Birdsey Parsons: A Legend Rooted In Reality

By nancy K. Crevier

Musician. Conservationist. Deadbeat dad. Revered grandfather. Beloved town eccentric. If Louis Birdsey Parsons was one, he was all.

During the mid 20th Century, it would not have been unusual to see a cart pulled by a small donkey and driven by a goateed gentleman trotting peacefully down Route 34 toward Warner’s Store in the center of Sandy Hook. Piled in the back of the wagon might have been sticks and wood gathered from the area or, perhaps, apples might have rolled from one side of the wagon to the other as it made its way down the road.

A lifelong resident of Sandy Hook, Birdsey Parsons — referred to in archival pieces as Birdsey, Birdsy, Birdsie, and even Birdseye — lived from 1884 to 1979, the son of late 19th Century South Center School teacher Charles Parsons, and descendent of Newtown’s first gristmill owner, Moses Parsons.

And although it was a member of the Parsons family who owned the first automobile in Newtown, as recalled by the late Robert Stokes in the collection of oral histories Newtown Remembered, Birdsey Parsons is best recalled for his preferred mode of transportation — his donkey, hitched to a small wagon.

“My mother, Charlotte, thought the world of Birdsey Parsons,” said Edmund “Stretch” Forbell, who was a teenager when his family moved to Newtown in 1945. “They would visit in the driveway of our Pole Bridge Road home. He was a recluse, but very cheerful,” Mr Forbell said.

Legend has it, Mr Forbell added, that the donkey was named Betty because it shared the same birth date as the early Newtown physician Dr Kiernan’s granddaughter, Betty Seaman. Mr Forbell remembers feeding the burro candy bars on occasion, when his travels took him past Birdsey Parsons’ place, just north of where today’s I-84 passes over Route 34.

The wagon was used to go about the area collecting “bits of wood,” said Mr Forbell. That wood was stored in a series of several small sheds on Mr Parsons’ Route 34 property, one of which he called home.

The donkey was a big hit with those along Route 34, said Mr Forbell, not just himself.

“The Flying Eagle bus ran regularly between Danbury and New Haven, and I remember Cliff Walker went to school in New Haven. He told me he remembers the bus stopping and blowing its horn by Birdsey’s place, and that donkey would come running out for a treat,” Mr Forbell said.

“One afternoon as the bus arrived in Sandy Hook,” Mr Walker corroborated, “the bus driver pulled over to the pasture. He had a carrot, and he tooted the horn. Here comes the donkey running up. She practically stuck her nose in the door for the treat,” said Mr Walker, “and had the whole bus laughing.” Birdsey Parsons was scruffy looking, said Mr Walker, “But he was considered to be a good guy.”

Newtown Bee Publisher R. Scudder Smith also speaks about going with his mother as a young boy to feed sugar cubes to Betty, in Newtown Remembered: Continuing stories of the 20th century.

When Betty died, that was not the end of Mr Parsons’ spin on protocol. “He switched to a little tractor that went six miles per hour, top speed,” Mr Forbell said. “But he never drove it that fast. It was usually about three miles per hour,” he said.

“I was born here and knew [Birdsey] since I was a little kid,” said John Pendergast, Jr. “He was quite a guy. He used to write songs,” he recalled. What stands out most in his memory, though, said Mr Pendergast, was Mr Parsons’ work at the Plastic Moulding Company on Glen Road. “During World War II, I got to sort of know him. He was involved with the manufacturing process for Bakelite products there. He used to come out of Plastics just covered in black dust. I’ll never forget that,” he said.

“Birdsey was all part of life in Sandy Hook. He was a pretty good guy, from what I recall, and very friendly,” Mr Pendergast said.

In the second volume of Newtown Remembered, Doris Dayton Dickinson remembered Birdsey Parsons as being “no hobo,” despite his humble dwelling, his aversion to mainstream employment, and his reclusiveness, which exacerbated following the 1942 death of his wife, Vivian Wetmore.

“Whenever he got one [shed] filled, he would make another little shed and then he would fill that. And when the town bought his property to put Route 84 through, they had to move every one of those little buildings. He demanded that they be carted over onto Jeremiah Road….” is Mrs Dickinson’s recollection of Birdsey Parsons.

At times, it was more than wood chips hauled in the cart behind Betty, though, according to Mrs Dickinson’s remembrances. During Prohibition, she heard the tale of Mr Parsons having “sheet music” for sale. “He was selling hard cider. He had a sign, ‘I sell sheet music; I give my cider to whom I please.’”

 Skirting taxes was also a part of Mr Parson’s simple life, according to the recollections of Mr Stokes. At Plastic Moulding Company, where Mr Stokes worked as a young man, Mr Parsons worked as well — but only “until he made taxable money, which I think was $525, and then he quit. He didn’t want to pay taxes.”

Eccentric, But Harmless

While his lifestyle may have struck others as peculiar, Mr Parsons may have been one of Newtown’s early conservationists. Five years after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring awakened an interest in the environment, a December 22, 1967, Newtown Bee article makes mention of the then 83-year-old Birdsey Parsons as having a “great love of the out-of-doors. He wrote and published a pamphlet concerning conservation, particularly the spraying of insecticides and the resulting effects on the natural food cycle of the birds.”

