BY HILDEGARD M. GROB
The residents of Ridgefield”™s Keeler Tavern Museum embody Connecticut history across three centuries:
”¦Beginning with the 1713 settler who fashioned a sturdy “wilderness door” to protect his family;
”¦And the entrepreneur who opened the home as a Post Road inn and tavern where Patriots toasted rebellion;
”¦Or the gregarious landlord for much of the 19th century, renowned for his good cheer ”” and his indispensable role in a nearby carriage manufactory;
”¦Aided in hotel-keeping by an emancipated black woman, whose help freed him to pursue his day job ”” creating elegant landaus for slave-holding planters in New Orleans;
”¦And the “starchitect” of 1913”™s Woolworth Building, as the wealthy resort community vied with Newport and the Hamptons.
That frontier settler? He was understandably wary, having survived the 1704 Deerfield Massacre by hiding in a corncrib.
The innkeeper and ardent Patriot? British troops repaid his audacity when they fired a cannonball that rocked his home and business; it attracts sight-seers to this day.
The Patriot hero of that 1777 Battle of Ridgefield? None other than New Haven”™s Benedict Arnold; grateful Ridgefielders raised a few eyebrows with a commemorative medal 200 years later.
That carriage-maker? Yet another ingenious innovator as commerce and industry transformed his small agricultural community ”” and others throughout Connecticut
The African-American woman? “Sister” to the landlord”™s daughter, she lived and was buried as a family member in a state that abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison called “the Georgia of New England.”
Architect Cass Gilbert, whose unabashed credo was creating buildings “to make the land pay?” An early (if unselfconscious) preservationist who left the 200-year-old structure largely intact, so that visionary citizens could open it to visitors, including schoolchildren from around the world.
What distinguishes Keeler Tavern Museum from most house museums are the life stories of the remarkable individuals and families who inhabited the site, interpreted as living history by costumed docents. Taken together, the structure, the artifacts, and the personalities distill and illuminate the essential story of both Ridgefield and Connecticut from the 18th to the 20th centuries.
For more information about the Keeler Tavern Museum visit keelertavernmuseum.org and follow us on Facebook.
Hildegard M. Grob is executive director of the Keeler Tavern Museum, a member of the Cultural Alliance of Fairfield County.
