What’s in a name? In our quest to plumb the depths of local history, we focus here on the origin of the street names in New Canaan, Darien and Rowayton. We expected that some would be relatively easy to parse, such as those bearing the names of prominent citizens. Others like Seminary Street in New Canaan and Tory Hill Lane in Rowayton provide a hint of their provenance right up front. But it was streets such as Rowayton’s Dancing Bear Road and Darien’s Keewaydin Drive that left us stumped at first. Rest assured, we dug deep and with the help of local historians hit pay dirt on all of these plus a few more.
Stephen Mather Road
Darien
Stephen Tyng Mather (1867–1930) was the great-great-grandson of the iconic Dr. Moses Mather of Darien. But unlike the good reverend, who commanded the pulpit at the Middlesex Society for more than sixty years, Stephen inherited a sense of adventure.
Born in San Francisco, he spent five years as a reporter for the New York Sun before heading out to Death Valley to join his father in business. A wiz at promotion, he coined the highly successful “20 Mule Team Borax” branding logo for their Thorkildsen-Mather Borax Company that allowed him early retirement as a millionaire.
A dedicated conservationist and Sierra Club member, Mather began his third career as assistant secretary of the interior and, eventually, the founding director of the National Park Service.
“When he arrived in Washington, he was a striking figure of a man, handsome, over six feet tall with keen blue eyes and energy to wear out almost anyone,” wrote Darien historian Marian Castell. “He was not fearful of making changes, and he was not afraid to meet aggression with force.”
Under Stephen Mather’s stewardship, total park area in the United States doubled and visitors increased tenfold. Jewels like Grand Canyon, Acadia and Mount McKinley National Parks were added to the park service crown on his watch. His contributions are recognized posthumously on bronze markers stating: “He laid the foundation of the National Park Service, defining and establishing the policies under which its areas shall be developed and conserved, unimpaired for future generations. There will never come an end to the good he has done.”
Mather sponsored the 1913 Darien Pageant in which he played the part of Rev. Moses Mather. A few years later he organized the bicentennial observation of the minister’s birth and the sesquicentennial of the Mather Homestead.
Cheese Spring Road
New Canaan
Referenced as early as 1739 in a land deed, this quiet country lane maintained a low profile until 1892, when one of its residents sued the town to reopen the impassable lower section.
For five years Susan Anderson doggedly pursued her case all the way to the Supreme Court of Errors so she could do her shopping in New Canaan rather than making a longer trip into Wilton. The court ruled in her favor, and the work commenced the following year. Pity she had little time to enjoy her victory.
The Widow Anderson’s tenacity was in keeping with her character. Born a Northrup in Wilton, the daughter of a notorious moonshiner, she upgraded property she inherited from him to a well-kept and prosperous farm. But she also had a reputation for being a powerful woman, who drove a hard bargain, displayed a quick temper and treated her hired help poorly.
The latter was apparently her downfall. On November 15, 1898, neighbors noticed that the Anderson homestead was ablaze. By the time help arrived, nothing was salvageable.
Responders were shocked, however, to find the body of Anderson’s farmhand hanging from an apple tree on the property. In Frederick Hahanan’s pocket was a suicide note written in his native German that concluded with the chilling words, “She is seventeen days dead, seek and you will find.”
The ensuing search turned up Susan’s brutalized remains in a shallow grave in the pigpen. Investigators concluded that Hahanan, who in his note complained of “not receiving anything to eat or any wages” during his year on the farm, had taken out his frustrations on his employer before committing suicide a fortnight later.
The murder in New Canaan was salacious enough to merit coverage by the New York Times, which duly noted the victim’s “eccentric ways and quarrelsome disposition,” alongside the assertion that she was worth $60,000.
Susan’s funeral, arranged by her brother and sister, took place at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Wilton, with burial in the family plot. A hastily arranged service for Hahanan had taken place a few days earlier, and his body was interred in the paupers’ field in Lakeview Cemetery.
Laurel Road
New Canaan
Laurel Road, connecting Canoe Hill Road and North Wilton Road, is the older of two streets in New Canaan that share the same name. (The other is on the Stamford side of town.)