Birdsey Parsons is one of the town eccentrics who falls into the mix with other Newtown legendary characters, like Michael Brennan, Jeff Briscoe, or more recently, Bill Ready and his adult tricycle, said Town Historian Dan Cruson.

“These men don’t generate much in the way of documents, but more in the way of legends,” Mr Cruson pointed out.

What town eccentrics do often have in common, Mr Cruson said, is the protective arms of the community into which they are gathered.

“Most are harmless — although Michael Brennan was accused of the cobbler murder — and sometimes they are what we used to call ‘simpletons.’ A neighborhood can be quite protective of these eccentrics,” he said.

Birdsey Parsons was reclusive by choice, it appears, said Mr Cruson.

“Most of what we know of him is post-World War II. He’s an elusive man as to the details of his life,” he said.

Mr Parsons fathered five children with his wife Vivian Wetmore Parsons, a fact little known to many who remember the man and his donkey. Sylvia Davidson, his only living child, shared her memories of her father with The Bee recently. Now 97 years old and living in Trumbull with her husband of nearly 75 years, Howard Davidson, 96, Mrs Davidson and her daughter, Betsy Sword of Monroe, confirmed that there was a lot of truth in most of the stories told about Birdsey Parsons.

“Mother and father were separated for many years, soon after Bradford’s birth,” recalled Mrs Davidson. Birdsey Parsons’ children were Isabelle, Sylvia, Ellen, Frances, and Bradford. “I don’t ever remember him living at home with us. He always said he was a farmer, and he did own property,” she said.

“Home” for the five Parsons children was a house on Riverside Road, across from Cherry Street in Sandy Hook, where Mrs Parsons and her children lived until Sylvia was a young teen.

“I don’t know where my father lived when we kids were small. He never worked, he didn’t support us. My mother took in laundry for prominent families in town. It was hard work, scrubbing by hand. He would stop by sometimes and play with us kids, and my mother would fix a big dinner,” Mrs Davidson remembered, “and he worked now and then at the store in Sandy Hook. Then occasionally there would be a treat, cookies or something from there.”

The family was desperately poor, despite Mrs Parsons’ hard work. Birdsey Parsons’ brother, Hubert, would sometimes send the family gift boxes of clothing and food, but Mrs Davidson remembers walking from Sandy Hook to Hawley School on Church Hill Road, with only a layer of cardboard lining shoes riddled with holes.

Her father did work at the Plastic Moulding Company, she said, and as Mr Stokes remembered, he would only work until he reached the point at which he would have to pay taxes. Then he would quit.

Her father was different from the rest of the family even at a young age, Mrs Davidson believes. “Somewhere along the way, something happened,” she said.

“Birdsey was only 7 or 8 years old when his mother died,” Betsy Sword interjected. “I remember my mother telling me that her dad had it rough. His dad remarried and moved away. We don’t actually know who raised Birdsey,” said Mrs Sword. The family has always guessed that it was a relative with a farm, sparking in Birdsey Parsons a lifelong love for animals and the earth.

“That’s right,” Mrs Davidson said. “He did have money from his family, and stocks and bonds and cash. That’s how he bought property,” she said. So far as she knows, the money was gone through quickly during Birdsey Parsons’ lifetime, possibly early in his marriage. “We never saw any of it,” she said.

Mr Forbell’s mother, Charlotte, was a good friend to Birdsey Parsons, he said, and he believes that Mr Parsons was considered to be quite intelligent and well spoken. Rumors have floated around that Birdsey Parsons may have attended Yale University.

“He was not college educated,” said Mrs Davidson, and it was Birdsey Parsons’ brother Hubert who went to Yale and became a well-respected engineer and botanist.

“One of his sisters went on to music school, and another sister went to one of the prestigious women’s schools of the times, maybe Vassar,” Mrs Davidson said. “Birdsey could have gone to college, but he chose not to.”

Mr Davidson came to know Birdsey after he married Sylvia, and remembered his father-in-law as coming across as college educated. “I can see why people might have thought so,” Mr Davidson said, and added, “He had the ability to rattle off information like a philosopher. He was noted for his philosophy that he spread around town, to live very simply, and he was sort of a walking Farmer’s Almanac.”

For whatever reasons, said Mrs Davidson, “[My father] never grew up and became responsible.”

Divorce was not an option for Mrs Parsons, despite her husband’s lack of support, said Mrs Sword. “At that time, divorce wasn’t really an accepted thing, so the family just struggled on,” she said.

Never A Bad Word

Despite her husband’s irresponsibility, Mrs Parsons did not bad-mouth him to the children, said Mrs Davidson.

“My mother never made any comments to us about my dad. We felt sorry for him. We all were together, and he was alone,” she said.

“I never heard a bad word against him,” agreed Mr Davidson. “Everyone accepted him as he was.”

