Vern Knapp Is Moving On –

Leaving Newtown After 70 Years

By Kaaren Valenta

When Vern Knapp and her husband, Albert, built their house on South Main Street in 1939, Newtown was a village with a population of less than 3,000 and the street in front was a dirt road.

“If a car went by, you’d rush to the window to see who was going by,” she recalled. “You’d recognize the car and say so-and-so is going to Bridgeport to shop.”

Today thousands of cars a day whiz by the white colonial at the corner of South Main and Orchard Hill Road and a For Sale sign sits on the lawn. Mrs Knapp, 88, is preparing to move to Nebraska, to a retirement community near where her daughter, Karen Lyons, lives.

The Depression brought Mrs Knapp to Newtown as a full-time resident more than 70 years ago.

“My family had a summer cottage on Lake Zoar,” she explained. “But when I was 17 and going into my senior year in high school, we moved to Newtown. My father, Harold Smith, was an architect in New York City but there wasn’t any work during the Depression, so we moved here.”

John Burr, the manager of the A&P grocery store located in the commercial building at the flagpole, had a small business there that his wife operated first as a tea room and later as a soda fountain and luncheonette where patent medicines also were sold. Harold Smith bought the business and renamed it the Flagpole Fountain.

“He did quite a bit of architectural work in Newtown, too,” Mrs Knapp said. “He would sit in the back booth, working on drawings of houses. It was quite a drop from being an architect in New York, but it was a job.”

The family lived on Orchard Hill Road, where they had a large garden and grew much of the food that they ate. Newtown had three grocers at the time, the A&P at the flagpole, the general store owned by Morris & Shepherd further north on Main Street, and the general store in the red brick building in Sandy Hook.

Al Knapp started working at Morris & Shepherd as a delivery boy when he was just 16. One day Vern Smith brought her father’s car to fill up with gasoline at the pumps outside the grocery store and met the young clerk who worked there. They married in 1935 and lived with Vern’s parents while her father designed the home they would build four years later on South Main Street.

“There was supposed to be a large living room off the south end with a cathedral ceiling and a balcony, but we never got that far,” Mrs Knapp said.

 In 1940, Al Knapp purchased the general store with a partner and renamed it Knapp and Trull. Like most young Newtown men, Al Knapp served in the Navy during World War II while Vern waited on customers and ordered merchandise for the store. After the war, the Knapps adopted a baby girl they named Karen. For 14 years, Al Knapp’s father lived with them until he died at the age of 94.

In an article that appeared in The Bee in 1996, Mrs Knapp described her life in Newtown. How, for instance, she bought her first car by trapping muskrats and selling the pelts. She had a muskrat coat made and wore it so much that she finally had a jacket made out of the remnants. She and her husband like to hunt game to put meat on the table, a country way of life in those years.

“The Yankee Drover Inn that burned down on Main Street used to be called the Parker House,” Mrs Knapp recalled. “They would rent horses, and I liked to ride them.”

Al Knapp sold his half of the grocery in the 1950s to Dick Hibberd, who lived on Main Street, and went to work for Heise Borden, calibrating and engraving commercial pressure gauges. The Knapps always enjoyed nature and had a particular fondness for the Orchard Hill area. When the town started talking about putting in ball fields there, Al Knapp and George Adams fought valiantly to keep it a natural park, Mrs Knapp said. As a testament to this, Al Knapp’s name is inscribed on a plaque at the entrance to the park.

Mrs Knapp had a number of jobs over the years, but not during the years when she was raising her daughter. She was a secretary for real estate agent Ben Blanchard and worked at the town hall as an assistant clerk in the probate office.

Al Knapp died in 1985, but Vern kept busy, volunteering at blood banks and at the Congregational Church basement where items for the church’s thrift shop on South Main Street are sorted, mended, ironed, and priced. Vern Knapp also cleaned all the silver serving pieces that were donated for sale.

Now battling pneumonia, she spent the last two weeks packing and deciding what to take to Nebraska. Her daughter, a professor of English literature at the university in Lincoln, was supposed to arrive last week to help but was delayed by the closure of airports after the September 11 terrorist attacks. The Knapps’ neat white colonial house has a buyer.

 “I am going to miss Newtown and the people, but I’ll make a lot of friends where I am going. It is a very nice retirement community six miles from Karen’s house,” Mrs Knapp said. “It’s a completely new adventure.”