" I am deeply saddened to tell you of the passing of my personal hero, my mother Sheila Hutcheon-Barr, who gave so much to the world and to me, when she won her battle with the brain disease of frontal lobe dementia at 10:00 in the morning yesterday December 30, 2021, peacefully, holding my hand through the night. She was herself to the end, courageous and determined to live and die on her own terms, with a joyful heart of caring, acceptance, humor, resolution, honor, dignity and grace. She did not allow her illness to define her; what defined her was her love and caring for others, even people she did not know, and her quiet resolve to make the world a better place, which she did by improving the lives of countless people through her work as an art teacher, mentor and friend, through her community activism and by her example of how she led her life. It is not an exaggeration to say that my mother changed the world, for the better in every way.
Mom was an multi-disciplinary artist in the mediums of painting, poetry, photography, stained glass, pottery and basket weaving, which she shared with thousands of students, by whom she is fondly remembered, during her 35 year career as the art teacher at Northwood Elementary School in Franklin, Indiana, where she won the Franklin Community School Corporation's "Seniors Choice Award for Most Influential Educator" in 2003. Mom also worked in the summers as an art teacher at Camp Thunderbird on Lake Plantagenet in Bemidji, Minnesota and thereby gave me the gifts of knowledge of nature, wilderness and sailing, which have served me well in life. She was a founding member of Johnson County Historic Landmarks, which she and a group of friends started to preserve the historic architecture of Franklin, Indiana when they were appalled at the tearing down of fine Victorian era homes in her adopted hometown. The project grew into Mom developing a teaching guide for Indiana Architecture and Historic Landmarks which was used as a template to educate schoolchildren throughout the state of the value of their architectural heritage and the imperative to preserve it, an endeavor which won Franklin Heritage the "Sandy Servaas Memorial Award" in 1986 for meritorious service from the Indiana Historic Landmarks Foundation. The result of her efforts is that Franklin has been transformed by younger generations into a town of lovingly restored old Victorian homes painted in period colors surrounding a vibrant downtown renaissance which breathed new life into the old town with an improved quality of life for its citizens. That quality of life Mom wanted to give her community was also expressed as a founding member of the Franklin Symphony Council, whose mission ensures that every schoolchild in Johnson County goes to attend a performance of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra before they reach high school. When we were searching for a nursing home that would accept someone with Mom's form of dementia, (many thanks and gratitude to the caring staff at Majestic Care of Connersville who have cared for her like family these last seven weeks) a nursing home liaison who assisted us mentioned that her eleven year old son had attended the ISO through the program the week before, so Mom's cultural education efforts continue through those two programs to this day. She volunteered in many ways to improve the quality of life for her community, graduating from the 2006-2007 class of the community volunteer organization Leadership Johnson County. Another one of Mom's achievements was when the Morning Light Hospice in Indianapolis gave her an award in 2016 "In Grateful Appreciation for Outstanding Service to the Board and Her Community" from the Financial Development Committee of which she was a Commitment Circle Member. Morning Light Hospice also helps lower income families and the homeless who are in need of hospice care. Sheila was also recognized in Nov. 2020 as a Charter Member of The National WWII Museum in New Orleans, LA contributing in honor of her father Lt. Frank G. Hutcheon. After she retired Mom also volunteered for many years as a greeter and information lady at Johnson County Hospital. Mom also bought an old historic house and created an art gallery and hosted a 50 year retrospective of her work in 2011 despite the fact that much of her art was scattered having been given away to friends. Her last public exhibition was the inclusion of a special painting at the Hancock County Artists Show at 20 North Main Gallery in Greenfield, Indiana in October of 2021, which was of one of her early paintings that was given back to her by the family of close friends Col. Doug, June and Chris Stewart. When then Lt. Doug Stewart was deploying to Vietnam with the Marines in 1962 he asked Sheila, who was attending the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) to paint a picture for him and she created for him an abstract painting in blue, white and green of the skyline of New York City which she painted en plein aire from across the Hudson River. She was an esteemed donor and supporter of the Hancock County Artists Society and as noted above remained active in the arts up until two months before her passing. Mom was also involved until her passing in the charitable organization PEO which helps to raise funds for women's educational opportunities worldwide and her PEO sisters, like her dear friend Marilyn who has visited her frequently this summer, have shown an outpouring of support in recent weeks, along other women's group friends such as her steadfast support group including Mary Elliott, Donna Wagner and Kathy Cookerly, to whom our family is forever grateful as they have always been there for her, including many visits during her long, recently intensifying illness.
Although she was not overtly political, Mom also expressed her love for others and hope for a better world by participating in politics as a grass roots activist, working as a volunteer on the campaigns to elect Barack Obama, helping to win Indiana for his presidential bid in 2008 and in a losing effort in 2012, and through her many community service efforts. Her heroes in politics were Eleanor and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Dalai Lama of Tibet, folk singers Joan Baez and Bob Dylan and feminist singer Helen Reddy, President Jimmy Carter, (for whose family her husband Leslie Barr was an aide, who had stories of driving Roselyn and Amy Carter in the Barr family's Cadillac), President John and especially Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King and Gandhi, all of whom she deeply admired and whose deaths she mourned but who deepened her resolve to make a difference and be a power for good in our society. She also reached out internationally, welcoming several Japanese women who were working in the US into her home to live, with whom she became lifelong friends, such as her beloved Yoko and Qu. Mom was a lifelong American patriot who loved her country. Mom believed in feminism, equality, education, civic responsibility, compassion, anti-racism, peace, environmental responsibility and social justice and the persevering power of love and exemplified all these things by the way she lived and the way she raised her two sons and taught generations of schoolchildren in Indiana, to live with love and respect and care for others, and also to stand up for what is right and to make every effort to make the world a better place, an endeavour in which she truly succeeded in every way. Her motto was the famous quote from Gandhi, "Be the change you want to see in the World" and she lived it.