Wherever he was and whatever he was doing, Mrs Davidson said that her father at some point wrote and published several pieces of music. “I don’t know where he learned to write music, or who was handling his money. The family did have money, so I guess that it wouldn’t have been unusual for him to have had music lessons as a boy. He always thought he would make it big with his music, I think. I don’t know if someone was taking his money to publish them and leading him on, or what, though,” she said. Whether or not her father sold the sheet music plus hard cider in the days of Prohibition is not something of which she is aware, she said.

Her father may have authored the essay on conservation, but Mrs Davidson did not recall having ever seen such a pamphlet. But her father had a love of the outdoors, and she said that it was highly likely that he had written such a piece.

“He believed in living simply, I know that,” she said.

The family’s woes came to an end when Mrs Davidson was a young teenager.

“Mrs Curtis [of the Philo Curtis family, but not Mrs Philo Curtis] lived in town and she said her daughter, Mrs Hawley, in Stepney, needed help. So my mother and us five children moved to Stepney to this huge house. That house is still there,” said Mrs Davidson, “just before the Methodist Church.”

The five Parsons children continued their educations in Stepney and at Central High School in Bridgeport, with Isabelle and Sylvia especially excelling. Life was good, at last, for the abandoned Parsons family.

“Mrs Curtis would even bring our whole family to her summer property on the beach at Fort Trumbull, and to Florida, where my mother would care for Mrs Hawley’s whole family,” Mrs Davidson said. Their mother’s employer made sure that the family was well cared for, said Mrs Davidson. And occasionally, after the move, Birdsey Parsons would visit for a special occasion.

The hard early life, however, took a toll on Vivian Wetmore Parsons, and in 1942, she died at the age of 50.

“My mother gave us loving support,” Mrs Davidson said, “and she taught us a great respect for others.” So it is not surprising that the children, particularly the girls, continued to remain in contact with and care for their father as he aged.

“Birdsey did not take care of himself when living alone. I remember once, after I was married, going to Sandy Hook to visit him one Christmas. Howard drove us there and my father was living in a little shack [one of several he built on his property]. We brought him Christmas dinner and when I got to the door, we could hear crying and crying. I told him, ‘We’re not going to stay,’” recalled Mrs Davidson tearfully, “but here is Christmas dinner.”

Beginning in 1959, the Parsons family held reunions at Putnam Park in Redding, and later at Indian Wells Park in Shelton, Mrs Davidson said, and her father was always a participant.

“He played baseball until he was unable to, and then he umpired the family games for us,” she said.

Mixed Feelings

The grandchildren and great-grandchildren revered Birdsey Parsons, said Mrs Sword.

“We were far removed in time [from the difficult times he put his family through] and we loved him for his stories,” she said.

The latter part of Birdsey Parsons’ life was probably better for him, surmised Mrs Davidson. “He was with family. His last years he was taken care of by Ellen. He was kept well,” she said.

The children pitched in to keep their father involved in the family as he grew older. He danced at his great-granddaughter’s wedding, traveling with Sylvia and Howard to Maine for the occasion, and he visited New York City with the couple in the 1970s.

“He worried about the great height of the buildings and what would hold them up so that they didn’t fall down on us,” Mr Davidson chuckled. “And when we were on the ferry, going over to Staten Island, and to see the Statue of Liberty, he was worried how deep the water was. He was a real country boy,” he said.

“Mrs Curtis gave so much to this woman [Vivian Parsons] and her children,” said Mrs Sword, an amazing example of someone from the outside stepping in to change another’s life. “Her intervention was the basis of a beautiful life for the Parsons children,” she said. It was this example, Mr Parson’s granddaughter believes, that gave the Parsons children the ability to care for Birdsey Parsons as he aged.

“Ambivalent” is how Mrs Davidson sums up her feelings for Birdsey Parsons. Feelings of grief for the often absent father and for his life, and feelings of distress over hardships his immaturity caused the family and her mother, mix together with her mother’s lessons of caring for all, no matter what.

He did not help his family financially, and they suffered greatly early on because of his carelessness, said Mrs Sword. But even without his meaning to, he eventually helped his grandchildren. In 1967, he sold his five acres on Jeremiah Road to Betsy and Carl Sword, who in turn sold the property.

“That money served as seed money to send all four of our children to college,” declared Mrs Sword.

And oddly enough, a family attending Mrs Sword’s church in Monroe came upon hard times and was “adopted” by Mrs Sword.

“Eventually the family was able to move into a home again, with our help,” Mrs Sword said. The house was in Sandy Hook, near her mother’s childhood home. “It is almost like that caring for my mother’s family by Mrs Curtis came full circle,” she said.

Birdsey Parsons died in 1979, and is buried in Zoar Cemetery, as is Vivian Wetmore Parsons.

Birdsey Parsons, said Howard Davidson, epitomizes the essence of America.

“You can be totally different and still not be a detriment to society. Just by being Birdsey, he contributed to the Sandy Hook community. To the community, he was an unconventional character, not the irresponsible family man he was when the children were growing up. He was a citizen of the town and recognized by townspeople who respected his individuality, ” noted Mr Davidson. “He left a legacy to say, ‘We’re not all going to live the same kind of life.’”