Caroline Stokes—

Newtown’s Woman Of Change, Changes With The Times

By Nancy K. Crevier

“You pass through different phases in life, and you have to accept change,” is Caroline Stoke’s philosophical outlook on her impending move to North Carolina, after 64 years spent living mostly in Sandy Hook, and more recently in Heritage Village, Southbury. “I’m open to change,” she said, as a friend began to pack up books and other memorabilia in her apartment on Wednesday, September 29.

Change was in the winds for the newly married Caroline and Robert Stokes from New Jersey, as they drove down Route 6 one day in the summer of 1946. Her husband, newly discharged from the service, was on his way to an interview at Plastic Moulding in Sandy Hook, and anticipating a move, they were seeking a rental home.

As they came down Mt Pleasant Road into the center of town, she fell in love with the scenic village laid out before her.

“That first view I had of Newtown is still there, thank goodness,” said Mrs Stokes. “When we have house guests, we always go up to Castle Hill to look at that Main Street view,” she said.

She had no idea that day what a large part she would play in the history of the C.H. Booth Library when the young couple stopped there for information about the town.

“Sarah Mitchell was the librarian then,” recalled Mrs Stokes, “and she sent us up to Mike Crowe, by the monument, where he had his realty office in his home. He didn’t have anything for us, so we put an ad in The Newtown Bee, and got four answers.”

Their first home was a small house on the corner of Riverside Road and Cherry Street.

“My husband could walk to work, and since we had no car then, we walked everywhere. I met my neighbors through the children I met walking to the store every day for bread and such,” said Mrs Stokes.

At Warner’s Store, she would blend into the background to listen in to the conversations of the men gathered there. “Sitting around on nail kegs were these old-timers, chewing the fat. They didn’t pay any attention to me, they didn’t even know they were drawing me in. Women weren’t supposed to have opinions, I guess is what they thought. Now Hawley Warner, who I think was the third generation of storeowners there, had the gift of gab. He would promote discussions. A lot of ideas were evoked from those discussions,” said Mrs Stokes, and it was in that general store that the seeds of interest in her new community were planted.

Although she had no children yet of her own, she joined the Mothers’ Club.

“They were a community-minded group of young women, and I liked that,” she said. It was the Mothers’ Club, said Mrs Stokes, that convinced the local school board of a need for kindergarten, an idea that was implemented for the first time in 1948. Trained as an elementary level teacher at Winthrop College in North Carolina, Mrs Stokes had taught for one year in Manhattan before her marriage. She became Newtown’s first kindergarten teacher, teaching out of a basement room in the St Rose Community Center.

Immediate Connections

Robert and Caroline Stokes found immediate connection at Newtown Congregational Church as well, where minister Paul Cullens, the founder of Newtown Boy Scouts, quickly drew the couple into the fold.

“He was an amazing man,” said Mrs Stokes, who went on to teach Sunday School at the church and serve as Sunday School superintendent. Rev Cullens’s wife, Agnes Cullens, also immediately pegged the young woman as the perfect match with Betty Lou Osborne, as a co-leader of Newtown’s early Girl Scout troop.

“‘Here is your co-leader,’ is how she introduced us on the street,” laughed Mrs Stokes. And though the two were quite different in personality — “Betty is a wonderful homebody and loves her farm, and I’m never staying put,” said Mrs Stokes — that was the beginning of a lifelong friendship.

The women quickly discovered that they had a commonality, recalled Mrs Osborne. “Caroline Johnson Stokes came to town newly married to Robert P. Stokes, recently in the Naval Reserve after Pacific service, and I was newly married, also, at the time, to Navy veteran Jim Osborne, Jr.”

The two have remained fast and true friends, said Mrs Osborne, offering thoughts about her “dear friend of 60-plus years” relocating to an area many miles away from Sandy Hook.

“As age grows and some memories flow away, the very old memories grow stronger … All Caroline and I need to say to each other is, ‘Remember that Halloween night when….?’ and she’ll smile and relate that memory. We will still have those memories always, and so will a few of our old friends,” Mrs Osborne said, and added, “We had a great time building a lifetime of friendship — something to treasure.”