It began as an early eighteenth-century highway called Kellogg’s Ridge Road, but eventually was known variously as Farm Road, Poorhouse Road or Town Farm Road after New Canaan’s Poor Farm, which was located at its midpoint.
For decades New Canaan had held out for a central poorhouse to serve all of Fairfield County. But by 1851, when it was clearly not forthcoming, the town meeting voted to buy Matthew Kellogg’s eighty-two-acre farm to house the indigent.
The thinking of the day was that residents of the poor farm should be as self-supporting as possible, so the town supplied them with livestock, farm apparatus and seed in hopes of turning a profit from the sale of surplus crops. Whether they were successful or not isn’t clear, but town budget records for 1867 show that $1,000 was allocated for the farm, which then sheltered nineteen residents and forty-three transients.
“The Poor Farm was the haven for the lone and elderly poor of New Canaan who had no other means of support,” wrote Isabel Bouton Moore, who was born there in 1911 while her father was its superintendent.
Her first-person recollections of an idyllic childhood spent playing hide-and-seek in the barns’ haymows, tapping maple trees and boiling down the sap for syrup, and chowing down on substantial meals created from the farm’s bounty have been compiled by the New Canaan Historical Society in its 2006 Annual.
Just as it began, the poor house ended with a town meeting vote in 1921. Within two years the last three inmates had been transferred to other almshouses in the area, and the farm and related buildings were sold in 1928. Putting the past behind it, the town renamed the road for the state flower that grows in abundance along its route.
Douglas Road
New Canaan
When Johnny came marching home from World War II, he found housing for veterans in very short supply. In New Canaan, a group of citizens formed the Douglas Realty Company, which built the original section of Douglas Road (west from South Avenue, absorbing Hope Avenue and continuing northward into Orchard Drive) and Gower Road to provide homes costing less than $10,000 for the town’s returning heroes.
The modest structures were utilitarian one-story starter homes of the day. More than half a century later, many have been modified or undergone modest expansion. Many more have succumbed to the wrecking ball, replaced by larger, multi-story homes.
Douglas Road, which crosses land formerly cultivated by the Hoyt Nursery, was reportedly named for the Douglas firs along its route.
Frogtown Road
New Canaan
Frogtown Road, connecting Ponus and Weed streets, dates back to 1734, making it one of the oldest roadways in town. It began as a footpath used by the early founders of the Congregational Church who lived on Davenport Ridge.
Within a couple of generations, members of the Weed family owned three of the four houses on the road. Stephen Weed built an early landmark, an old stone fort, on the eastern bank of the Noroton River just south of Frogtown Road. The Revolutionary War veteran was part of a prisoner exchange from the notorious Sugar House Prison in New York City and still suffered the mental scars of his incarceration.
“He steadily insisted that the British would raid the parish and that this line of march would be up the Noroton River valley,” wrote Charles P. Morton in Landmarks of New Canaan, published by the historical society in 1951. Weed stood sentinel against such an attack for nine long years, well past the end of the war.
By 1900, only one resident remained on Frogtown Road: William H. “Billy” Jones, dubbed “the mayor of Frogtown” by New Canaan Messenger editor Will Kirk. But schoolboys who passed the property had another name for Jones — “Thunderpumper” — because of all the noise he made if any of them dared to detour onto his land.
Parade Hill Road
New Canaan
Believed to have existed before Canaan Parish was founded in 1731, Parade Hill Road winds eastward downhill from Oenoke Ridge to the intersection of New Norwalk Road and Forest Street.
North of its western end was the old parade ground for which it was named. Purchased by Canaan Parish in 1778 for fourteen pounds from Joseph Blatchley, the one-acre “military parade” is where the militia, known as the Train Band, drilled twice yearly until it became part of the Ninth Regiment of the Connecticut Militia during the Revolution. During the war, the home guard assembled on the grounds whenever an alarm was raised.