Sheila Hutcheon-Barr attended the Rhode Island School of Design in the early 1960's and SUNY, the State University of New York, where she studied art and met my father Steve Harrison, Sr. and married him at the Dutch Reformed Church in the historic Huguenot village of New Paltz, NY in 1965. They were friends of the Chapin Brothers, the musicians Tom and Harry Chapin, the latter of whom is famous for the song "Cat's in the Cradle" who played in the local bars near New Paltz, NY. My parents moved us all to Terre Haute, Indiana where they divorced in 1974. Despite her love of the ocean, Mom stayed in Indiana to raise us rather than moving back East, saying "Grow where you are planted." which she did, along with her dear friends Lilo and Vico von Stralendorff who were German immigrants who fled the Nazis and moved to Franklin who shared her love of nature and their log cabin in the woods with us in Brown County. Mom married the love of her life Leslie James Barr of Greenfield, Indiana in 1987 and was widowed upon his tragically early death at the age of 43 in 1991. She is survived by the second love of her life Michael Wirey, many best friends including Deedra, Norman, Scott and Courtney Durocher and June Stewart of Foster, RI, Nancy Campbell of Terre Haute, IN, Nancy Mosely of Cloverdale, IN, David and Carol Carter, Michelle Cuttill, and Janice and Lawrence Hunter of Spencer, IN, many close friends from Franklin, IN such as Christopher Hext of Franklin Heritage and fellow teachers Janet Stone and Bob and Barbara Dole. Also Kathy and Marie Barr and their families of Greenfield, IN and the children of Les Barr Andrew, Matthew and Jenny Barr originally of Greenfield and her close friends and neighbors Jan Peters with whom she shared her Christian faith and Meryl Suhr also of Greenfield. She is also survived by her brother Bruce Hutcheon, who was a US Coast Guard rescue diver and the USCG's representative honor guard and pall bearer for the funeral of President Lyndon B. Johnson, and his wife Kathy and their family, including their children Scott Hutcheon and his daughter Abby, her favorite niece of Colorado Springs and Mom's beloved niece Laura, of San Diego who she helped with assistance for her college education. She is also survived by her son Ian Redpath Carpenter Harrison, Indiana's finest chef and owner of Carnegie's restaurant in Greenfield, a culinary institution since 2000 and Ian's wife, another of Mom's many best friends, Jody Thomson, who has always been there for her every step of the journey since they met, her other 'adopted sons' my brother's best friends Lance Adams, David Vandivier and Rob Branigin, and also myself, her eldest son, Steve Harrison who is a professional sailor formerly living on the island of Mallorca, Spain until May 2021 when I returned to Greenfield for the honor and the privilege of accompanying my mother on her last journey. We were able to make one last trip out East to Rhode Island and Maine to see a couple of her best friends, June Stewart and Mom's cousin Judy McLaren of Smithfield, RI who were very close to her, and to see Mom's home village of Foster, RI and to go to the beach and see the ocean one last time, to see Newport and Ocean Drive and walk on Cliffwalk again and enjoyed lobster rolls at the Ocean Mist on the beach in Matunuck. A highlight of the trip for Mom as an artist was being able to meet the great artist and great friend of mine Sasha Kouznetsov, who was happy to give her a personal show of his paintings, with which they enthusiastically connected as fellow artists, creators and lovers of the beauty of this world, which along with our family, will sadly miss the light she brought to so many of us. But Mom's light shone through in everything she did and all she gave to us, and through all her endeavours and the way she lived her life for others more than for herself, she left the world a better place. For this and so much more, I am deeply and eternally grateful to her. She gave me everything a mother could give and as I reminded her when she could no longer remember these things, she will always be my hero.
A brief Genealogy:
Sheila Hutcheon was born on the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, on December 21, 1943 in Tampa, Florida in a quonset hut on the side of the airfield tarmac at Southeast Air Base (1939) which is now known as MacDill Air Force Base, where her father Lt. (Ret. Captain) Frank George Hutcheon (b.1918 Providence, RI -d. 2010 Columbus, IN) worked for the Army Signal Corps building the first radar station on the west coast of Florida and her mother Norma Ellen McCabe (b. Feb 19, 1919 Cranston, RI - d. Jul. 23, 1995 Columbus, IN) and daughter of Flora McCabe, was a Registered Nurse. After the war, the young family moved back to the old New England village of Foster, Rhode Island where Mom grew up attending classes in a red one room schoolhouse next door to where she lived in the Aylesworth House (1824) which has been the town of Foster's police station since 1965 and when we visited in July the Chief was kind enough to allow us to visit her old bedroom which is now his office. Her father Frank donated the land for and helped build the Foster Volunteer Fire Department, and was instrumental in the strict zoning laws which maintain the historic character of the village without commercial development to this day.
Sheila's grandfather Frank W. Hutcheon and his wife Agnes Redpath emigrated in 1904 from Perth, Scotland to Providence, Rhode Island, a Scottish ancestry which made Mom proud, passed onto her by her grandmothers Agnes Redpath-Hutcheon and Nana Murray, and her mother's side of the family came to America in 1634 on the ship "Bevis" with William Carpenter, an English immigrant from Cornwall who first settled at Weymouth, Massachusetts and "who was named to represent that town in both 1641 and 1643 in the Plymouth County General Court. In 1645, William Carpenter and other Weymouth residents began a new settlement at Rehoboth, Massachusetts, where he served as the town clerk, a post also held by several of his descendants. Numerous early records bear his signature. By the time William Carpenter's will was executed in 1659, he and his family had become respectable citizens enjoying a fairly good standard of living. He was a large property owner, both at Rehoboth and nearby Pawtuxet. In addition, he owned more livestock than the average settler. William Carpenter's household items indicate that he had prospered. One of the more remarkable aspects of his will was the mention of an excellent private library, certainly a rarity for even the clerk of a small village and perhaps equaled only by the collections of some of Boston's more prominent residents. The books reveal a man of intellectual curiosity and scholarly inclinations. In addition to the usual religious texts, William Carpenter owned books on various subjects, including Latin books, Hebrew and Greek grammars, and a Greek lexicon. He is known as the "Father of Patriots," the only American Colonial with as many as 227 male descendants who actively served in the American Revolution." (from the Genealogy of Ancestors of Norma Ellen Hutcheon: Family trees of William Carpenter of Rehoboth, Massacusetts and James Hamblin of Barnstable, Massachusetts Vol.1, a full genealogy of his wife's family lovingly compiled by Sheila's father Frank G. Hutcheon). William Carpenter of Rehoboth's descendant Col. Thomas Carpenter (1743-1807) served as Commander of a Rhode Island regiment in Sullivan's Expedition to Rhode Island and New York (approx. 4,500 soldiers in total) the success of which resulted in the deaths of hundreds or thousands of Native Americans, both British-allied Wampanoag and Iroquois, in several battles and skirmishes but mainly by starvation outside a British fortress in Canada after their crops and villages in the eastern and central New York valleys were burned, breaking the Iroquois Nation who was allied with the British, a regrettable fact for which on this solemn day our family would like to take a moment to express our sincere remorse and sorrow to the indigenous people of America, who helped us survive upon our arrival on this continent, their home. I am not sure if Mom was aware of the result of Col. Thomas Carpenter's participation in Sullivan's Expedition but she was proud of her family's service in the Revolutionary War which made her a member of the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution). Other ancestors on her mother's side fought on the side of the Union in the American Civil War in the coastal campaign in South Carolina maintaining a garrison on Hilton Head, South Carolina, an island to which her parents retired in their later years.