Following her original year of teaching, Mrs Stokes returned to school and received her master’s in social work at NYU. Working mainly with families on the Lower East Side of the City, she quickly became aware of the great need for education and for a greater interest in women’s health. It was there that she developed a devotion to community needs and women’s needs, a dedication that she used to benefit women and children in Connecticut.

“Times were changing when I moved to Sandy Hook,” commented Mrs Stokes. “It used to be that women only worked when economic reasons forced them to do so, but the war had forced women into the work world. And I think that it was liberating. It meant that women realized they could work both in and away from home.”

The Mothers’ Group was civic minded, but Mrs Stokes felt that more could be done. She discovered the League of Women Voters in Danbury and, realizing the need for a branch in Newtown, she founded the Newtown League of Women Voters.

“I discovered that as a group, the League of Women Voters was a way for women to become informed on state and local issues.,” Mrs Stokes said, “and I remained active with them up through about the 1970s, I think.”

It was around 1948, she believes, that the League pushed for zoning and reassessment of properties in town, and in 1950, Newtown adopted zoning regulations for the first time. The League also united to support a regional high school with Southbury, Bethlehem, and Monroe, a stand which led to great divisiveness within the town “and some juicy meetings” for two or three years, until Newtown eventually pulled out of the pact.

“We newcomers could see that the area children could be better served through combining what were then small schools, but there was a lot of opposition from the farmers and people who had grown up here, and who didn’t want to send their children to school in Southbury [where the land for the regional school had been selected],” she said. That League-supported venue failed, but its members were successful in organizing studies that resulted in changes to the educational system, and to the consideration of the need to maintain an agricultural school in a town that was rapidly turning away from agriculture.

Less argumentative than the regional school issue, but still a thorn in the side of many Newtowners, said Mrs Stokes, was the League of Women Voters’ program to name roads and to post road signs.

“It was a touchy social thing, but ultimately it was a successful program. And out of this came two sets of town maps,” she said. The League also published a history of Newtown, Newtown Connecticut Past and Present, in 1955, updated in 1975 and 1989.

Women may not have been welcomed to pipe in to the general store impromptu talks, but Mrs Stokes did find it “illuminating” to come to Newtown where, unlike her hometown in New Jersey, women were speaking up at town meetings. What she did find shocking, on the other hand, was the fact that Connecticut remained the only one of 48 states in which birth control remained illegal.

“My own mother in New Jersey was a member of a group that was encouraging women to use birth control, so of course, I had heard about it. To find out that in Connecticut women could not access birth control was unthinkable to me,” she said. Over the years she worked hard on the state level, she said, to change that.

“We were not popular, but we were persistent, and willing to stand up for an issue,” she recalled.

Far less controversial was her inspiration to start a garden club. “We all lived in this lovely area and had gardens, but we needed to learn. I knew that in New Jersey there were garden clubs, so a bunch of us ladies got together and formed the Garden Club of Newtown. The purpose of a garden club is to share knowledge so we can be more productive. And a lot of talking takes place when you are weeding with friends,” Mrs Stokes said.

“I met Caroline Stokes at a meeting of the Garden Club of Newtown the first month that I moved to Newtown,” said Ginnie Carey, “and she welcomed me in the same warm way that I am sure she has welcomed many other newcomers. She swiftly introduced me to the town and the many activities that she was involved in and thought I might enjoy as well, and was a marvelous source of information about the history of the town.”

Eventually, the two women were startled to discover that they were cousins.

“Caroline’s grandfather and my father’s grandfather were brothers,” laughed Ms Carey. “Caroline has been a wonderful traveling companion in the intervening years, willing to go anywhere and interested in learning about everything and always telling everyone we meet about Newtown, and what a very special place it is. I will miss her,” said Ms Carey, “as will the many others whose lives she has touched.”

The Garden Club of Newtown was successful enough that the women later formed a group intended to benefit the “gentlemen” of town.

“The Horticulture Club of Newtown met deliberately at night so that men could come, something that I suspect has been forgotten…,” Mrs Stokes said.

Dedicated To Newtown

With yet more energy, Mrs Stokes turned her attentions to the libraries in town.

