A hand-colored view of the south side of the Lounsbury house, now the Community Center, around 1920.
The Community Center on Main Street came out of a time more than 100 years ago when Ridgefield was a village that had achieved a particular status as a summer resort for rich and prominent New Yorkers.
One of Ridgefield’s native sons, Phineas Lounsbury, became a member of this elite by combining business acumen, political skills, an advantageous marriage, and charitable giving to achieve wealth and a level of power that culminated in the governorship of Connecticut.
In the winter, Ridgefield was just a village. The lights in the mansions remained dark. Citizens traveled on horse-drawn sleds and small boys tried to catch a lift by jumping on the runners. Children went to one and two-room schools heated by wood stoves.
In the summer the grand houses lit up and bustled with servants. Coachmen drove elegant carriages to the Ridgefield station to fetch their masters and their piles of baggage. The summer residents made family outings by carriage to picnic by Lake Waccabuc. Ridgefield boys ran errands for them and did chores for a few cents a time. Irish immigrants came to work in the mansions and Italian immigrants came to build houses and stone walls. Many of them stayed.
Many shoemakers
Gov. Phineas Lounsbury was a generous, if ostentatious donor to causes in town.
The rise of Phineas Lounsbury and his older brother, George, began during the Civil War after Phineas had been discharged from the Army because of sickness. Ridgefield was a town with many shoemakers, including their father Nathan, who farmed and made shoes for the New York market, both successfully.
The brothers established what became a flourishing womens’ shoe factory. Phineas built ties with the New York banking society and sealed them by marrying Jenny Wright, daughter of Neziah Wright, a founder and treasurer of the American Bank Note Company. Phineas joined the board of the Merchants Exchange Bank in New York and became its president in 1885.
His political career had begun in the 1870s, kicked off perhaps by his fervent opposition to alcohol, which was not shared by his more tolerant brother, George. Under Connecticut’s local option law Ridgefield was dry. Ridgefield held a town meeting in 1873 at which George proposed that Ridgefield should become wet. Phineas moved that a vote be taken by paper ballot — and that the ballot box be kept open for two hours, “presumably allowing him to run up and down the village to gather supporters.” When the ballots were counted, the “drys” won 111-104.
A year later Phineas was elected to represent Ridgefield in the state assembly, where his oratorical skills and financial know-how soon made him a Republican party leader. He won the nomination for governor unanimously in 1886. In the ensuing election he trailed the Democratic nominee, but since neither candidate won the necessary majority, Connecticut law put the decision in the hands of the Republican-controlled state legislature, which voted Lounsbury into the governorship on the first ballot.
Quiet term as governor
His one term in office, from 1887 to 1889, apparently was a quiet one, distinguished by the passage of “The Incorrigible Criminals Act.” Much like contemporary “three strikes” laws, his law mandated a 25-year sentence for those who committed for the third time a felony which carried a two-year sentence. Lounsbury made clear his harsh view of criminals by saying the prison would serve its purpose by “shutting up forever within its walls and behind its bolts and bars, the entire criminal class of the state.”
Along with his political power, Lounsbury had added steadily to his wealth. In addition to being president of the Merchants Exchange Bank, he served as a trustee to the American Bank Note Company, run by his rich father-in-law, Neziah Wright, whose death in 1879 added to the couple’s wealth. He served on other corporate boards and invested in the stock market.
Generosity
He was a generous, if somewhat ostentatious, donor to the Methodist Church. When the plate came around held up a $5 note so people could see how much he was giving (it was equivalent to more than $100 today).
In 1882 he gave land for the construction of a new two-room school, and then threw in $600 for a third room. After the Great Fire of 1895, which destroyed the center of town, Ridgefield created its first Fire District with Lounsbury as its chairman. He donated a $1,000 horse-drawn “fire apparatus” capable of “throwing a stream far above any house in the village.”
This is the Connecticut state building at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 that inspired the design of Grovelawn, Gov. Phineas Lounsbury’s mansion that is now the Community Center.
His biggest contribution to shaping the future of Ridgefield was to acquire land — lots of it — and build his mansion, Grovelawn, the future Community Center. Lynn-Marie Wieland, a Ridgefield archaeologist, has documented from town records how Phineas accumulated many acres in successive steps, beginning in 1876 and continuing on through to 1896.
After Phineas Lounsbury visited the hugely successful Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, he came back determined to build a house just like the Connecticut state building, a grand but comfortable Neo-Classical Revival mansion characterized by four imposing fluted columns and a wide porch around three sides. This is the result, shown around 1915.
On the site of the present Lounsbury mansion, Phineas and Jenny lived at first in a dark Second Empire house, well covered in vines and, judging by old photos, on the gloomy side. But in 1893 Lounsbury visited the hugely successful Columbian Exposition in Chicago and came back determined to build a house just like the Connecticut state building, a grand but comfortable Neo-Classical Revival mansion characterized by four imposing fluted columns and a wide porch around three sides.
Lounsbury had his existing house hauled to its present site at 27 Governor Street where it stands today, much altered, as an office building. He commissioned Charles Northrop, who had built several of the grand mansions that distinguished Ridgefield, to build a replica of the Chicago house.
When Phineas and Jenny moved into the new Grovelawn it was the equal of any of the Ridgefield mansions built by the likes of E.P. Dutton, founder of the publishing house, and A. Newbold Morris, a descendant of a signer of the Declaration of Independence.
Phineas was now a full-fledged member of the Eastern elite, seen in a contemporary photo as a proud, benign-looking gentleman, with uplifted chin and a well-padded midriff that he habitually covered with a white waistcoat.
He lived in Grovelawn for nearly three decades.
This is the second in a series of occasional articles on Lounsbury and the Community Center.