Among Mom's other ancestors from Cape Cod were sailors and ship captains such as the Hamblin brothers of Barnstable, Massachusetts, Captain Simeon Hamblin (b. 1807-d. 1892) who went to sea at 11 and became a "Master" at age 19, and was skipper of the schooners "Edward," "American Eagle," "Eliza," "Ann" and "Steel." His brother Capt. William Hamblin (b. 1812-d. 1893) was skipper of the schooners "Resolve," "Victor," "Young Travante" and "George Washington." No wonder Mom always loved sailing and the sea."
A Memorial Service for Sheila will be held in the near future with date forthcoming. Flinn and Maguire Funeral Home, 2898 North Morton Street, (U.S. 31 North) in Franklin.
Mom was an multi-disciplinary artist in the mediums of painting, poetry, photography, stained glass, pottery and basket weaving, which she shared with thousands of students, by whom she is fondly remembered, during her 35 year career as the art teacher at Northwood Elementary School in Franklin, Indiana, where she won the Franklin Community School Corporation's "Seniors Choice Award for Most Influential Educator" in 2003. Mom also worked in the summers as an art teacher at Camp Thunderbird on Lake Plantagenet in Bemidji, Minnesota and thereby gave me the gifts of knowledge of nature, wilderness and sailing, which have served me well in life. She was a founding member of Johnson County Historic Landmarks, which she and a group of friends started to preserve the historic architecture of Franklin, Indiana when they were appalled at the tearing down of fine Victorian era homes in her adopted hometown. The project grew into Mom developing a teaching guide for Indiana Architecture and Historic Landmarks which was used as a template to educate schoolchildren throughout the state of the value of their architectural heritage and the imperative to preserve it, an endeavor which won Franklin Heritage the "Sandy Servaas Memorial Award" in 1986 for meritorious service from the Indiana Historic Landmarks Foundation. The result of her efforts is that Franklin has been transformed by younger generations into a town of lovingly restored old Victorian homes painted in period colors surrounding a vibrant downtown renaissance which breathed new life into the old town with an improved quality of life for its citizens. That quality of life Mom wanted to give her community was also expressed as a founding member of the Franklin Symphony Council, whose mission ensures that every schoolchild in Johnson County goes to attend a performance of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra before they reach high school. When we were searching for a nursing home that would accept someone with Mom's form of dementia, (many thanks and gratitude to the caring staff at Majestic Care of Connersville who have cared for her like family these last seven weeks) a nursing home liaison who assisted us mentioned that her eleven year old son had attended the ISO through the program the week before, so Mom's cultural education efforts continue through those two programs to this day. She volunteered in many ways to improve the quality of life for her community, graduating from the 2006-2007 class of the community volunteer organization Leadership Johnson County. Another one of Mom's achievements was when the Morning Light Hospice in Indianapolis gave her an award in 2016 "In Grateful Appreciation for Outstanding Service to the Board and Her Community" from the Financial Development Committee of which she was a Commitment Circle Member. Morning Light Hospice also helps lower income families and the homeless who are in need of hospice care. Sheila was also recognized in Nov. 2020 as a Charter Member of The National WWII Museum in New Orleans, LA contributing in honor of her father Lt. Frank G. Hutcheon. After she retired Mom also volunteered for many years as a greeter and information lady at Johnson County Hospital. Mom also bought an old historic house and created an art gallery and hosted a 50 year retrospective of her work in 2011 despite the fact that much of her art was scattered having been given away to friends. Her last public exhibition was the inclusion of a special painting at the Hancock County Artists Show at 20 North Main Gallery in Greenfield, Indiana in October of 2021, which was of one of her early paintings that was given back to her by the family of close friends Col. Doug, June and Chris Stewart. When then Lt. Doug Stewart was deploying to Vietnam with the Marines in 1962 he asked Sheila, who was attending the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) to paint a picture for him and she created for him an abstract painting in blue, white and green of the skyline of New York City which she painted en plein aire from across the Hudson River. She was an esteemed donor and supporter of the Hancock County Artists Society and as noted above remained active in the arts up until two months before her passing. Mom was also involved until her passing in the charitable organization PEO which helps to raise funds for women's educational opportunities worldwide and her PEO sisters, like her dear friend Marilyn who has visited her frequently this summer, have shown an outpouring of support in recent weeks, along other women's group friends such as her steadfast support group including Mary Elliott, Donna Wagner and Kathy Cookerly, to whom our family is forever grateful as they have always been there for her, including many visits during her long, recently intensifying illness.
