Jane was born in Bridgeport, Conn. on May 7, 1941, to Charles Robert Miller and Nanna Taylor and was the oldest of six children. She spent her childhood in Greenfield Hill in a house built by her great grandfather, playing with best friend Weegie Elwood and cousin Suzie MacQuarrie, and bicycling country roads, many of which bore the names of her ancestors. Money was always tight in her family, with her father trying to feed six children with one backhoe and a small dump truck, but Jane’s grandparents owned simple, rustic places that she enjoyed visiting.
As a child, she spent a few weeks every summer either roaming the woods of the mountaintop farm in the Catskills her father’s family had bought for a dollar an acre during the depression, or swimming in the waters off Long Island Sound in front of her grandmother Taylor’s beach-front bungalow. And as a teenager, she lived during the summer with her grandmother Taylor as a companion and helper in a one-room cabin on Hobbs Pond in Hope, Maine. To earn money at home, she babysat every weekend and worked in a department store and as a clerk in a boutique. In Maine, she raked blueberries on the islands of Penobscot Bay and picked crab meat at a seafood factory in Rockport.
Jane was the first grandchild in her family and was doted on, especially by her father after he returned from the War in the Pacific. On summer evenings, he would sit her on the back of his motorcycle and tell her to hold tight to his belt as they rode into Bridgeport for the stock car races. But that activity ended when Jane’s grandfather was killed in a motorcycle accident and Jane’s father acceded to his wife’s wishes that he get rid of his Harley Davidson for good. Jane was traumatized by her beloved grandfather’s sudden death and left with a lifelong antipathy toward motorcycles that resulted in an unbreakable resolve that no husband of hers would ever own one himself.
Jane met Marshall Eddy on a New Years Eve blind date when they were both in high school, and they dated on and off for six years. After Marshall joined the Army in 1959, Jane went to the University of Miami, where she formed a life-long friendship with Fort Lauderdale native Linda Ridings, an international solo synchronized swimming champion who ended up marrying Marshall’s brother David.
After one year of college, Jane ran out of money, so she moved in with her grandparents in New Smyrna Beach, took secretarial courses at a local community college, worked at the desk of the local YMCA, and taught sailing in small dinghies to little kids. During that time, a group of her grandparents’ friends entered her (without her knowledge) in a local beauty contest, and she ended up being voted “Miss New Smyrna Beach 1961.” That award automatically qualified her for the “Miss Florida East Coast” contest in Miami where she was voted “Miss Congeniality” by her fellow contestants. Her career as a beauty queen culminated in riding in the back of an open convertible as part of a parade that circled the track of the brand-new Daytona Speedway during its grand inaugural ceremony. In that event, which featured a woman representing every state of the union, she was arbitrarily given a sash identifying her as “Miss Arkansas” — a state she had never visited.
Marshall had enlisted for three years but his tour as a Russian linguist radio intercept operator on the East-West German border was extended by several months due to the Berlin Wall Crisis. Shortly after he returned from Germany and mustered out of the service in the Spring of 1962, he and Jane were married in the Greenfield Hill Congregational Church — the same church in which her parents and grandparents had been married. They spent the summer in Greenfield Hill, where Jane managed a vegetable stand and Marshall drove a dump truck and worked on road construction. That fall, they moved to Vermont so Marshall could attend Middlebury College. While there, Jane worked as a desk clerk at the Middlebury Inn, secretary in the Language Department, and typed papers for students and faculty members. An Army friend of Marshall’s who had also served on the border, Jim Kenney, lived in Essex Junction, and his family generously provided a frequently-visited home-away-from-home for Jane and Marshall during their three years at Middlebury.
In a Russian history class, Marshall met Mike Heaney, who became a lifelong friend. After college, Jane and Marshall moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, so Marshall could attend Law school on the new Cold War GI Bill, while Mike, like many of Marshall’s college classmates, went to Vietnam as a Lieutenant in the infantry. Halfway into his one-year tour, Mike was wounded in a fire fight in the jungle during which half of the men in his platoon were killed. Sent home after a long hospitalization, he needed help irrigating a still open wound in his leg, so Jane went to New Jersey during one school vacation and served on Mike’s care-giving team.
They moved to Whiting when Marshall graduated and took a job with the fledgling two-man law firm of Langrock and Sperry, but two years later, when Marshall was offered the opportunity to become the third partner, he decided he would rather teach than be a lawyer. He got a job at Middlebury Union High School, where he remained as first a social studies teacher and then an art teacher for forty-five years.