By the early 1800s, Training Day had evolved into a festive town holiday, according to historian Mary Louise King. “Everyone who could gathered at the Parade Ground to buy cookies, cider, and peddlers’ goods and watch the regiments drill,” she wrote in her book, Portrait of New Canaan.
At mid-century, with the local militia disbanded, neighbors began encroaching on the parade grounds and blocking access to Parade Hill Cemetery, and the landmark was lost to the town. For a while the road was known as Johnny Jones Lane, after one of the landowners.
Park Street
New Canaan
Park Street is one of five “spokes” of the wheel laid out with God’s Acre as its hub. (The other four are Oenoke Ridge, Main, Locust and Seminary streets.) It was built in 1738 after Norwalk members of Canaan Parish petitioned for a convenient route to the meetinghouse. The name Park Street didn’t come into use until 1850, however, when the gravestones on God’s Acre were moved to Lakeview Cemetery, and God’s Acre was designated a park.
One of the street’s most prominent residents was Dr. Willard Parker Sr. A transplanted New York surgeon who retired to New Canaan in 1870, he owned fifty acres on Park Street, including a boy’s boarding school established earlier in the century as the Philopaedean Seminary. The gentleman farmer undertook a massive construction project that included remodeling the existing Federal style house, the demolition of the school, and the addition of a large yellow barn and heated greenhouse.
Until his death in 1884, Dr. Parker was one of the town’s most generous benefactors and staunchest boosters, encouraging colleagues and friends alike to move there for its clean air and country lifestyle.
Among his converts was the popular sculptor John Rogers. First as a summer renter on Park Street and later as a homeowner on Oenoke Ridge, Rogers and his family sank deep roots. His studio, complete with many original Rogers Group sculptures, is open to the public on the nearby grounds of the New Canaan
Fable Farm Road
New Canaan
By New Canaan standards, Fable Farm Road is relatively new. Built in 1959, it dead-ends northward from Silvermine Road west of the Valley Road intersection.
Its name originated with novelist Faith Baldwin, who bought part of the St. John family farm that had existed there for two centuries. She reportedly named it Fable Farm because she liked to think of her literary works as fables.
Born in 1893, the American author was one of the most successful writers of twentieth-century light fiction. She treated her target audience — middle-class housewives and young working girls — to a simplified version of life among the wealthy, where honor and goodness always prevailed.
Faith began her career writing serialized romance novels for women’s magazines. Her first novel, Mavis of Green Hill, was published in 1921.
Time magazine called her “the newest of the highly paid women romance writers” in Depression-era 1935, when she was earning more than $300,000 a year ($4 million in today’s dollars). That figure would soon jump to a cool $2 million.
Many of her books made the leap to celluloid, and she became a television personality in the early fifties when she hosted a weekly Saturday afternoon anthology series called Faith Baldwin Romance Theater.
Seminary Street
New Canaan
Running west from Park Street to the bottom of Elm Street hill, Seminary Street was laid out in 1738. Originally called Brook Street for the three brooks it crosses, it was renamed around 1870.
At least five public and private schools have been located on Seminary Street, including New Canaan Institute, a school for boys and girls founded circa 1874 by Mrs. Edward Ayres in her home at number 117.
The institute closed at the end of the century, just as increasing numbers of newcomers and summer converts were settling permanently in town. Those with children took a particular interest in private education, and by the fall of 1916 had founded the Community School in a rented house at 46 Seminary Street. Among its offerings were private kindergarten and French lessons by Mrs. Solon Borglum, wife of the noted sculptor, who lived in nearby Silvermine.
Several moves later, the school changed its name to New Canaan Country School and settled into the former Grace Home on Ponus Ridge, where it remains today.
Ultimately she racked up more than 100 books, including two under the pen name Amber Lee. She completed her last, Adam’s Eden, in 1977, the year before she died.
Historical Society.
Royle Road
Darien
When playwright Edwin Milton Royle moved to Darien in 1909, he was already the toast of Broadway for his politically incorrect play The Squaw Man. It was turned into a film — the first feature-length movie made specifically in Hollywood — and marked the directorial debut of Cecil B. DeMille.
