The Oaks

379 Algonquin Road, Fairfield, Connecticut

Built in 1908, for Jonathan Godfrey (1857-1949), and his first wife Mary Elizabeth Giles (1858-1916). Overlooking the 17th and 18th fairways of the Brooklawn Country Club, it was designed by Mrs Godfrey's relation, the young society architect Francis Burrall Hoffman, Jr., and the grounds were laid out by the noted landscape architect, Marian Cruger Coffin. Mrs Godfrey (great-granddaughter of General Aquila Giles, of the Continental Army) died eight years after it was finished and in 1919 Jonathan Godfrey - President of the Compressed Paper Box Co., Bridgeport - remarried Estelle DeWolf Mudge who was just 18-years old and 44-years his junior....

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This house is best associated with...

Jonathan Godfrey

President of the Compressed Paper Box Co., Bridgeport, Connecticut

1857-1949

Mary (Giles) Godfrey

Mrs Mary Elizabeth (Giles) Godfrey

1858-1916

Edgar Webb Bassick

President of the Bassick Company, Bridgeport, Connecticut

1872-1948

Grace (Morris) Bassick

Mrs Grace Elizabeth (Morris) Bassick

1875-1957

By 1922, the second Mrs Godfrey had left her elderly husband amid rumors that she had become romantically involved with the grandson, Count Edmundo Ruspoli-Poggio Suasa, of his first wife's first cousin. Six years later (1928), Godfrey sold The Oaks to Edgar Webb Bassick, President of the Bassick Company, who a few years before had given his parents' historic home, Lindencroft, to the city and built the Bassick High School in its place.

It remained in the Bassick family up until 1952 when the by then elderly and widowed Mrs Bassick is said to have sold the property to Albert and Victoria Ekstrom. They remained here until the 1980s when they sold the house to someone who wanted to divide it into apartments. Neighbors objected to the proposal and the next owner demolished it, building seven new houses in its place along the newly laid out Eagle Lane.