Although she was not overtly political, Mom also expressed her love for others and hope for a better world by participating in politics as a grass roots activist, working as a volunteer on the campaigns to elect Barack Obama, helping to win Indiana for his presidential bid in 2008 and in a losing effort in 2012, and through her many community service efforts. Her heroes in politics were Eleanor and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Dalai Lama of Tibet, folk singers Joan Baez and Bob Dylan and feminist singer Helen Reddy, President Jimmy Carter, (for whose family her husband Leslie Barr was an aide, who had stories of driving Roselyn and Amy Carter in the Barr family's Cadillac), President John and especially Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King and Gandhi, all of whom she deeply admired and whose deaths she mourned but who deepened her resolve to make a difference and be a power for good in our society. She also reached out internationally, welcoming several Japanese women who were working in the US into her home to live, with whom she became lifelong friends, such as her beloved Yoko and Qu. Mom was a lifelong American patriot who loved her country. Mom believed in feminism, equality, education, civic responsibility, compassion, anti-racism, peace, environmental responsibility and social justice and the persevering power of love and exemplified all these things by the way she lived and the way she raised her two sons and taught generations of schoolchildren in Indiana, to live with love and respect and care for others, and also to stand up for what is right and to make every effort to make the world a better place, an endeavour in which she truly succeeded in every way. Her motto was the famous quote from Gandhi, "Be the change you want to see in the World" and she lived it.
Sheila Hutcheon-Barr attended the Rhode Island School of Design in the early 1960's and SUNY, the State University of New York, where she studied art and met my father Steve Harrison, Sr. and married him at the Dutch Reformed Church in the historic Huguenot village of New Paltz, NY in 1965. They were friends of the Chapin Brothers, the musicians Tom and Harry Chapin, the latter of whom is famous for the song "Cat's in the Cradle" who played in the local bars near New Paltz, NY. My parents moved us all to Terre Haute, Indiana where they divorced in 1974. Despite her love of the ocean, Mom stayed in Indiana to raise us rather than moving back East, saying "Grow where you are planted." which she did, along with her dear friends Lilo and Vico von Stralendorff who were German immigrants who fled the Nazis and moved to Franklin who shared her love of nature and their log cabin in the woods with us in Brown County. Mom married the love of her life Leslie James Barr of Greenfield, Indiana in 1987 and was widowed upon his tragically early death at the age of 43 in 1991. She is survived by the second love of her life Michael Wirey, many best friends including Deedra, Norman, Scott and Courtney Durocher and June Stewart of Foster, RI, Nancy Campbell of Terre Haute, IN, Nancy Mosely of Cloverdale, IN, David and Carol Carter, Michelle Cuttill, and Janice and Lawrence Hunter of Spencer, IN, many close friends from Franklin, IN such as Christopher Hext of Franklin Heritage and fellow teachers Janet Stone and Bob and Barbara Dole. Also Kathy and Marie Barr and their families of Greenfield, IN and the children of Les Barr Andrew, Matthew and Jenny Barr originally of Greenfield and her close friends and neighbors Jan Peters with whom she shared her Christian faith and Meryl Suhr also of Greenfield. She is also survived by her brother Bruce Hutcheon, who was a US Coast Guard rescue diver and the USCG's representative honor guard and pall bearer for the funeral of President Lyndon B. Johnson, and his wife Kathy and their family, including their children Scott Hutcheon and his daughter Abby, her favorite niece of Colorado Springs and Mom's beloved niece Laura, of San Diego who she helped with assistance for her college education. She is also survived by her son Ian Redpath Carpenter Harrison, Indiana's finest chef and owner of Carnegie's restaurant in Greenfield, a culinary institution since 2000 and Ian's wife, another of Mom's many best friends, Jody Thomson, who has always been there for her every step of the journey since they met, her other 'adopted sons' my brother's best friends Lance Adams, David Vandivier and Rob Branigin, and also myself, her eldest son, Steve Harrison who is a professional sailor formerly living on the island of Mallorca, Spain until May 2021 when I returned to Greenfield for the honor and the privilege of accompanying my mother on her last journey. We were able to make one last trip out East to Rhode Island and Maine to see a couple of her best friends, June Stewart and Mom's cousin Judy McLaren of Smithfield, RI who were very close to her, and to see Mom's home village of Foster, RI and to go to the beach and see the ocean one last time, to see Newport and Ocean Drive and walk on Cliffwalk again and enjoyed lobster rolls at the Ocean Mist on the beach in Matunuck. A highlight of the trip for Mom as an artist was being able to meet the great artist and great friend of mine Sasha Kouznetsov, who was happy to give her a personal show of his paintings, with which they enthusiastically connected as fellow artists, creators and lovers of the beauty of this world, which along with our family, will sadly miss the light she brought to so many of us. But Mom's light shone through in everything she did and all she gave to us, and through all her endeavours and the way she lived her life for others more than for herself, she left the world a better place. For this and so much more, I am deeply and eternally grateful to her. She gave me everything a mother could give and as I reminded her when she could no longer remember these things, she will always be my hero.
A brief Genealogy:
Sheila Hutcheon was born on the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, on December 21, 1943 in Tampa, Florida in a quonset hut on the side of the airfield tarmac at Southeast Air Base (1939) which is now known as MacDill Air Force Base, where her father Lt. (Ret. Captain) Frank George Hutcheon (b.1918 Providence, RI -d. 2010 Columbus, IN) worked for the Army Signal Corps building the first radar station on the west coast of Florida and her mother Norma Ellen McCabe (b. Feb 19, 1919 Cranston, RI - d. Jul. 23, 1995 Columbus, IN) and daughter of Flora McCabe, was a Registered Nurse. After the war, the young family moved back to the old New England village of Foster, Rhode Island where Mom grew up attending classes in a red one room schoolhouse next door to where she lived in the Aylesworth House (1824) which has been the town of Foster's police station since 1965 and when we visited in July the Chief was kind enough to allow us to visit her old bedroom which is now his office. Her father Frank donated the land for and helped build the Foster Volunteer Fire Department, and was instrumental in the strict zoning laws which maintain the historic character of the village without commercial development to this day.
