Furnishing The Matthew Curtiss House

–– A Johnson Family Tradition

By Dottie Evans

On Thursday afternoon, November 20, Newtown Historical Society President Gordon Williams and Accessions Chairman Faith Gulick opened the front door of the Matthew Curtiss House to welcome two very special guests, Stanley King, 85, and his sister Irene King Coad, 88.

Perhaps it should have been the other way around, with the guests acting as the hosts.

Mr King and Mrs Coad had every right to feel at home there. This is because more than half the furnishings and antiques that now fill the society’s colonial Main Street museum came from their family’s ancestral home.

Ever since 1983 when Mr King and Mrs Coad began clearing out the Ezra L. Johnson homestead at 84 South Main Street, a steady stream of Johnson heirlooms have been given to the Newtown Historical Society.

These items include portraits, furniture, books, clothing, antique oil lamps, tin lanterns, children’s toys, dishes, scrapbooks, and personal items. Many had been preserved and documented through generations of Johnsons that reach all the way back to the progenitor, Ichabod Johnson, who was the first to settle in the south of Newtown early in the 18th Century.

As Ms Gulick led her two visitors around, she gestured frequently at portraits of their relatives adorning the museum walls.

“All the objects in the small birthing room off the kitchen, nearly everything in the dining room ––half the furnishings in this entire house –– were given to us by your family,” Ms Gulick said.

Mr Williams added there were almost no words to express how grateful the Newtown Historical Society was for these gifts.

“We can only promise to do our best to take good care of everything. Every Newtown resident owes you a debt of thanks,” he said.

Mrs Coad said she and her brother were only doing what their ancestors had always done. Preserve what was passed down, and try to keep all the family antiques together in one place where they could be seen and enjoyed.

The Johnsons Of South Main Street

Irene King Coad was the oldest, and Stanley was the third oldest, of the nine children born to Ruth Johnson King and Sereno King. A tenth child, Sarah Jane, was born before Irene but she died at birth.

“There were six boys and three girls, and all but one brother are still living,” Mrs Coad said.

Most of the Kings have since moved. Mrs Coad lives in Woodbury, and Stanley only recently left his Newtown home for Southbury. Little by little, as they have downsized, family members have donated items to the historical society –– most all were objects that once filled the handsome white farmhouse where Newtown’s famed historian Ezra L. Johnson was born in 1832.

Built in 1830 and reconstructed in 1876, the old house still stands proudly on its spacious lot, partially hidden from busy Route 25 behind a tall stand of pine trees, and enclosed on three sides by towering maples that were probably planted by Ezra L. Johnson himself.

The house is owned now by Leonard Manz, and the land around it is being subdivided for a housing development. An earlier Johnson house built in 1795 by Ezra H. Johnson once stood south of the 1830 house but it burned to the ground in the 1920s.

Irene King Coad could not have known her great- grandfather Ezra because he died the year before she was born. But she remembers his lifetime companion, Jane Eliza Johnson. Irene King was a child of 6 on October 16, 1922, when her great-grandmother died at the age of 85. She frequently visited her great-grandmother in the old farmhouse.

“I can still see her sitting in the living room, she was always there,” Mrs Coad said.

“She used to tell me not to eat the pears off the ground from an old pear tree in the yard. She said they weren’t fit to eat. But I’d pick one up anyway and eat it on the way home. They always tasted delicious. I liked to go over there and visit my Aunt Kate, who gave me sugar cookies,” she recalled.

Mrs Coad remembers a time when farmland owned by the Johnson family sprawled along both sides of the Danbury/Bridgeport road [now Route 25], and she recalls watching when the dirt road was paved, “turned into a highway.”

When Ezra L. Johnson died in 1914, Jane Eliza Johnson took up the task of editing the History of Newtown that her husband had labored over for nearly 50 years. It was she who added the 150 pages of genealogical data that has proven an invaluable research tool despite the fact that no dates were included.

As Mrs Coad toured the Matthew Curtiss House with her brother, she shared many anecdotes and memories triggered by seeing these long-held family heirlooms once again.

Before the visit was over, she remarked that she had once brought her great-grandson to visit the Curtiss house. She wanted to show him what his ancestors had saved and passed on to the Newtown Historical Society for safekeeping.

 “Now that he’s a sophomore in high school, he’s getting his driver’s license. He’s really growing up fast. But he was very interested in seeing all these old family things,” she added.

Across nearly 11 generations of Johnsons, one wonders if any particular objects caught his eye: a pair of small, well-worn canvas buckle shoes that had been owned by his long-ago ancestor, Hannah Sanford Merritt; an accompanying note penned by her daughter stated that Hannah had owned these shoes in 1792, when she was a young girl of 17; or even a rather utilitarian-looking pewter and fabric ear trumpet “used by Hannah Merritt in her declining years between 1825 and 1835.”

Did the sight of these lovingly preserved objects once owned by an ancestor who lived nearly 200 years before give him an appreciation of continuity? Despite time passing, did he feel some sense of personal connection? Sixteen-year-olds generally don’t say, but it is the Johnson family way to share an appreciation for that connection with Newtown.