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Found In The Stacks: “Boldly” by Nils Hogner

Written by Bill Bucklin

Artist and author Nils Hogner was well known in Litchfield from the 1930s until his death in 1970. He wrote and illustrated a dozen children’s books on his own, in addition to illustrating sixty others, thirty of them written by his wife Dorothy.

Boldy, created by Hogner in 1953, is the story of a timid little puppy who is laughed at by his littermates for not living up to his name. But one day Boldy faces down a fox and discovers that a big heart can live in a small body.

Hogner captures Boldy’s timidity perfectly on the cover, setting the stage for the captivating illustration of Boldy’s triumphant reunion with his deeply impressed family after the fox encounter.

Nils Hogner and his wife Dorothy lived at Hemlock Hill Farm in Litchfield. Hogner was known for his murals, and contributed posters for local horse shows. Many of Hogner’s children’s books are about horses, among them Dynamite the Wild Stallion and The Nosy Colt.

Hogner grew up in Massachusetts, studied art in Boston, and traveled to the Southwest to begin his painting career. He met and married Dorothy while he was a professor at the University of New Mexico. It isn’t clear what prompted the couple’s move to Litchfield, but their residence was very much the community’s gain.

Found In The Stacks: “Rails of the World: A Monograph of the Family Rallidae” by S. Dillon Ripley

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Written by Bill Bucklin

Lying on its side among the shelves of old leatherbound volumes, the big book with three stately birds on the front cover practically begs you to pick it up. Rails of the World: A Monograph of the Family Rallidae by S. Dillon Ripley is not about railways, but about Ripley’s favorite subject–birds. From a review by Roger Tory Peterson: “Among the least known and most elusive of any major bird species, rails manage to colonize remote islands, impenetrable jungles and desolate shorelines in almost all regions of the world.”

*Rails of the World: A Monograph of the Family Rallidae* by S. Dillon Ripley (1977)

The book is a window into the world of S. Dillon Ripley, one of Litchfield’s most fascinating residents. Rosemary Ripley, his daughter, said in an interview: “My father was interested in birds from a very young age. My grandmother was a single mother. She decided to take the family to live in India for a year. My father was 13 and living there opened his eyes to the natural world.”

Ripley continued his interest in bird species as a teenager in Litchfield in the 1920s. Later he became a professor of ornithology at Yale University, served as Director of Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History, and in 1964 became the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. His greatest contribution to Litchfield is the Ripley Waterfowl Conservancy, which he and his wife founded in 1985.

S. Dillon Ripley died in 2001 and is buried in Litchfield’s East Cemetery, but his legacy is very much alive in Litchfield.

Found In The Stacks: “Reports of Cases in the Superior Court of Connection 1785-1788” by Ephraim Kirby

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By Bill Bucklin

Ephraim Kirby must have been a fascinating person to have a drink with during his service as a lawyer in Litchfield in the 1780s and 1790s.

Born in Woodbury, Kirby volunteered for Revolutionary War service just after the battle of Lexington and was wounded thirteen times. After the war he attended Yale University, leaving without a degree. After apprenticing to become a lawyer he was admitted to the bar and settled in Litchfield. Kirby’s son attended Tapping Reeve’s famous law school, where Reeve was teaching students to transpose English common law for the needs of America’s emerging legal system.

Kirby recognized the need for a written record of court decisions and began to compile any reports he could find. When the Connecticut legislature passed a law in 1785 requiring judges to prepare their decisions in writing, Kirby realized he had struck legal gold. Kirby spent three and a half years in a different form of service to his country, collecting every single Superior Court case report.

*Reports of Cases Adjudged in the Superior Court of the State of Connecticut, from the year 1785, to May, 1788.*

In 1789 Kirby visited Thomas Collier, Litchfield’s first printer, and left him with the manuscript of Reports of Cases Adjudged in the Superior Court of the State of Connecticut, from the year 1785, to May, 1788. Collier set the 425 pages of type, and in 1789 America’s first-ever volume of law reports was published.

Recognizing the volume’s significance, the Connecticut legislature ordered 350 copies which were sent to all Connecticut towns. It’s easy to imagine Tapping Reeve’s delight at adding this treasured volume to the Litchfield Law School’s expanding law library.

Found In The Stacks: “The Lady of the Lighthouse” by Helen Smith Woodruff

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Written by Bill Bucklin

When you think of famous authors from Litchfield, CT, of course Harriet Beecher Stowe comes to mind. The works of a second Litchfield author, once famous, also reside in the stacks of the Litchfield Historical Society. Helen Smith Woodruff wrote 11 novels between 1912 and 1921, some of them completed while summering in Litchfield with her husband Lewis B. Woodruff of New York City, descendant of one of Litchfield’s founding families.

Helen Smith Woodruff was a society woman with a remarkable social consciousness. After undergoing a short period of blindness from scarlet fever she wrote the novel The Lady of the Lighthouse, published in 1913. The lighthouse in the title is misleading, because Woodruff’s focus is on the main character’s mission to brighten the world of a young blind boy in New York City, one of many blind children at a rehab facility known as the Lighthouse. Woodruff donated the proceeds of all her books to charity. The $300,000 in royalties from The Lady of the Lighthouse went to the New York Association for the Blind, the equivalent of ten million dollars today.

Helen Smith Woodruff died in New York City in 1924 as the result of a fall from a second-story window in her New York home after a long period of illness at the age of only 36 (https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/helen-smith-woodruff/). One imagines summers in Litchfield were darker without her.

Detective Work in the Archives

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Group photo of Sons of Veterans of the United States of America C. O. Belden Camp #31 Litchfield, about 1881

Project Archivist Leith Johnson is working on creating and enhancing descriptive records for the Litchfield Historical Society Photograph Collection funded by a Connecticut Humanities SHARP grant. He contributed the piece below about this photograph, which had no identifying information written on it or with it, and required some investigation.

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