Date: Fri 18-Sep-1998

Publication: Bee

Author: KAAREN

Quick Words:

Northrop-Elyea-monument

Full Text:

Growing Up In Newtown At The Turn Of The (Last) Century

(with photos)

BY KAAREN VALENTA

Helen Northrop Elyea has vivid memories of growing up on Main Street. So when

the Newtown Historical Society presented copies of several books about the

history of Newtown to the library at Ashlar of Newtown, the 96-year-old Ashlar

resident was intrigued.

Mrs Elyea and Elin Hayes, president of the Newtown Historical Society, spent

nearly an hour perusing one of the books, Daniel Cruson's Images of America:

Newtown , looking at the photographs while they sat in the comfortable lobby

of the skilled nursing facility on Toddy Hill Road.

"Oh, look, there's my father," Mrs Elyea said, pointing at a photograph taken

in 1905 at the town's Bicentennial Celebration. "And that's Mr McCarthy, my

teacher at the North Center School. The school used to sit where the monument

is now."

The historical society also donated copies of Touring Newtown's Past by Al

Goodrich and Mary Mitchell; The Prehistory of Fairfield County and Newtown's

Slaves by Mr Cruson; pamphlets on Judge William Edmond, Mary Hawley, and

Matthew Curtiss, Jr, and a binder to keep each month's issue of the historical

society newsletter, The Rooster's Crow , that also contains historical essays

by Mr Cruson, who is the town historian.

"We thought it would be very appropriate to give the books to the residents of

Ashlar," Mrs Hayes said. "If anyone in Newtown can appreciate what we do as

the historical society, it is the older residents. This is our way to give

back to them."

Mrs Elyea was born in the house at 68 Main Street (now the Hyde residence,

immediately north of the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument) on October 5, 1901.

"My father, George Northrop, rebuilt the house. He was a contractor, a good

one. People used to wait for his work," Mrs Elyea said. "He worked for the man

who owned The Castle on Castle Hill Road. The lady with him, his secretary

Miss Blake, had a little white dog. [Later] my sister and I used to go up

there and climb in the windows and play there."

George and Anna Northrop had three daughters: Georgie, Mary Aurelia, and

Helen, the youngest. Behind their house, the Northrops had a large barn that

held a carpentry workshop and housed the horses -- Nettie and Beauty -- that

pulled their wagon. They also had a smokehouse where Anna Northrop would smoke

two pigs every fall to provide the family with ham for the winter.

"We'd buy them from the Mitchell farm up the Housatonic River -- he used to

raise pigs," Mrs Elyea explained.

"One day when I was at school, my teacher looked out the window and saw the

doctor bringing my father home in a car because he was hurt. Something had

scared my father's horse, and it ran away. The wagon hit a curb and turned

over. The accident tore my father's ear off."

"I attended ballroom dancing classes with boys and girls in the old town

hall," Mrs Elyea said. "Across the street from our house was the (John Beach

Memorial) library. Ann Blackman lived right next to the library. She had a

balky horse, and my mom would have to go and help her get it going."

Although her memory for recent events isn't as good as it used to be, Mrs

Elyea can remember everything about Main Street during the years she was

growing up there. She can name all the residents who lived in each house,

without having to stop to think about it.

"Mrs Glover and her son, Curtis, lived in the house that was on the other side

of the school. She was an old woman at the time," Mrs Elyea said. "They left

the house to the church and it became the rectory. Levi Morris was the funeral

director and had a store across the street, but it burned in a fire so he

moved up the street and went into business with Mr Shepard at the General

Store."

"William Leonard owned the Newtown Inn [on the site where the Booth Library is

now]. I was best friends with his daughter, Clarissa. I used to go to school

with Justine and Agnes Holian, who lived in the Grand Central Hotel [which

later became the Parker House, then the Yankee Drover]."

"I would go to the post office in the old town hall every morning to get the

mail," Mrs Elyea said. "In the winter we would skate down below the railroad

station (on Church Hill Road) where they cut the ice for the ice house."

When she walked down Main Street to visit her friends, she would pass by the

house of Mary Hawley, usually skipping up the two steps the Hawleys had once

used to climb into their wagon, and jumping off.

"She wasn't very nice," Mrs Elyea confided. "Not friendly. But I guess she had

a hard life."

Mrs Elyea remembers Arthur T. Nettleton, who was president of the Newtown

Savings Bank and Miss Hawley's financial adviser. "My cousin Carlton Hubbell

worked at the bank and so did George Stuart," she said.

During the War Maneuvers of 1912, when thousands of soldiers came to Newtown

on training exercises, Mrs Elyea was 11 years old.

"I had a US pin that one of the soldiers gave to me," she said. "So many

people came to town to watch [the maneuvers] that some of them had their cars

parked in our yard."

After graduating from the North Central district school, Mrs ELyea attended

high school at Newtown Academy, which was located on Church Hill Road across

the street from St Rose Church.

"Leo Hickson was the principal," Mrs Elyea said. "But there was some kind of

trouble. The school broke up, and I went with some of the students to the high

school at [what formerly was] the Sunset Tavern and graduated from there."

After graduation, she married a classmate, Paul T. Clarkson, and moved to

Waterbury, where he worked at Scovill, a large brass manufacturing plant. In

1947 the couple moved to California for his health, but he died five months

later.

More than 20 years later, when she was in her early 70s, she married Earl

Elyea, whom she also would outlive. Three years ago, Mrs Elyea decided to

return to Newtown.

"She called and said she was coming," explained her nephew, Richard Andrews,

who lives on The Boulevard Extension. She lived with us for the first month

because there wasn't an opening at Ashlar."

Now Mrs Elyea sits in the parlor at Ashlar, pouring over the photographs in

the books donated by the historical society and remembers how Newtown was

nearly a century ago.

"We had a very happy childhood," she said. "It was a wonderful place to grow

up."