Sheila's grandfather Frank W. Hutcheon and his wife Agnes Redpath emigrated in 1904 from Perth, Scotland to Providence, Rhode Island, a Scottish ancestry which made Mom proud, passed onto her by her grandmothers Agnes Redpath-Hutcheon and Nana Murray, and her mother's side of the family came to America in 1634 on the ship "Bevis" with William Carpenter, an English immigrant from Cornwall who first settled at Weymouth, Massachusetts and "who was named to represent that town in both 1641 and 1643 in the Plymouth County General Court. In 1645, William Carpenter and other Weymouth residents began a new settlement at Rehoboth, Massachusetts, where he served as the town clerk, a post also held by several of his descendants. Numerous early records bear his signature. By the time William Carpenter's will was executed in 1659, he and his family had become respectable citizens enjoying a fairly good standard of living. He was a large property owner, both at Rehoboth and nearby Pawtuxet. In addition, he owned more livestock than the average settler. William Carpenter's household items indicate that he had prospered. One of the more remarkable aspects of his will was the mention of an excellent private library, certainly a rarity for even the clerk of a small village and perhaps equaled only by the collections of some of Boston's more prominent residents. The books reveal a man of intellectual curiosity and scholarly inclinations. In addition to the usual religious texts, William Carpenter owned books on various subjects, including Latin books, Hebrew and Greek grammars, and a Greek lexicon. He is known as the "Father of Patriots," the only American Colonial with as many as 227 male descendants who actively served in the American Revolution." (from the Genealogy of Ancestors of Norma Ellen Hutcheon: Family trees of William Carpenter of Rehoboth, Massacusetts and James Hamblin of Barnstable, Massachusetts Vol.1, a full genealogy of his wife's family lovingly compiled by Sheila's father Frank G. Hutcheon). William Carpenter of Rehoboth's descendant Col. Thomas Carpenter (1743-1807) served as Commander of a Rhode Island regiment in Sullivan's Expedition to Rhode Island and New York (approx. 4,500 soldiers in total) the success of which resulted in the deaths of hundreds or thousands of Native Americans, both British-allied Wampanoag and Iroquois, in several battles and skirmishes but mainly by starvation outside a British fortress in Canada after their crops and villages in the eastern and central New York valleys were burned, breaking the Iroquois Nation who was allied with the British, a regrettable fact for which on this solemn day our family would like to take a moment to express our sincere remorse and sorrow to the indigenous people of America, who helped us survive upon our arrival on this continent, their home. I am not sure if Mom was aware of the result of Col. Thomas Carpenter's participation in Sullivan's Expedition but she was proud of her family's service in the Revolutionary War which made her a member of the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution). Other ancestors on her mother's side fought on the side of the Union in the American Civil War in the coastal campaign in South Carolina maintaining a garrison on Hilton Head, South Carolina, an island to which her parents retired in their later years.
Among Mom's other ancestors from Cape Cod were sailors and ship captains such as the Hamblin brothers of Barnstable, Massachusetts, Captain Simeon Hamblin (b. 1807-d. 1892) who went to sea at 11 and became a "Master" at age 19, and was skipper of the schooners "Edward," "American Eagle," "Eliza," "Ann" and "Steel." His brother Capt. William Hamblin (b. 1812-d. 1893) was skipper of the schooners "Resolve," "Victor," "Young Travante" and "George Washington." No wonder Mom always loved sailing and the sea."
A Memorial Service for Sheila will be held in the near future with date forthcoming. Flinn and Maguire Funeral Home, 2898 North Morton Street, (U.S. 31 North) in Franklin.
" I am deeply saddened to tell you of the passing of my personal hero, my mother Sheila Hutcheon-Barr, who gave so much to the world and to me, when she won her battle with the brain disease of frontal lobe dementia at 10:00 in the morning yesterday December 30, 2021, peacefully, holding my hand through the night. She was herself to the end, courageous and determined to live and die on her own terms, with a joyful heart of caring, acceptance, humor, resolution, honor, dignity and grace. She did not allow her illness to define her; what defined her was her love and caring for others, even people she did not know, and her quiet resolve to make the world a better place, which she did by improving the lives of countless people through her work as an art teacher, mentor and friend, through her community activism and by her example of how she led her life. It is not an exaggeration to say that my mother changed the world, for the better in every way.
Mom was an multi-disciplinary artist in the mediums of painting, poetry, photography, stained glass, pottery and basket weaving, which she shared with thousands of students, by whom she is fondly remembered, during her 35 year career as the art teacher at Northwood Elementary School in Franklin, Indiana, where she won the Franklin Community School Corporation's "Seniors Choice Award for Most Influential Educator" in 2003. Mom also worked in the summers as an art teacher at Camp Thunderbird on Lake Plantagenet in Bemidji, Minnesota and thereby gave me the gifts of knowledge of nature, wilderness and sailing, which have served me well in life. She was a founding member of Johnson County Historic Landmarks, which she and a group of friends started to preserve the historic architecture of Franklin, Indiana when they were appalled at the tearing down of fine Victorian era homes in her adopted hometown. The project grew into Mom developing a teaching guide for Indiana Architecture and Historic Landmarks which was used as a template to educate schoolchildren throughout the state of the value of their architectural heritage and the imperative to preserve it, an endeavor which won Franklin Heritage the "Sandy Servaas Memorial Award" in 1986 for meritorious service from the Indiana Historic Landmarks Foundation. The result of her efforts is that Franklin has been transformed by younger generations into a town of lovingly restored old Victorian homes painted in period colors surrounding a vibrant downtown renaissance which breathed new life into the old town with an improved quality of life for its citizens. That quality of life Mom wanted to give her community was also expressed as a founding member of the Franklin Symphony Council, whose mission ensures that every schoolchild in Johnson County goes to attend a performance of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra before they reach high school. When we were searching for a nursing home that would accept someone with Mom's form of dementia, (many thanks and gratitude to the caring staff at Majestic Care of Connersville who have cared for her like family these last seven weeks) a nursing home liaison who assisted us mentioned that her eleven year old son had attended the ISO through the program the week before, so Mom's cultural education efforts continue through those two programs to this day. She volunteered in many ways to improve the quality of life for her community, graduating from the 2006-2007 class of the community volunteer organization Leadership Johnson County. Another one of Mom's achievements was when the Morning Light Hospice in Indianapolis gave her an award in 2016 "In Grateful Appreciation for Outstanding Service to the Board and Her Community" from the Financial Development Committee of which she was a Commitment Circle Member. Morning Light Hospice also helps lower income families