Royle, his actress/wife Selena Fetter and their daughters, Selena and Josephine, settled into The Wickiup, a twenty-one-room Brookside Road estate across from Cherry Lawn Park. During their eleven years there, his work turned to more serious matters like The Struggle Everlasting, which he declared the first play of symbolism by an American. It added to his body of work, which included vaudeville sketches and one-act plays in which both he and Selena performed.
The couple also gave back to the community. Both had leading roles in the legendary 1913 Darien Pageant, and “Ned” served a term on the Board of Education. In addition to Royle Road, an elementary school was also named after him.
Quaker Lane
Darien
Darien was home to one of the first Quaker communities in Connecticut, established by the Sellecks, one of the town’s most prominent families. The first Quaker, or Friend, in what was then called Middlesex Parish was Catherine Clock, born in 1726 to a German immigrant and the daughter of the local gristmill owner. Catherine married up, becoming the twenty-year-old wife of Nathan Selleck Jr., eldest son of the prosperous owner of Sellecks Farms in present day Tokeneke. The couple settled on Old Farm Road and raised five children.
The Sellecks appear to have become Friends by 1781, when Nathan successfully petitioned the selectmen for permission to free his servant Jack. (Abolition had been long championed by the Quakers.)
By then the Connecticut Assembly had repealed intolerant laws calling for the imprisonment or exile of all Quakers and fines for “entertaining Quakers, Ranters, Adamites and other hereticks,” paving the way for free and open worship for non-Congregationalists. But it wasn’t until 1794 that the Friends of Middlesex were numerous enough to receive the blessing of their counterparts in the Purchase Monthly Meeting in New York, and it would be another fifteen years before they were strong enough to stand completely on their own.
Mass defections from the Middlesex Society (today’s First Congregational Church) after the 1806 death of Reverend Moses Mather further swelled the Friends’ ranks. Acting as their agent, the Sellecks’ son-in-law, Wyx Seely, purchased one-and-a-half acres of land fronting on the recently completed Turnpike Road (Post Road) across from the street now known as Quaker Lane. Within five years a small, square meetinghouse was built there.
Unfortunately, by 1828 membership had dwindled to thirty-four; within a dozen years, many of the elder members had died. The small band of Friends struggled along until 1846 before the concept of “inner light” that’s central to Quaker beliefs faded in Darien. Trustees sold off the property and buildings for $400 in 1862, and the remains of members buried in the cemetery were re-interred in Spring Grove Cemetery.
Barringer Road
Darien
Emily Dunning Barringer (1876–1961) was a pioneer, a woman ahead of her time, who helped pave the way for future generations.
Born in New Canaan, she graduated second in her class at Cornell University Medical School in New York. Yet when she applied to Gouverneur Hospital for a staff position, she was turned down because of her gender. Dr. Barringer persevered, reapplied and was accepted, going on to become the first woman to complete postgraduate surgical training.
Her experiences as the first female ambulance surgeon were the basis for her autobiography, Bowery to Bellevue, published in 1950. Later made into the MGM film The Girl in White, it starred June Allyson as Emily and Arthur Kennedy as her husband, Dr. Ben Barringer.
As chairman of a special commission of the American Medical Women’s Association, Emily Barringer lobbied successfully to allow women doctors to receive commissions in the U.S. Army and Navy. She was decorated for organizing the American Women’s Hospitals in Europe, which provided medical needs during World War I and postwar reconstruction.
Emily Barringer was inducted into the Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame in 2000.
Clubhouse Circle
Darien
Before moving to its current location, Wee Burn Country Club’s first home was on what is now Clubhouse Circle off the Post Road.
Established in 1896 as the first golf club in Connecticut and one of the first in the country, Wee Burn’s course was laid out by George Strath, a Scotsman who had the good fortune of being both an expert golfer and an experienced landscaper and gardener. He was also the club’s first golf pro.
Annual membership dues in those days were $125, and for that members had to put up with one rather unusual hazard. According to the club’s lease with the landowner, nothing was to interfere with his use of the property for grazing cows. “The fourth hole, therefore, was neatly fenced off for the purpose, and local rules made to cover the exigencies of the situation,” reports Wee Burn, a History, an official club publication.
