr. Jagger was in his 70s at the time. Perhaps this was his “retirement home.”
He appears to have sold the place in 1792 for only six pounds. He was about 90 then and perhaps wanted to move into the village or could not afford to take care of the house, or was physically unable to do so. Around then town started supplying welfare payments of about seven shillings a week to a family to care for “Old Jagger.”
Writing in 1800, the Rev. S.G. Goodrich reported there were three “foreigners in the town who are paupers,” one of whom was “named Jagger … an old man about 95 years, an Englishman who served under the Duke of Cumberland at the Battle of Culloden in 1745, and was in Flanders with the regiment previous to that battle.”
Mr. Goodrich said Jagger “wrought jet work in cedar since he has been in this country, till he was near 80 years old and he will to this day … sing a martial air he learned in Flanders and cry, ‘God save King George.’” (Jet work may have meant inlaying cedar with pieces of polished black coal to form decorative articles.)
Samuel Goodrich, the minister’s son who became author Peter Parley, mentioned him in his autobiography, Recollections of A Lifetime. “We had a professed beggar, called Jagger, who had served in the armies of more than one of the Georges, and insisted upon crying ‘God save the king!’ even on the 4th of July, and when openly threatened by the boys with a gratuitous ride on a rail,” he said.
His death is noted in the town records: “Joseph Jagger dead December 24th 1802, supposed to be one hundred years old.”
By 1817, deeds are mentioning “Jagger Road,” later Jagger Lane. By the mid-20th Century, the road rarely appeared on maps, except those of the U.S. Geological Survey, which describe it as an unimproved dirt road. A 1912 map called it Jaguar Lane.
The late Elise Conley Cox, daughter of the Colonel Louis D. Conley who built the Outpost Farm estate and nurseries here, grew up on the estate (much of which is now the state park). She recalled that as a child, she used to go sledding down this road, which was surrounded by her father’s property and was probably used a good deal by his estate workers.