Jane loved the country life in Whiting and participated in starting a kindergarten in the local church but felt isolated with small children, so she and Marshall started to look for a house to buy in Middlebury. After a couple of months of fruitless searching, Jane had the idea of converting the barn behind the Eddy family brick home on Main Street into a house. It seemed like a crazy idea, but Jane convinced Marshall that it could work, and they both convinced Marshall’s parents to sell them the barn and half an acre on Otter Creek. Untrained, but with an innate sense of architectural design, Jane came up with a beautiful renovation plan all by herself, including turning the tack room and the three horse stalls into bedrooms for the children.
She and Marshall did much of the renovation work themselves but left the hayloft as an open recreational space so it could be used for rope swings, basketball, theater productions, magic shows, catch, badminton, ping pong, racket ball, volleyball, and a general play space for kids that was especially popular on rainy days and in the winter. It also hosted numerous community square dances, which sadly had to end when it was found that The Barn was shifting on its foundation!
Jane was a woman of many talents and accomplishments, the greatest of which was raising four wonderful children: Serena Eddy, Katinka Eddy (Eric Troffkin), Stanton Eddy, and Merritt Eddy. She learned the craft of motherhood through taking care of her siblings for extended periods of time when she was a pre-teen and teenager, due to the fact that her mother needed substantial bed rest after the birth of each baby. Jane was extremely proud of each of her children: Serena is the director of Mansfield Hall in Burlington; Katinka, who is bilingual, teaches English to Spanish-speaking refugee children at an inner-city Detroit Charter School; Stanton runs Home Base Inc. in Burlington; and son Merritt was a top salesman for UPS and other companies until he died in his forties. After Merritt’s death, his widow, Jodi, delighted Jane and Marshall by moving to Middlebury with her two children and continued practicing her profession as a physical therapist.
Jane was a superb potter, producing beautifully crafted functional items and sculptures throughout her life. She freely shared her extensive knowledge of ceramics with other potters and worked as a children’s pottery teacher at Frog Hollow for more than twenty years. At a National Conference of Ceramic Artists (NCECA) convention in Syracuse she was honored as the Children’s Pottery Teacher of the Year. Jane also volunteered at The New Day Montessori School as an aide to Abi Sessions, and later for several years in Ann Corrigan’s classroom at Mary Hogan, where she was presented with a “Star Award” in recognition of her many years as a volunteer.
At Camp Betsy Cox in Pittsford, she taught campers how to forage for natural foods in the wild. At the college level, she assisted Middlebury Professor Molly Costanza-Robinson in a course on “Caveman Chemistry,” and taught two J-term courses by herself on “Native American Pit-Fired Pottery.” Ever the perfectionist, she endeavored to replicate the Native American experience in those classes as accurately as possible, going as far as having her students fire their pots in a pit dug into the earth outside her studio and fueled by chips of cow dung that she had collected at local farms and sun-dried in her backyard. She was also called on to repair broken ceramic pieces for people. One time, Dick Forman commissioned her to make thirty identical chamber pots for the production of a French farce by the college theater department. The pots were meant to be thrown in anger, but at the first rehearsal it became clear that the flying shards were too dangerous for the actors, so the twenty-nine remaining pots were never used.
Jane was not only generous with her time, but also with her studio. She taught pottery for free to several high school students and made her studio available at no cost to the Frog Hollow Craft Center for two years when they needed a place for clay classes after they were forced to move out of their old home by the falls due to a transfer of ownership.
Jane was an avid agriculturalist whose flower gardens were regular stops on Addison County garden tours. For several years, she built a “sunflower” house in the middle of her garden, complete with walls of giant sunflowers, carefully laid out paths, children’s furniture, miniature flower beds, and a roof made of woven scarlet runner bean vines, and she delighted in having tea parties with her grandchildren and neighborhood families.
She had more than fifty peony plants, one of which was an original breed that she propagated herself and named after her grandchild “Kess.” She taught the Japanese art of “ikebana,” and made beautiful bouquets, corsages and centerpieces for weddings, parties and celebrations. For two years, she traded flower arrangements and small table bouquets with a local coffee shop in return for a daily coffee and muffin. Her extensive vegetable gardens provided much of the family food in-season and were the subject of a chapter in a cookbook by Ripton author Andrea Chesman. She also built and stocked a root cellar that was featured in a book called “Homesteading in Vermont.” The animals she kept on her half acre of land in Middlebury included, among other things, forty chickens housed in a chicken coop on the second story of the wool house. She believed that happy chickens produced better tasting eggs and she decorated her coop so fancifully with mirrors, leaves, toys, fragments of colorful cloth, and hanging ornaments that it was made the subject of a humorous story by Don Mitchell in one of his Sunday Boston Magazine columns.
She was fascinated by bees and maintained four hives in her backyard, winning a first-place ribbon at the Vermont State Agricultural Fair in Barre for her comb honey, which she packed in basswood boxes she made herself. She combined her love of art and bees by creating a series of linoleum cut prints that served as the illustrations for a book of honey-based recipes that was sold at fairs around the state by the Vermont Beekeepers Association. She was known by the Vermont State bee inspector as someone who could remove unwanted swarms of bees from peoples’ houses and trees, and was called several times to perform that task with her friend and fellow beekeeper Dick Coleman.
