Evelyn Woodbury

Evelyn Woodbury, area philanthropist, died on April 13th, 2010 at age 100



From behind the breakfast counter at Hayes Drugstore in Portland, Maine, Evelyn Smith poured a cup of coffee for Wendell Woodbury, in town for a visit from his home in North Conway, New Hampshire. Evelyn -- the eldest of seven children, born in Jackson, New Hampshire on October 18, 1909 to Mabel and Clifton Smith -- had once worked for Mr. Woodbury as a caregiver for his ailing wife. When the woman improved, Evelyn was without a job and had moved to Portland to seek other employment.



Years later, after Wendell's first marriage had ended in divorce, he remembered the spirited young blonde from Jackson. When he located her in Portland, Wendell began what he surely hoped would be a brief and successful courtship. But Evelyn was no pushover. It would take seven years of weekend visits - and several thousand miles on Wendell's car -- before Evelyn accepted his marriage proposal. On February 18, 1940 they were married at Wendell's uncle Harvey Gibson's house in North Conway; then known as the Moat View House, today the site of the Gibson Center for Senior Services. Following the ceremony, the couple embarked on a European honeymoon cruise, courtesy of the Gibsons, upon the newly-christened ocean liner the United States. For Evelyn, raised in a family of modest means (like many families in Jackson, hers could not afford bus fare when Kennett High School opened, so Evelyn never went past the eight grade) now an entirely new world was suddenly opened to her.



In North Conway, Evelyn and Wendell settled into Wendell's Victorian-style house on Main Street, with its distinctive yellow clapboards and white gingerbread trim. The house was a gift from Harvey Gibson when Wendell was appointed his uncle's North Conway agent in 1927, overseeing the North Conway-born-now-youngest-Wall Street-bank-president's considerable holdings in the Mt. Washington Valley, including the Eastern Slope