24 Graenest Ridge Road

Wilton's 2018 historic resource inventory lists exactly one house on Graenest Ridge Road, a Chateauesque pile of 1924 at No. 9, but the road's name is older than any pavement on it. Grace Knight Schenck, head of surgical nurses at Roosevelt Hospital in New York, married Dr. Ernest Schenck in 1909 and moved to Wilton in 1911. Together they bought a former squabbery known as the Solomon Farm and renamed it Graenest, folding their two first names into one word. Grace led Wilton's women in the Connecticut Women's Suffrage Association from 1911, ran the Women's Land Army through the First World War, and sat as Justice of the Peace in 1920. No. 24 came later, in 1957: a post-and-beam house under a shallow shed roof, three bedrooms, two fireplaces, 2.32 acres. The squab farm is gone. The name it was given is still on the mailbox.