Ann Shattuck Smith June 23, 1920 – May 06, 2019 Share this obituary Sign Guestbook| Memorial Donation Ann Shattuck Smith, 98, died Monday, May 6, 2019, in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she had been a longtime resident of Westminster Canterbury of the Blue Ridge. Her passing was unexpected but peaceful — fitting for one who lived a long life in gentleness, creativity and grace. The second child of Beatrice Freshney Shattuck and Edward Whittemore Shattuck, Ann was born in Birmingham, Michigan in 1920.
With her parents and her brother Ben, Ann lived a peripatetic childhood, her father’s business taking them from Detroit to Oklahoma City, Chicago, New York, Albany, and Springfield. Her parents’ roots, however, ran deep in the village of Alexandria, New Hampshire, and an 18th century farmhouse to which they returned every summer, delighting in a life among the hills without electricity, telephone, or indoor plumbing. Ann and Ben were given to understand that, wherever they might live from year to year, this was their true, ancestral home — and each of them, when their working lives were over, returned here to nourish and extend their own roots into the granite.
A graceful natural athlete who grew up swimming, sailing, playing tennis, skiing, and climbing her beloved Mount Cardigan, Ann met her future husband one summer when he, a native of Fall River, Massachusetts working his way through Harvard, was in Alexandria for a summer job. His name was Anthony Nelson (Tony) Smith, and — the Great Depression and the Second World War intervening in their romance — they married some twenty years later. In the meantime, Ann finished high school in Concord, New Hampshire, graduated from Connecticut College, and spent a year at Dartmouth training as a medical technologist.
While Ann spent the war years in Boston, working in a hematology lab at Children’s Hospital, Tony, who’d enlisted and trained in the ski-troops of the 10th Mountain Division, wound up as a medical technician, a Sergeant, at a hospital in France. After the war they reconnected and resumed their romance, and married in 1953 on the terrace of her parents’ New Hampshire farmhouse. From here, they moved south to Raleigh, North Carolina, where Tony opened a branch office of what is now the Amica insurance company, and Ann went to work at Rex Hospital.
Ann had a daughter, Barbie, in 1955; and a son, Chip, in 1956. Ann never sat still, except to read or knit. She’d sit cross-legged on the floor and braid a woolen rug that grew ring by ring around her, like Rapunzel braiding her hair, or sit with a wooden frame and make a picture on burlap, hooking smoothly and endlessly until the picture became a rug, sometimes a very large rug that required years of design and patient hooking.
While the rest of the family watched TV, she spun wool into yarn on a spinning-wheel; and the hum of the wheel or the click-clacking of her knitting needles became the soft percussion to the soundtrack of their home life. She braided or hooked every rug on their floors, always had a jigsaw puzzle going on the coffee table, and her knitting kept them all in sweaters. She and the children spent their summers on “the hill” in New Hampshire.
Like her mother before her, Ann was active and energetic all her life. Even into her early nineties, when Tony had passed and Ann spent her summers with her son in New Hampshire, she was walking up the Mt. Cardigan Road to where the power-lines went across – no easy climb, even for the fit – her walking poles click-clocking along with her steps.
When her children were in junior-high, Ann went back to school, studying library science at the University of North Carolina. She became a librarian at NC State, this second career ending when both she and Tony retired in the early 1980s. She loved libraries, literature, and children, and spent the Sunday mornings of her Raleigh years working in the library of the First Presbyterian Church.
After retirement, she and Tony bought a house in Alexandria, just up the road from where her brother Ben had settled; and while Ben became a Selectman in the town, Ann devoted herself to the village historical society. Tony died ten years before she did. In the years of his decline, when they’d moved into the Westminster Canterbury retirement community in Charlottesville, Virginia, she became his guardian, caregiver, shepherd, and rock; but once she had seen him through his own difficult passage, she was able to relax — to depend more and more upon her daughter Barbie and son-in-law Don Selby (who live in Charlottesville), and to allow herself to rest, to forget, to dream.
Her mind began to waver before her body did, but her sunny disposition never deserted her. She came in the end to live entirely in the moment – a Zen-like mode that many people spend their lives striving for – and she enjoyed herself, living life in a narrow compass and in the present tense. In her waning years she revisited the books and characters of her childhood: Eeyore, Poo, the Mole and the Water Rat and Mr. Toad – characters as comforting to old age as they are to youth.
She passed peacefully, with Barbie and Don at her side. Ann is survived by daughter Barbara Smith Selby and son-in-law Donald E. Selby of Charlottesville; and son Charles E. Smith of Murrells Inlet, South Carolina and Alexandria, New Hampshire. Ann Shattuck Smith was a wife of 55 years to her beloved Tony, and a devoted mother to her children.
She was also a career woman and craftswoman, homemaker, artist and athlete; and she was, first, last and always, a loving, gentle, convivial and boon companion on life’s way. May her memory continue to be so, to those who loved her. A memorial service will be held at 3:00 p.m. on Thursday, May 23, 2019 in the Chapel at Westminster Canterbury of the Blue Ridge in Charlottesville.
We will see Ann’s ashes returned to the landscape she loved. In lieu of flowers, memorials are suggested to the Westminster Canterbury of the Blue Ridge (WCBR) Foundation, 250 Pantops Mountain Road, Charlottesville, Va 22911; or the Newfound Lake Region Association, 10 N Main Street, Unit 1, Bristol, NH 03222.
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