RIDGEFIELD -- On Tuesday, town leaders were confident they'd finally worked out a deal to save the Nehemiah Keeler House on Ridgebury Road from demolition. It's a house that has stood in place for nearly all of the town's 300-year history.

On Thursday, with a bulldozer scooping up the remains of the house, Caitlin Keeler walked up and asked for a piece of shingle as a memento.
"I grew up in this house,'' said Keeler, 19, the last in a long line of Keelers to do so. She now lives nearby.

The decision by homeowner Robert Martinsen to tear down the house dismayed town officials.

"It's so sad,'' First Selectman Rudy Marconi said. "What a loss. We did everything we could to save it.''

"We're beyond surprised,'' said Gary Singer, president of the Ridgefield Historical Society. "We're astonished. Flabbergasted.''

Martinsen, who bought the house in 2005, was unavailable for comment Thursday. His attorney, Robert Murray of Stamford, declined to comment.

But Martinsen made plans last autumn to tear down the house after no one responded to his offer to donate it to the town. He received a demolition permit Oct. 30.

That information sent the town scrambling to save the house, one of the oldest in Ridgefield. In November, Marconi said he and Martinsen had reached a deal to save the house and move it to another location. The town would abate the $8,000 in taxes Martinsen owned on the property.

Marconi said that began the process of finding the best piece of land in the Ridgebury area for the relocation. He said he got a price from one firm to move the house, and a second price from a company that would dismantle the house and rebuild it.


He also talked to the area utility and cable TV companies about the logistics of moving the house. He found people in town willing to donate tens of thousands of dollars to rescue the home and groups interested in using it once it was restored.

All this took time, he said, but Martinsen was clearly aware the process was moving forward.
"It wasn't as if it was people sitting around saying, 'We'll get to it, we'll get to it,''' Marconi said.
By Tuesday, Marconi and Singer said, it seemed like all the ducks were in a row. On Wednesday, they expected to sign the papers transferring ownership of the home to the town.

But Wednesday morning the bulldozer arrived, and Marconi got a call that Martinsen was tearing the house down.
"It was like a punch to the stomach,'' he said.

The home was a Colonial saltbox. It may have been built around 1717 to 1720, Singer said -- just a decade or so after the town was founded in 1708.

"My great-great-grandfather lived there,'' said Robert Keeler Reynolds of Danbury.

Reynolds said the house was built in traditional style, with a huge chimney in the center of the house heating all the rooms. That chimney was all that was left standing Thursday.

Singer said that in recent years Ridgefield has tried to be a model town for historic preservation.
"We want the town to look the same 100, 200, 300 years from now as it does today,'' he said.

The Keeler House was part of that history, in place when Ridgebury was the rural, agricultural community on the northern edge of town.

"The Keeler House has been there for the entire time,'' Singer said.

What was so painful about the loss, he said, was that the town was on the verge of saving the house.
"We thought we'd have a celebration,'' he said. "Instead, we had a wake.''

Contact Robert Miller
at bmiller@newstimes.com
or at 203-731-3345.