New Canaan There & Then

New Canaan There & Then: The Maxwell Perkins House

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‘New Canaan There & Then’ is sponsored by Brown Harris Stevens Realtors Bettina Hegel, Joanne Santulli, Dawn Sterner and Pam Stutz. William Maxwell Evarts “Max” Perkins was the preeminent editor, and in many cases discoverer, of the greatest authors of 20th century American literature, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, Marjorie Kennan Rawlings, James Jones and Ring Lardner. And Perkins lived, and died, in New Canaan. Perkins’ first encounter with New Canaan was in the summer of 1924, when he rented a cottage on the outskirts of town. “You would hate it,” he wrote his close friend Fitzgerald, “But I like it.”

Perkins liked it so much that later that year he purchased a gracious Greek Revival house located on 63 Park Street, steps away from the train station that he would commute from for the rest of his life.

New Canaan There & Then

New Canaan There & Then: Silver Hill Hospital

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‘New Canaan There & Then’ is sponsored by Brown Harris Stevens Realtors Bettina Hegel, Joanne Santulli, Dawn Sterner and Pam Stutz. Silver Hill Hospital does extraordinary work in treating all who suffer from addiction and psychiatric disorders. And it has a fascinating history. 

Founded by John Millet in 1931, it started as the Silver Hill Inn, a place to help patients described as “nervous, depressed, anxious, or malingering.” Beginning in 1971, focus was placed on building the hospital’s substance abuse program. By 1984, that program was staffed by a psychiatrist, an associate psychiatrist, a psychologist, substance abuse counselors, nursing staff, and a recreational and occupational therapist.

New Canaan There & Then

New Canaan There & Then: Shoemaking

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‘New Canaan There & Then’ is sponsored by Brown Harris Stevens Realtors Bettina Hegel, Joanne Santulli, Dawn Sterner and Pam Stutz. As many in New Canaan know, shoemaking dominated New Canaan’s economy for more than a century. 

It all began with the Benedict family, who began making rough, wooden pegged shoes in 1768. These durable shoes were popular with New York laborers and southern plantation owners, who purchased them for enslaved field workers. The Ayres family made higher quality sewn shoes that they shipped to out-of-state upscale retailers. At the height of this industry, New Canaan produced 50,000 pairs a year.

New Canaan There & Then

New Canaan There & Then: The Harvard Five

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‘New Canaan There & Then’ is sponsored by Brown Harris Stevens Realtors Bettina Hegel, Joanne Santulli, Dawn Sterner and Pam Stutz. Many of us enjoyed the recent screenings of Devon Chivvis’ long-awaited film The Harvard Five, about the talented group of architects from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design who, with their professor Marcel Breuer, settled in New Canaan and built the innovative midcentury modern houses for which this Town is now famous. The film is a must-see. And while all of these architects went on to have illustrious careers, Philip Johnson is arguably the most famous of all. In 1906, Johnson was born in Cleveland, Ohio to a wealthy and educated family.

New Canaan There & Then

New Canaan There & Then: The Telephone Comes to Town

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‘New Canaan There & Then’ is sponsored by Brown Harris Stevens Realtors Bettina Hegel, Joanne Santulli, Dawn Sterner and Pam Stutz. A fascinating article by Marshall H. Montgomery titled “It Deserves to be Celebrated or The First One Hundred Years of the telephone in New Canaan” appears in the 1981 Annual published by the New Canaan Historical Society. It provides a broad overview of the milestones in bringing telephone service to the town New Canaan. Here are some of the highlights:

The first telephone system began operating in New Haven, Connecticut in 1878, two years after Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone. It had a switchboard and a directory printed upon a plain card.