“The Sandy Hook Library was a precious little group of Sandy Hook ladies. But I realized that the C.H. Booth Library could offer so much more,” said Mrs Stokes, who was asked to serve on the board of the Sandy Hook Library, and gently convinced the group that the Main Street library could better serve the entire community. “I helped close up and move the Sandy Hook Library’s collection to Main Street,” she said.

She served on the Board of Trustees for C.H. Booth Library for many years. Upon her resignation from the board, she was asked to take on the position as the library’s first curator. The C.H. Booth Library became the wellspring of still many more cherished friendships over six decades.

“My greatest memories of Caroline, beside her friendship and willingness to share her memories of mid-19th Century Newtown with me, are associated with her curatorial work at the library,” said Town Historian Dan Cruson. He had tried to organize the library’s holdings of Newtown memorabilia. “This was in the late 1970s and with a young family and developing teaching career, I could not do justice to the collection.

“Since I was on the library Board of Trustees then,” he continued, “I suggested to the rest of the board [on which Caroline also served] that they create a position of curator to organize and preserve the collections. The board agreed and in 1982 [Caroline Stokes] became the first curator, serving until just a year ago.”

Without her work, said Mr Cruson, many items in the collection would no longer exist and many others would be lost to the library’s patrons.

Her position as curator also allowed her to dip into the rich cultural well of Newtown, opening up the library to regular exhibitions by area artists. Equally intriguing to Mrs Stokes was the number of Newtown authors and illustrators. It was through her efforts that these writers and artists were integrated into one collection, now located on the third floor of the library.

Mrs Stokes also organized the Book Menders group, to properly repair volumes in the library’s collections, a group that Booth Reference Librarian Andrea Zimmerman said saves the library a huge amount of money each year.

Mary Maki, president of Friends of the C.H. Booth Library, agreed that Mrs Stokes’ contributions to the library were priceless.

“Of all the gifts Caroline gave Newtown, I most appreciate her foresight and diligence in acquiring and organizing the Julia Brush genealogy collection. It took countless volunteer hours to transport boxes of papers to the library, where she supervised qualified people to sort, organize, and list every piece, making the Booth Library’s genealogy collection unique and utilized by researchers from all over the United States,” said Ms Maki.

Although she periodically took a break from several of the groups she had instigated to raise her two daughters, Bonnie and Nancy, Mrs Stokes remained dedicated to the town. When her children became teenagers, she found herself once again available to work, and for several years taught third grade at Hawley School.

For more than 50 years, Caroline and Robert Stokes lived happily in “Grey Patch” their home at 89 Church Hill Road. “I never felt there was that division people spoke of, between Sandy Hook and ‘the town.’ We loved it there,” she said.

When her husband died eight years ago, she had hoped to stay in her little home in Sandy Hook, but it became clear that the two acres and house were not manageable on her own. Her daughter, Bonnie, encouraged her to look at a place in Heritage Village.

“I walked through, and knew it could be my home. But I came with some misgivings about leaving my home of so many years, of course, ” she admitted.

Despite her advancing years, the move to Southbury did not curtail her activities in Newtown. Mrs Stokes has remained an active member with many of the organizations she nurtured from their infancies.

She is proud of the changes that she helped bring to Newtown and Sandy Hook in her six decades here.

“I taught, I introduced the kindergarten concept to the town, I fought for a regional high school and then supported backing the new high school. I wanted people to become educated about education, so I guess these are some of my greatest contributions over the years,” she said.

 Mr Cruson has no doubts that Newtown and Connecticut are saying goodbye to a legacy.

“Caroline,” he said, “is the citizen of Newtown who is most responsible for saving Newtown’s history, both its material remains, and its more ephemeral memories.”

Mrs Stokes will be 90 years old in October, and the winds of change are rising once again. “I’ve always been encouraged to welcome change, and I haven’t had time to think about all I’ll miss about Newtown. Certainly I’ll miss the culture and the geography, the people, and the rural feel of this community.

“I’ll be dividing my time between two North Carolina residences, one by the mountains and one by the ocean. I’ll find something to enrich my days, I’m sure,” mused Mrs Stokes. “It’s new land to me, but I’ll find my way.”

The public is invited to attend a casual coffee and dessert reception for Caroline Stokes, Friday, October 15, between 1 and 3 pm, in the C.H. Booth Library meeting room.