New Canaan There & Then: Murder in the Next Station to Heaven

‘New Canaan There & Then’ is sponsored by Brown Harris Stevens Realtors Bettina Hegel, Joanne Santulli, Dawn Sterner and Pam Stutz.

The blazing inferno could be seen from miles away, despite the mid-November gloom enveloping New Canaan that morning in 1898. 

Lewis P. Child saw the smoke from his stately home on West Road and immediately set out for town on his bicycle to raise the alarm. By the time he and other responders made it to the farm on Cheese Spring Road, it was too late. Both house and barn were already gone.

But what came as a complete shock to the would-be rescuers was the sight of a middle-aged man dangling from the limb of a lonely apple tree near a stone wall abutting the property. The man was Frederick Hahanan, aged 48, a German immigrant who came to America in 1886 and who was employed for the past year as the “hired man” for the owner of the Cheese Spring property, Mrs. Susan Northrop Anderson. 

Following Connecticut law, Mr. Hahanan remained in place until the town’s Medical Examiner, Dr. C. B. Keeler, could be summoned to inspect the situation. When Hahanan’s body was finally cut down, there was another surprise for the assembled group – a suicide note. 

The note recited several biographical facts, including his family (“Born in Germany, 1850. Married in 1876. Father of four children, all grown up, three sons and one daughter”), military service (“In 1870-71 served in the [Franco-] German War. When 18 years of age, in the cavalry”), and prior employment (“Five years in one place, Theodore Price. Four years and 10 months at W. E. Finch, Norwalk”).

The note then continued with the following sad lament: “One year at Susan Anderson, and did not receive anything to eat or any wages. I wish I could see my wife and children once more. I wish my friends a happy farewell.”

And then the startling addendum: “She is 17 days dead, seek and you shall find.”

It took not 17 days but rather a matter of hours for the body of Susan Anderson to be discovered in a shallow grave in a stall behind the chicken house that had once been used as a pigpen. The wounds were catastrophic. The right side of her head was crushed in, a long incision was evident on her throat, and she had a deep wound on the side of her abdomen; it is likely that she was struck with an axe.

Upon her mother’s death in 1888, Susan Anderson inherited 60 acres of her family’s homestead on the west side of Cheese Spring Road. She embarked upon an ambitious and extensive home improvement effort, including a remodeling of the main residence, upgrading of the barn, and a construction of a horse and carriage house. 

According to the Norwalk Evening Hour, which covered the sensational murder/suicide, the widow ran a well-kept and prosperous farm, raising “quinces and peaches and chickens and turkeys and was a well-known figure in Norwalk where she sold her farm produce.” This was in contrast with her father, Charles B. Northrop, who allegedly eschewed farmwork for the far more profitable venture of selling moonshine whiskey; his distillery was rumored to be deep in the woods near Grupe’s Reservoir. 

While the Evening Hour extolled Mrs. Anderson’s work ethic, it also noted that “she was known to drive a hard bargain and paid her help very poorly,” giving them “barely enough to eat.” Indeed, in 1894, four years prior to the murder, the Evening Hour reported that Mrs. Anderson drove into New Canaan with her then-hired man, one Charles Byington, seated next to her, bound with forty feet of clothesline wrapped around his torso and Anderson’s daughter Annie riding behind Byington holding a 22-caliber revolver against his back. 

Anderson claimed that Byington had stolen tools and other items from her, while Byington denied the claim and stated that his employer owed him a substantial sum of back pay. Justice Russell Hall found the evidence for Mrs. Anderson’s claim lacking and dismissed her case. Surely Anderson’s well-known “local reputation for eccentric and quarrelsome disposition”, as reported by The New York Times following her murder, played a role in that decision.

Beyond her untimely demise, Susan Anderson’s principal legacy in New Canaan may be her impact on development of the upper eastern region of the town, specifically the area surrounding her property on Cheese Spring Road. In the late 19th century that road ran north to Benedict Hill Road and the Wilton line, and south to Valley Road, either directly or via Huckleberry Hill Road (neither Mariomi nor Hickock Road existed then). 

Those roads were in appalling condition, with one local official declaring that “travel over them with carriages or vehicles of any kind is difficult and dangerous,” and commuters faced “deep ruts and gullies, rocks and stones projecting from the surface and, in places, bushes and branches of trees overhanging and interfering with the passage of carriages.” 

The roads were so bad that it was often impossible for Mrs. Anderson to drive to New Canaan, causing her to make repeated entreaties to the New Canaan Board of Selectmen to “work” Cheese Spring into a thoroughfare suitable for travel. No doubt too was the influence of the death of her father, who was killed when he was thrown from his wagon while traveling on Benedict Hill Road in 1877.

Mrs. Anderson’s requests were ignored by the Board, prompting her to sue the Town of New Canaan. The lawsuit was successful, and was affirmed by the Connecticut Supreme Court on Nov. 30, 1897.

Bizarrely, this did not preclude the selectmen from continuing their quixotic fight with Mrs. Anderson. After their final loss in court, they proposed to simply “discontinue the highway known as Cheese Spring Road, leading from the residence of Susan Anderson” in both a southerly and northerly direction. This prompted an exasperated Judge Wheeler to suggest that the three selectmen should be jailed for contempt of court, and Sheriff Lyon of Norwalk ultimately was sent to collect the costs of the lawsuit ($189) from them personally in January 1898, “or otherwise attach [their] property as security.”

Susan Anderson was buried in the Northrop family plot in St. Matthews’s Parish Cemetery in Wilton (even in death she had trouble making it to downtown New Canaan). Unlike his former boss, Frederick Hahanan managed to remain in New Canaan but was not as lucky with respect to his final resting place; his body was interred in an unmarked grave in the pauper’s field in Lakeview Cemetery.

As Lucy Appleton Garcia-Mata aptly stated in her 1970 assessment of the late resident of Cheese Spring Road: “When one considers Susan Northrop Anderson’s vigorous legal activities and farming operations plus her problems with her hired men, and her tragic end, her career in New Canaan was indeed spectacular for only ten years’ residence there.”