Waitsfield woman was an artist, scholar, educator and activist
A hawk circled over Berlin Hill on June 2, 2022, as Barbara Elsbeth was received by the ancestors, through rays of golden light and the bluest sky she had ever seen. Radiant, having dispatched her pain as baked earth effigy into the arms of willow that had revealed visions before, water to cleanse and air to clear. Barbara was born on August 30, 1939, on the eve of a seismic global shift, to Edward Francis and Anne Blake Smith of Parkchester, in the Bronx, New York City. Premature at birth, she was a 1939 New York World’s Fair “incubator baby” on display at the World of Tomorrow pavilion, a testament to her tenacious nature. She attended St. Helena High School, where the humble demeanor and frayed vestments of Monsignor Scanlon left a lasting impression, as did time volunteering on the St. John’s Guild Floating Hospital for the city’s poor and underserved. Receiving a degree in occupational therapy from Mount Mary College in Milwaukee, she went on to become director of OT at Rhode Island State Hospital and would later work in hospice and eldercare. Barbara was active in the Catholic Worker Movement, civil rights, feminism and opposition to the war in Vietnam, and she greatly admired Rev. Daniel Berrigan, Dr. Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day and Pete Seeger. As a young mother in Woodbury, Conn., Barbara would pack her kids into the car with handmade signs and visit the federal prison in Danbury to demand the release of the Berrigan brothers, and she regularly brought the family to vigils protesting the Vietnam War. She settled in Waitsfield, Vt., in 1975 and raised her four children, Christopher, Anne, Paul and Peter, in a creativity-filled environment that carried into their adult lives: art, literature, song, sewing, puppet making, gardening, and all the kids grinding grain for bread, pizza and bagels and shaping their own small raisin pies. Barbara became involved in education as her children came of school age. She taught in Montessori schools, conducted workshops and strove to steer public school systems in a more progressive direction. She received her MA in arts education at the University of Vermont and taught art at Harwood Union High School, and is remembered as warm and accepting, treating each student with dignity. She made learning about art an intellectual pursuit, as well as a tactile and expressive one. Later, she conducted college workshops…
Waitsfield woman was an artist, scholar, educator and activist
A hawk circled over Berlin Hill on June 2, 2022, as Barbara Elsbeth was received by the ancestors, through rays of golden light and the bluest sky she had ever seen. Radiant, having dispatched her pain as baked earth effigy into the arms of willow that had revealed visions before, water to cleanse and air to clear. Barbara was born on August 30, 1939, on the eve of a seismic global shift, to Edward Francis and Anne Blake Smith of Parkchester, in the Bronx, New York City. Premature at birth, she was a 1939 New York World’s Fair “incubator baby” on display at the World of Tomorrow pavilion, a testament to her tenacious nature. She attended St. Helena High School, where the humble demeanor and frayed vestments of Monsignor Scanlon left a lasting impression, as did time volunteering on the St. John’s Guild Floating Hospital for the city’s poor and underserved. Receiving a degree in occupational therapy from Mount Mary College in Milwaukee, she went on to become director of OT at Rhode Island State Hospital and would later work in hospice and eldercare. Barbara was active in the Catholic Worker Movement, civil rights, feminism and opposition to the war in Vietnam, and she greatly admired Rev. Daniel Berrigan, Dr. Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day and Pete Seeger. As a young mother in Woodbury, Conn., Barbara would pack her kids into the car with handmade signs and visit the federal prison in Danbury to demand the release of the Berrigan brothers, and she regularly brought the family to vigils protesting the Vietnam War. She settled in Waitsfield, Vt., in 1975 and raised her four children, Christopher, Anne, Paul and Peter, in a creativity-filled environment that carried into their adult lives: art, literature, song, sewing, puppet making, gardening, and all the kids grinding grain for bread, pizza and bagels and shaping their own small raisin pies. Barbara became involved in education as her children came of school age. She taught in Montessori schools, conducted workshops and strove to steer public school systems in a more progressive direction. She received her MA in arts education at the University of Vermont and taught art at Harwood Union High School, and is remembered as warm and accepting, treating each student with dignity. She made learning about art an intellectual pursuit, as well as a tactile and expressive one. Later, she conducted college workshops…