and the homeless who are in need of hospice care. Sheila was also recognized in Nov. 2020 as a Charter Member of The National WWII Museum in New Orleans, LA contributing in honor of her father Lt. Frank G. Hutcheon. After she retired Mom also volunteered for many years as a greeter and information lady at Johnson County Hospital. Mom also bought an old historic house and created an art gallery and hosted a 50 year retrospective of her work in 2011 despite the fact that much of her art was scattered having been given away to friends. Her last public exhibition was the inclusion of a special painting at the Hancock County Artists Show at 20 North Main Gallery in Greenfield, Indiana in October of 2021, which was of one of her early paintings that was given back to her by the family of close friends Col. Doug, June and Chris Stewart. When then Lt. Doug Stewart was deploying to Vietnam with the Marines in 1962 he asked Sheila, who was attending the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) to paint a picture for him and she created for him an abstract painting in blue, white and green of the skyline of New York City which she painted en plein aire from across the Hudson River. She was an esteemed donor and supporter of the Hancock County Artists Society and as noted above remained active in the arts up until two months before her passing. Mom was also involved until her passing in the charitable organization PEO which helps to raise funds for women's educational opportunities worldwide and her PEO sisters, like her dear friend Marilyn who has visited her frequently this summer, have shown an outpouring of support in recent weeks, along other women's group friends such as her steadfast support group including Mary Elliott, Donna Wagner and Kathy Cookerly, to whom our family is forever grateful as they have always been there for her, including many visits during her long, recently intensifying illness.
Although she was not overtly political, Mom also expressed her love for others and hope for a better world by participating in politics as a grass roots activist, working as a volunteer on the campaigns to elect Barack Obama, helping to win Indiana for his presidential bid in 2008 and in a losing effort in 2012, and through her many community service efforts. Her heroes in politics were Eleanor and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Dalai Lama of Tibet, folk singers Joan Baez and Bob Dylan and feminist singer Helen Reddy, President Jimmy Carter, (for whose family her husband Leslie Barr was an aide, who had stories of driving Roselyn and Amy Carter in the Barr family's Cadillac), President John and especially Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King and Gandhi, all of whom she deeply admired and whose deaths she mourned but who deepened her resolve to make a difference and be a power for good in our society. She also reached out internationally, welcoming several Japanese women who were working in the US into her home to live, with whom she became lifelong friends, such as her beloved Yoko and Qu. Mom was a lifelong American patriot who loved her country. Mom believed in feminism, equality, education, civic responsibility, compassion, anti-racism, peace, environmental responsibility and social justice and the persevering power of love and exemplified all these things by the way she lived and the way she raised her two sons and taught generations of schoolchildren in Indiana, to live with love and respect and care for others, and also to stand up for what is right and to make every effort to make the world a better place, an endeavour in which she truly succeeded in every way. Her motto was the famous quote from Gandhi, "Be the change you want to see in the World" and she lived it.
Sheila Hutcheon-Barr attended the Rhode Island School of Design in the early 1960's and SUNY, the State University of New York, where she studied art and met my father Steve Harrison, Sr. and married him at the Dutch Reformed Church in the historic Huguenot village of New Paltz, NY in 1965. They were friends of the Chapin Brothers, the musicians Tom and Harry Chapin, the latter of whom is famous for the song "Cat's in the Cradle" who played in the local bars near New Paltz, NY. My parents moved us all to Terre Haute, Indiana where they divorced in 1974. Despite her love of the ocean, Mom stayed in Indiana to raise us rather than moving back East, saying "Grow where you are planted." which she did, along with her dear friends Lilo and Vico von Stralendorff who were German immigrants who fled the Nazis and moved to Franklin who shared her love of nature and their log cabin in the woods with us in Brown County. Mom married the love of her life Leslie James Barr of Greenfield, Indiana in 1987 and was widowed upon his tragically early death at the age of 43 in 1991. She is survived by the second love of her life Michael Wirey, many best friends including Deedra, Norman, Scott and Courtney Durocher and June Stewart of Foster, RI, Nancy Campbell of Terre Haute, IN, Nancy Mosely of Cloverdale, IN, David and Carol Carter, Michelle Cuttill, and Janice and Lawrence Hunter of Spencer, IN, many close friends from Franklin, IN such as Christopher Hext of Franklin Heritage and fellow teachers Janet Stone and Bob and Barbara Dole. Also Kathy and Marie Barr and their families of Greenfield, IN and the children of Les Barr Andrew, Matthew and Jenny Barr originally of Greenfield and her close friends and neighbors Jan Peters with whom she shared her Christian faith and Meryl Suhr also of Greenfield. She is also survived by her brother Bruce Hutcheon, who was a US Coast Guard rescue diver and the USCG's representative honor guard and pall bearer for the funeral of President Lyndon B. Johnson, and his wife Kathy and their family, including their children Scott Hutcheon and his daughter Abby, her favorite niece of Colorado Springs and Mom's beloved niece Laura, of San Diego who she helped with assistance for her college education. She is also survived by her son Ian Redpath Carpenter Harrison, Indiana's finest chef and owner of Carnegie's restaurant in Greenfield, a culinary institution since 2000 and Ian's wife, another of Mom's many best friends, Jody Thomson, who has always been there for her every step of the journey since they met, her other 'adopted sons' my brother's best friends Lance Adams, David Vandivier and Rob Branigin, and also myself, her eldest son, Steve Harrison who is a professional sailor formerly living on the island of Mallorca, Spain until May 2021 when I returned to Greenfield for the honor and the privilege of accompanying my mother on her last journey. We were able to make one last trip out East to Rhode Island and Maine to see a couple of her best friends, June Stewart and Mom's cousin Judy McLaren of Smithfield, RI who were very close to her, and to see Mom's home village of Foster, RI and to go to the beach and see the ocean one last time, to see Newport and Ocean Drive and walk on Cliffwalk again and enjoyed lobster rolls at the Ocean Mist on the beach in Matunuck. A highlight of the trip for Mom as an artist was being able to meet the great artist and great friend of mine Sasha Kouznetsov, who was happy to give her a personal show of his paintings, with which they enthusiastically connected as fellow artists, creators and lovers of the beauty of this world, which along with our family, will sadly miss the light she brought to so many of us. But Mom's light shone through in everything she did and all she gave to us, and through all her endeavours and the way she lived her life for others more than for herself, she left the world a better place. For this and so much more, I am deeply and eternally grateful to her. She gave me everything a mother could give and as I reminded her when she could no longer remember these things, she will always be my hero.