By 1903, however, things were back on par. Wee Burn purchased the original forty-eight acres plus an additional ten for $38,000, enabling it to remove the aggravating fence and add three more holes and four tennis courts. The operation moved to new digs on Hollow Tree Ridge Road in 1925. The original clubhouse, also known as the Seely House, still stands on Clubhouse Circle.
Keewaydin Drive
Darien
“Keewaydin” is a Native American Ojibway word meaning “northwest wind” or “home wind.” It was also the name of a Darien estate owned by Mrs. E.S. Auchincloss that was bordered by Mansfield and Brookside avenues.
The only readily available account of life at Keewaydin was written by the coachman’s son, Henry G. Pettitt, who moved to the grounds in 1916 at the age of seven. Keewaydin: A Story of Our Childhood is available at the Darien Historical Society.
“Keewaydin contained at that time some 650 acres of land… several wooded sections, many cultivated fields and grazing areas,” Pettitt recalls. “The estate section containing the owner’s residence [the Big House] was located on the high ground overlooking the farm, with a magnificent view of Long Island Sound.”
The farm-estate complex, typical of the period, was pieced together from several parcels of land over a period of years. It boasted a U-shaped riding stable/coach- house/garage rendered in the same modified Georgian architectural style as the Big House. Two streams, large vegetable and flower gardens, orchards, an egg and chicken operation, dog kennel and a dairy rounded out the amenities.
Pettitt left Keewaydin as a teenager in 1925. Over the years, the Auchincloss family sold off the estate, including a major portion that became the Country Club of Darien in the 1960s. Keewaydin Drive cuts across the northwest corner of the club.
Dibble Street
Rowayton
This street was named for Alphonso Dibble, New York-born son of Solomon and Mary Seeley Dibble. Mary Dibble was a distant relative of Alfred Seeley, a package ship operator who built his home at 177 Rowayton Avenue in 1820. He also owned the building that houses the Rowayton Market, which, then as now, was the principal store in the village.
In 1890 Dibble married the youngest Seeley daughter, Hannah, and they took title to the house and store. In the 1930s he built a new store next to the market, complete with a marble ice cream soda fountain. The location would become the Rowayton Drug Store.
Dibble served on the executive board of the Lyceum Library Association and donated space in the basement of his market to house the fledgling operation.
The Dibble family home was later sold to the Pinkney family, who lived there for 150 years. The Sixth Taxing District purchased the Seeley-Dibble-Pinkney House in the 1960s; today it is home to the Rowayton Historical Society.
Nylked Terrace
Rowayton
Nylked (DeKlyn spelled backward) Terrace was named after Charles DeKlyn (1819–1906), a well-to-do businessman who built one of the most expansive and unique homes that Rowayton has ever seen.
Started in 1898, the DeKlyn mansion dominated four acres of prime real estate on Pine Point at the entrance to Norwalk Harbor. Once described as an “eclectic Victorian beachfront resort,” the rambling mansion boasted more than thirty rooms (including two kitchens), porches on three sides, numerous balconies, gabled roofs and decorative trusses, and an observation tower.
Several guesthouses shared the property, and a long pier extended from the front lawn diagonally across much of Pine Point Beach to provide access to the family’s steam and racing yachts, the Nylked and Nylked II respectively. A coach and four matched white horses were stabled nearby on West (now Westmere) Avenue.
The retreat, which reportedly accommodated as many as thirty-five visitors at a time, was primarily a summer escape for the DeKlyns, who spent most of their time at their home on Danbury’s fashionable Deer Hill Avenue. A devout Baptist and billiard aficionado, DeKlyn celebrated his last birthday at Pine Point surrounded by family and friends. He died suddenly a few months later, leaving the Rowayton estate to his eldest son, Benjamin Franklin.
B.F. is credited with laying the groundwork for the Rowayton Hose Company No. 1 through his contribution of a two-wheel pumper and 600 feet of hose to its predecessor, the Rowayton Bucket Brigade. He maintained the massive estate until his death in 1918.