Honey was not the only sweet liquid in which she was interested. She found some taps at a yard sale which she used to tap some local maple trees and boiled down the sap in her driveway over an open fire that had to be tended twenty-four hours a day by family members and neighborhood children. She only produced a few quarts of dark syrup, but it was delicious.
Among her “pets” were a school of “Ryukin” goldfish that she kept in an aquarium furnished exclusively with ceramic artifacts of her own making, a succession of parakeets named after Japanese fruit blossoms, a baby squirrel that followed Marshall home from work one day and lived in the house as a pet for almost an entire year before being released, and a tiny snapping turtle that Jane and Marshall rescued from the surface of Dead Creek. After two years, during which the turtle had grown from the size of a quarter to a fifty cent piece, they returned it to the river, but it is memorialized to this day in Jane’s studio by a realistic life-sized female snapping turtle sculpture that she made to be the centerpiece of a show of women’s art at the Southern Vermont Art Center.
Among Jane’s other artistic interests were printmaking and painting, and she combined her love of pottery and printmaking to produce a series of beautiful large prints centered around clay. The head of the Ceramics department at Alfred was so impressed by her art that he traded one of his highly prized pots in return for a print. She immersed herself in art history, with a special interest in Picasso, the Japanese print maker Munakata, and Greek amphorae, about which she developed a unique theory about how wax was used in their production. She also was keenly interested in Native American Art of the Champlain Valley and made many vessels and sculptures based on pieces discovered by local archaeologists. She was once criticized by a Native American artist and professor at Dartmouth for intruding in the spiritual realm of his people, but when she visited him and convinced him of her deep respect for and knowledge of Native Americans, he was so impressed that he ended up trading one of his museum-quality kachina dolls to her in return for one of her pots.
She loved to bake and was known for producing large round loaves of Russian Black Bread, making homemade granola, and cooking a traditional family recipe of Indian Pudding on her beloved antique wood-fired cook stove. Friends and relatives could always count on receiving huge quantities of gingerbread cookies during the Holiday Season. She was an adventurous cook who put tofu in spaghetti sauce, made burgers out of non-meat ingredients, and cooked up cattail roots. One time she served her family a delicious meal of roast fowl, and it was only after they had finished eating that she told them they had just partaken of a ruffed grouse she had found dead, but still warm, beside the road on the way home. The wings of the grouse became not only a lovely decorative object in the living room but also a perpetual reminder to her children to ask her about the source of any meal they were not familiar with before they ate it.
Jane was a gifted knitter and seamstress, employing skills she learned from her “Granny” Bert. At the University of Miami, she did sewing jobs for other students to earn tuition money, and continued to sew once she had children, making many articles of clothing, including costumes, camp uniforms, and gorgeous Scandinavian knit sweaters. She altered her mother’s wedding dress for her own wedding, and made from scratch Serena’s wedding dress, which was completed with the help of her friend Abi Sessions less than an hour before the start of the wedding ceremony. Abi worked all night on the dress, which resulted in her missing the ceremony because she was fast asleep on the lawn. Jane also loved quilting and took the lead role in working with friends to create a quilt to present as a welcoming gift to an Ethiopian child who was adopted by a local couple. She was told by more than one avid quilter that her quilts could have garnered prizes at quilt expos.
Jane loved watching her children engage in their various activities, among the highlights of which were traveling to Barcelona to watch Serena row in the 1992 Olympics, attending Katinka‘s art exhibit in Madison, Wis., watching Stanton in the title role of Li’l Abner, and going to Boston to cheer for Merritt in the East-West college lacrosse All-star game. She spent hours instructing her grandchildren in various forms of arts and craft, gardening, sewing and cooking and loved watching them engage in their favorite sporting, dramatic and musical endeavors.
The spacious barn-house in Middlebury was perfect for gatherings of large crowds, and in 1970, Jane had the idea of hosting a natural food ordering group. Starting with a couple of dozen people, over time the group grew until more than a hundred people would meet every month to order bulk foods and share in delicious potluck meals. The ordering group lasted for two years until Jane and Marshall adopted a fourth child, Merritt, at which time they had to reluctantly ask the group to find another home. Fortunately, the ordering group continued uninterrupted at other venues and now, more than fifty years later, some old timers will still occasionally note, with a touch of pride, that they were present in Jane Eddy’s living room at the birth of the Middlebury Natural Foods Coop.