A brief Genealogy:
Sheila Hutcheon was born on the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, on December 21, 1943 in Tampa, Florida in a quonset hut on the side of the airfield tarmac at Southeast Air Base (1939) which is now known as MacDill Air Force Base, where her father Lt. (Ret. Captain) Frank George Hutcheon (b.1918 Providence, RI -d. 2010 Columbus, IN) worked for the Army Signal Corps building the first radar station on the west coast of Florida and her mother Norma Ellen McCabe (b. Feb 19, 1919 Cranston, RI - d. Jul. 23, 1995 Columbus, IN) and daughter of Flora McCabe, was a Registered Nurse. After the war, the young family moved back to the old New England village of Foster, Rhode Island where Mom grew up attending classes in a red one room schoolhouse next door to where she lived in the Aylesworth House (1824) which has been the town of Foster's police station since 1965 and when we visited in July the Chief was kind enough to allow us to visit her old bedroom which is now his office. Her father Frank donated the land for and helped build the Foster Volunteer Fire Department, and was instrumental in the strict zoning laws which maintain the historic character of the village without commercial development to this day.
Sheila's grandfather Frank W. Hutcheon and his wife Agnes Redpath emigrated in 1904 from Perth, Scotland to Providence, Rhode Island, a Scottish ancestry which made Mom proud, passed onto her by her grandmothers Agnes Redpath-Hutcheon and Nana Murray, and her mother's side of the family came to America in 1634 on the ship "Bevis" with William Carpenter, an English immigrant from Cornwall who first settled at Weymouth, Massachusetts and "who was named to represent that town in both 1641 and 1643 in the Plymouth County General Court. In 1645, William Carpenter and other Weymouth residents began a new settlement at Rehoboth, Massachusetts, where he served as the town clerk, a post also held by several of his descendants. Numerous early records bear his signature. By the time William Carpenter's will was executed in 1659, he and his family had become respectable citizens enjoying a fairly good standard of living. He was a large property owner, both at Rehoboth and nearby Pawtuxet. In addition, he owned more livestock than the average settler. William Carpenter's household items indicate that he had prospered. One of the more remarkable aspects of his will was the mention of an excellent private library, certainly a rarity for even the clerk of a small village and perhaps equaled only by the collections of some of Boston's more prominent residents. The books reveal a man of intellectual curiosity and scholarly inclinations. In addition to the usual religious texts, William Carpenter owned books on various subjects, including Latin books, Hebrew and Greek grammars, and a Greek lexicon. He is known as the "Father of Patriots," the only American Colonial with as many as 227 male descendants who actively served in the American Revolution." (from the Genealogy of Ancestors of Norma Ellen Hutcheon: Family trees of William Carpenter of Rehoboth, Massacusetts and James Hamblin of Barnstable, Massachusetts Vol.1, a full genealogy of his wife's family lovingly compiled by Sheila's father Frank G. Hutcheon). William Carpenter of Rehoboth's descendant Col. Thomas Carpenter (1743-1807) served as Commander of a Rhode Island regiment in Sullivan's Expedition to Rhode Island and New York (approx. 4,500 soldiers in total) the success of which resulted in the deaths of hundreds or thousands of Native Americans, both British-allied Wampanoag and Iroquois, in several battles and skirmishes but mainly by starvation outside a British fortress in Canada after their crops and villages in the eastern and central New York valleys were burned, breaking the Iroquois Nation who was allied with the British, a regrettable fact for which on this solemn day our family would like to take a moment to express our sincere remorse and sorrow to the indigenous people of America, who helped us survive upon our arrival on this continent, their home. I am not sure if Mom was aware of the result of Col. Thomas Carpenter's participation in Sullivan's Expedition but she was proud of her family's service in the Revolutionary War which made her a member of the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution). Other ancestors on her mother's side fought on the side of the Union in the American Civil War in the coastal campaign in South Carolina maintaining a garrison on Hilton Head, South Carolina, an island to which her parents retired in their later years.
Among Mom's other ancestors from Cape Cod were sailors and ship captains such as the Hamblin brothers of Barnstable, Massachusetts, Captain Simeon Hamblin (b. 1807-d. 1892) who went to sea at 11 and became a "Master" at age 19, and was skipper of the schooners "Edward," "American Eagle," "Eliza," "Ann" and "Steel." His brother Capt. William Hamblin (b. 1812-d. 1893) was skipper of the schooners "Resolve," "Victor," "Young Travante" and "George Washington." No wonder Mom always loved sailing and the sea."
A Memorial Service for Sheila will be held in the near future with date forthcoming. Flinn and Maguire Funeral Home, 2898 North Morton Street, (U.S. 31 North) in Franklin.