With no one in the family willing to take on its upkeep, the mansion was carefully subdivided and sold off in pieces less than thirty years after it was built. Three sections stand today as single-family homes at 73 and 75 Roton Avenue and 17 Ensign Road in Rowayton. Two former guest cottages and Nylked Terrace are all that remain of the DeKlyns on Pine Point.
Sammis Street
Rowayton
Sammis Street was named for a prominent Norwalk family. One branch in particular produced at least three men who established themselves as community leaders.
The patriarch, William Cannon Sammis, was born in 1818 in Norwalk and made his mark in both the shipping business and as a selectman. He married Sarah Ann Nash, daughter of a fellow sea captain, and produced four children.
The youngest, Augustus, became a doctor — one of the first in Norwalk — and trained under the noted Dr. John A. McLean. Dr. Sammis married another townie, Mary Bartram, and the couple lived near the Mathews estate on West Avenue.
His older brother Theodore spent three years working with his father before heading for New York, where he pursued careers as a commission merchant and wholesale grocer. He met and married Helena Briggs Doolittle, daughter of a prominent capitalist.
The couple eventually moved to Minneapolis. Over the next half-century Theodore developed a reputation as “a businessman conspicuous among his associates for his probity, fairness and honorable methods,” according to History of Minneapolis, Gateway to the Northwest. He died in Minnesota in 1933.
Dancing Bear Road
Rowayton
When novelist Mark Rascovich and his wife, Florence, became the first residents of this private cul-de-sac off Witch Lane back in 1960, they were given the option of naming it. Apparently their inspiration was his most recent book, The Flight of the Dancing Bear, a spy novel involving the Russian KGB that had just been published.
Rascovich went on to write several more books, including The Bedford Incident, which was made into a 1965 Cold War film patterned after the Melville classic Moby Dick, and Bucher: My Story, a collaborative effort with the commander of the infamous navy spy ship U.S.S. Pueblo seized by North Korea in 1968.
Pennoyer Street
Rowayton
Elias R. Pennoyer is a name that figures prominently in the history of Rowayton for a variety of reasons. Pennoyer was a schoolmaster and there is anecdotal evidence that he ran an academy from the home he built in 1855 at 182 Rowayton Avenue. He was also president of Rowayton’s short-lived first public library, the Lyceum Library Association, opened in the basement of Dibble’s Store (now Rowayton Market) in 1866.
At least two Rowayton landmarks are directly related to Pennoyer’s generosity: The Rowayton Methodist Episcopal Church, which was built circa 1868 on land he donated at Rowayton Avenue and Pennoyer Street (then called Maple Street), and the war memorial built in his own front yard on Rowayton Avenue.
Tory Hill Lane
Rowayton
Tory Hill Lane runs through property purchased in 1758 by Esaias Bouton, a great-grandson of one of the first settlers of Norwalk. But his place in the history books did not stem from his genealogy.
According to Elsie Nicholas Danenberg’s account in Romance of Norwalk, Bouton was notorious for being “perhaps the most ardent Tory of all in Norwalk, at least the one who made the most money here during the Revolution.”
His homestead — high on a knoll overlooking Wilson Cove — proved advantageous in his dealings with the British. At night they would watch from their longboats for the glow of Bouton’s fireplace reflected in the front window, a sign that the coast was clear. The Redcoats would then come ashore to barter for goods and make arrangements for delivery. Oftentimes they would also slaughter cattle grazing nearby, toss the carcasses into their longboats and escape under cover of night.
Bouton reportedly drove “sharp and profitable bargains,” often for his own produce and cattle. Hard evidence of his fraternization with the enemy surfaced in 1798 when workmen at Bouton’s home found written confirmation of an order for beef, grain and vegetables to be delivered “to the usual place of shipment.” The signature was that of General William Tryon, who personally commanded the historic burning of Norwalk.
Shortly after the end of the war, Bouton purchased additional land adjacent to his property, no doubt with the ill-gotten booty he obtained from the despised Redcoats.