Jane loved hosting large parties, one of the most memorable of which was a sit-down meal for fifty family members, friends and neighbors on the occasion of Marshall’s and her fiftieth wedding anniversary. But for sheer scale, it would be hard to beat her daughter Serena’s outdoor wedding reception, which was self-catered with the help of grill cooks Peter & Johanna Brakeley and Terry & Sally Ryan, smoothie mixers Kathy Clarke and crew, recorder music by David Moats and members of the Middwinds, piano solos by Dick Forman, and jazz sax by Matt Paddock. The number of guests at that event exceeded one hundred and fifty and included many members of both the men’s and women’s national rowing teams. Everyone roamed Jane’s garden and ate snap peas off the vine before sitting down to eat under tents in the next-door yard of the college president’s house, tents that Sylvia Robison had generously delayed taking down after graduation so they could be used for the wedding.
Jane was a naturalist at heart and amassed a collection of found objects like bird eggs, animal skulls, snake skins, insect remains, fossils, unusual stones, dried plants, and shells. She took delight in observing the birds along Otter Creek from her backyard among which were merlins, ospreys, great blue herons, swifts and Canada geese. She noticed over the years that the geese that congregated every Spring in the Creek taught their goslings to take off and fly right behind her house and that they would disappear to go north as soon as every bird in the flock was capable of flying over the railroad trestle a few hundred yards upriver. A pair of wrens would come every summer to a birdhouse she put up especially for them near her back porch, and for many years bats crowded the evening sky, giving her the occasion to participate in the annual bat count with a group from the Audubon Society that would come to sit in her driveway and tally the bats that lived in the Wool House. In the fall, she would note when ice covered the river, and in late Spring she would eagerly await its breakup by observing the edge of the ice on the Creek behind her house. As soon as she saw cracks form, she would walk into town and stand on the Main St. bridge so she could watch the massive slabs go over the falls. Both of those events, along with the fledging of the baby wrens and the flight over the trestle of the Canada Geese — not to mention the appearance of the first peony blossoms — were faithfully recorded in her nature journal.
Jane loved sharing her home with others, among whom were several Fresh Air children, a Swiss AFS student, a teen-aged foster child, foreign college students from places such as Saudi Arabia and Japan, numerous visiting potters who came to Middlebury to teach workshops at Frog Hollow, visiting writers including good friend David Budbill, members of the Vermont Symphony Orchestra, and three groups of Ukrainian Artists who came to the United States under the auspices of the Children’s Art Exchange, of which she and Marshall were board members.
Even though her body was starting to give out, Jane’s energy did not flag in her late seventies, and she tirelessly worked on a massive family history that was centered on letters sent home during World War II from the Pacific by her uncle and father and left undiscovered in a box in the attic until after her mother’s death. She approached that three-year-long task with the same drive and energy she devoted to all the other endeavors in her life, and finished it just in time to send out a digitized copy to all her siblings, children and cousins.
Jane is survived by her husband, Marshall; her children, Serena, Katinka, Stanton and daughter-in-law Jodi; four of her siblings, Mary Little, Becky Steinbach, Bill Miller (Nancy), and Barbara Mason; brothers-in-law David Eddy and Alden Keyser; seven beloved grandchildren, Chloe, Kess, Tucker, Seely, Spencer, Marshall and Ashlyn; and a multitude of delightful nieces and nephews and their children, the most recent of whom is named Sonja Jane. She was predeceased by her son Merritt, daughter-in-law Tamara, brother Chuck Miller (Debi), sisters-in-law Virginia Keyser and Linda Ridings, brothers-in-law George Little, David Steinbach and Clark Mason, and dear friends Helen Marsh and Hannah Magoon.
In accordance with family tradition, her body was transported by Stanton and Marshall in a homemade wooden box to the Mt. Pleasant Crematorium in St. Johnsbury. At a later date, her wishes will be honored when her ashes are scattered upon the surface of Lake Champlain around the periphery of the Abenaki landmark Oodzee-hozo (Rock Dunder) to which she felt a strong spiritual connection. There will be a celebration of life for family and friends at Jane and Marshall’s home on Saturday, Aug. 2, from 2-4 p.m.
The family would like to thank all of Jane’s dear friends and loved ones who visited and called her in her last months and provided food and companionship for the family, including, but not limited to, Abi Sessions, Andrea Ringey Grimm, Anne Friedrichs, Stephanie Smith, Debbie Smith, Kathy Clarke, and cousin Louise Rossmann. Also, Tony Myrick who provided a home for her in Bristol for two months before she came home to Middlebury, and the extremely competent and caring staff at Addison County Home Health and Hospice who helped her complete her final journey in the manner she desired. She will be sorely missed, but her family takes solace in the fact that she lived a long and productive life, was happily married for sixty-two years, and did not linger long or suffer in the end. She was a remarkable and admirable woman who well earned the right to a graceful death and an eternity of uninterrupted rest.
Contributions may be made in her honor to the Middlebury Studio School.
