This art installation highlights the unique legacies of some of the innovative changemakers who played outsized roles in New Canaan’s rich history. It is a special tribute to the New Canaan Museum and Historical Society as it celebrates the opening of the new Jim and Dede Bartlett Center for History on the Museum’s campus. The Legacy building served as the home of both the Library and the Historical Society in its earliest years, a shared history that inspired this exhibit. The Library is pleased to honor this connection and highlight our aligned missions to be community centers for learning and knowledge.
New Canaan has a proud history as home to several visionaries whose wide-ranging influence defines them as changemakers on a local, national and international level. The six people shown here were New Canaanites who left long-lasting legacies. Some were well known, some had noteworthy ties to the Library. All are featured in the New Canaan Museum and Historical Society’s permanent display which opens to the public on June 1st.
Legacy is a thing born of change: as the Library embarks on a community conversation to identify this building’s new role in its service, we note with pride that our new library building is itself the latest changemaker in our community.
William Attwood
Born in Paris, William Attwood (1919-1989) grew up in New Canaan and studied history and politics at Princeton University. With the outbreak of World War II, he enlisted and worked in foreign intelligence. After the war, he stayed in Europe as editor of the Herald Tribune. Returning to the U.S., he was a speechwriter for President John Kennedy, an author and award-winning journalist, editor of foreign affairs for Look Magazine, editor in chief of Cowles Communication, and President of Newsday. He served as Ambassador to Guinea and then Kenya. A member of New Canaan's Town Council, he founded the New Canaan Coalition for Nuclear Arms Control. New Canaan Library is proud to present the Attwood Lecture which aims to present distinguished speakers in the fields of journalism, government, literature and politics in honor of William Attwood’s memory and lifetime achievements.
Learn more from the following items in the Library’s collection:
Making it through middle age : notes while in transit
The twilight struggle : tales of the Cold War
Alice King
Born in New York City, Alice Darracott Seabrook (1890-1979) moved to New Canaan after her 1911 marriage to Clarence King, a professor at Columbia University. They lived on a 30-acre property in Silvermine where they welcomed minorities and refugees who could not find housing. She was an actress, singer, poet, and novelist, served on the Board of Public Welfare, and was active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Realizing that Black people could not secure bank mortgages to purchase property, in 1941 she refurbished 12 houses on East Avenue and Cherry Street and first rented and then sold the homes to Black families, primarily parishioners from the Community Baptist Church.
Check out the following works by Alice King:
HELP WANTED: FEMALE: The Young Woman's Guide to Job-Hunting
Women and careers in the Big Apple : three decades of development : the story of the Alumnae Advisory Center
Career opportunities for women in business
Philip Johnson
Philip Johnson (1906-2005) was best known for his modern and postmodern architecture. Along with several of his Harvard colleagues who later became better known as The Harvard Five, , he made significant contributions to the Mid-Century Modern movement which was a significant source of inspiration for the New New Canaan library building. In 1949, he built The Glass House on Ponus Ridge Road in New Canaan, now a National Landmark, where he lived with his partner, David Whitney. The New Canaan library is proud to partner with The Glass House on a popular lecture series: The Glass House Presents, an ongoing series of live events that extends the site’s historic role as a gathering place for artists, architects, and other creative minds. This talk is co-hosted by New Canaan Library and supported in part by the New Canaan Community Foundation.
Learn more from the following items in the Library’s collection:
The architecture of Philip Johnson
Philip Johnson : a visual biography
Philip Johnson : the architect in his own words
The Man in the glass house : Philip Johnson, architect of the modern century
Max Perkins
Maxwell Evarts Perkins (1884-1947) graduated from Harvard and was hired as a reporter for the New York Times. In 1910, he married the writer Louise Saunders and they had five children. In 1917, while a book manager for Scribner’s Publishing, he met F. Scott Fitzgerald, and worked with him for three years on “This Side of Paradise.” Released in 1920, it was an enormous success. Promoted to editor, Perkins led Scribner’s transition into publishing contemporary novelists including Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. After World War I ended, he moved to 63 Park Street in New Canaan, now listed on the National Register.
Learn more from the following items in the Library’s collection:
Father to daughter : the family letters of Maxwell Perkins.
To loot my life clean : the Thomas Wolfe--Maxwell Perkins correspondence
As ever yours : the letters of Max Perkins and Elizabeth Lemmon
Ruth Lapham Lloyd
The daughter of Lewis and Antoinette Lapham, Ruth (1896-1984) had seven children in two marriages, including son Christopher Lloyd, an award-winning actor. With her husband, attorney Samuel Lloyd, the family moved into Waveny mansion full-time in 1940, and she inherited the entire property in 1956. A patron of the arts, she was known as New Canaan’s guardian angel, who donated land for the high school, sold her property to the Town for a park at a generously low price, helped to fund the Lewis Lapham wing of the New Canaan Library, and supported the Historical Society. She also established an endowment at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, allowing it to stay open late one night per week.
Learn more about Ruth Lapham Lloyd:
Ruth donates money to the New Canaan Library for expansion of building in 1978
Ruth’s Connection to the Carriage Barn:
Waveny History via The New Canaan Advertiser
Eliot Noyes
Considered the father of industrial design, Eliot Noyes (1910-1977) was an architect who graduated from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in 1932. He worked for his professors Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer in Cambridge, and then served as the Director for Industrial Design at Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1939-1946. Hired by IBM, he designed the Selectric Typewriter in 1961, and many corporate buildings, including the IBM Aerospace Research Center in Los Angeles. He also redesigned Mobil gas stations and fuel pumps. Married to architect Mary Duncan Weed (1915-2010), he raised his family in New Canaan in a modernist home that is now on the Connecticut Register of Historic Places. As an homage to his significant influence in the mid-century modern movement, Centerbrook architects designed the tall fireplace located on the Mezzanine Level of the Library as a replica of the one in the Noyes house.
Learn more from the following items in the Library’s collection:
First house : the grid, the figure and the void
a+u : Mid-century Modern Houses in New Canaan
Eliot Noyes : A pioneer of design and architecture in the age of American moderism