Mom was an multi-disciplinary artist in the mediums of painting, poetry, photography, stained glass, pottery and basket weaving, which she shared with thousands of students, by whom she is fondly remembered, during her 35 year career as the art teacher at Northwood Elementary School in Franklin, Indiana, where she won the Franklin Community School Corporation's "Seniors Choice Award for Most Influential Educator" in 2003. Mom also worked in the summers as an art teacher at Camp Thunderbird on Lake Plantagenet in Bemidji, Minnesota and thereby gave me the gifts of knowledge of nature, wilderness and sailing, which have served me well in life. She was a founding member of Johnson County Historic Landmarks, which she and a group of friends started to preserve the historic architecture of Franklin, Indiana when they were appalled at the tearing down of fine Victorian era homes in her adopted hometown. The project grew into Mom developing a teaching guide for Indiana Architecture and Historic Landmarks which was used as a template to educate schoolchildren throughout the state of the value of their architectural heritage and the imperative to preserve it, an endeavor which won Franklin Heritage the "Sandy Servaas Memorial Award" in 1986 for meritorious service from the Indiana Historic Landmarks Foundation. The result of her efforts is that Franklin has been transformed by younger generations into a town of lovingly restored old Victorian homes painted in period colors surrounding a vibrant downtown renaissance which breathed new life into the old town with an improved quality of life for its citizens. That quality of life Mom wanted to give her community was also expressed as a founding member of the Franklin Symphony Council, whose mission ensures that every schoolchild in Johnson County goes to attend a performance of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra before they reach high school. When we were searching for a nursing home that would accept someone with Mom's form of dementia, (many thanks and gratitude to the caring staff at Majestic Care of Connersville who have cared for her like family these last seven weeks) a nursing home liaison who assisted us mentioned that her eleven year old son had attended the ISO through the program the week before, so Mom's cultural education efforts continue through those two programs to this day. She volunteered in many ways to improve the quality of life for her community, graduating from the 2006-2007 class of the community volunteer organization Leadership Johnson County. Another one of Mom's achievements was when the Morning Light Hospice in Indianapolis gave her an award in 2016 "In Grateful Appreciation for Outstanding Service to the Board and Her Community" from the Financial Development Committee of which she was a Commitment Circle Member. Morning Light Hospice also helps lower income families and the homeless who are in need of hospice care. Sheila was also recognized in Nov. 2020 as a Charter Member of The National WWII Museum in New Orleans, LA contributing in honor of her father Lt. Frank G. Hutcheon. After she retired Mom also volunteered for many years as a greeter and information lady at Johnson County Hospital. Mom also bought an old historic house and created an art gallery and hosted a 50 year retrospective of her work in 2011 despite the fact that much of her art was scattered having been given away to friends. Her last public exhibition was the inclusion of a special painting at the Hancock County Artists Show at 20 North Main Gallery in Greenfield, Indiana in October of 2021, which was of one of her early paintings that was given back to her by the family of close friends Col. Doug, June and Chris Stewart. When then Lt. Doug Stewart was deploying to Vietnam with the Marines in 1962 he asked Sheila, who was attending the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) to paint a picture for him and she created for him an abstract painting in blue, white and green of the skyline of New York City which she painted en plein aire from across the Hudson River. She was an esteemed donor and supporter of the Hancock County Artists Society and as noted above remained active in the arts up until two months before her passing. Mom was also involved until her passing in the charitable organization PEO which helps to raise funds for women's educational opportunities worldwide and her PEO sisters, like her dear friend Marilyn who has visited her frequently this summer, have shown an outpouring of support in recent weeks, along other women's group friends such as her steadfast support group including Mary Elliott, Donna Wagner and Kathy Cookerly, to whom our family is forever grateful as they have always been there for her, including many visits during her long, recently intensifying illness.
Although she was not overtly political, Mom also expressed her love for others and hope for a better world by participating in politics as a grass roots activist, working as a volunteer on the campaigns to elect Barack Obama, helping to win Indiana for his presidential bid in 2008 and in a losing effort in 2012, and through her many community service efforts. Her heroes in politics were Eleanor and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Dalai Lama of Tibet, folk singers Joan Baez and Bob Dylan and feminist singer Helen Reddy, President Jimmy Carter, (for whose family her husband Leslie Barr was an aide, who had stories of driving Roselyn and Amy Carter in the Barr family's Cadillac), President John and especially Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King and Gandhi, all of whom she deeply admired and whose deaths she mourned but who deepened her resolve to make a difference and be a power for good in our society. She also reached out internationally, welcoming several Japanese women who were working in the US into her home to live, with whom she became lifelong friends, such as her beloved Yoko and Qu. Mom was a lifelong American patriot who loved her country. Mom believed in feminism, equality, education, civic responsibility, compassion, anti-racism, peace, environmental responsibility and social justice and the persevering power of love and exemplified all these things by the way she lived and the way she raised her two sons and taught generations of schoolchildren in Indiana, to live with love and respect and care for others, and also to stand up for what is right and to make every effort to make the world a better place, an endeavour in which she truly succeeded in every way. Her motto was the famous quote from Gandhi, "Be the change you want to see in the World" and she lived it.
Sheila Hutcheon-Barr attended the Rhode Island School of Design in the early 1960's and SUNY, the State University of New York, where she studied art and met my father Steve Harrison, Sr. and married him at the Dutch Reformed Church in the historic Huguenot village of New Paltz, NY in 1965. They were friends of the Chapin Brothers, the musicians Tom and Harry Chapin, the latter of whom is famous for the song "Cat's in the Cradle" who played in the local bars near New Paltz, NY. My parents moved us all to Terre Haute, Indiana where they divorced in 1974. Despite her love of the ocean, Mom stayed in Indiana to raise us rather than moving back East, saying "Grow where you are planted." which she did, along with her dear friends Lilo and Vico von Stralendorff who were German immigrants who fled the Nazis and moved to Franklin who shared her love of nature and their log cabin in the woods with us in Brown County. Mom married the love of her life Leslie James Barr of Greenfield, Indiana in 1987 and was widowed upon his tragically early death at the age of 43 in 1991. She is survived by the second love of her life Michael Wirey, many best friends including Deedra, Norman, Scott and Courtney Durocher and June Stewart of Foster, RI, Nancy Campbell of Terre Haute, IN, Nancy Mosely of Cloverdale, IN, David and Carol Carter, Michelle Cuttill, and Janice and Lawrence Hunter of Spencer, IN, many close friends from Franklin, IN such as Christopher Hext of Franklin Heritage and fellow teachers Janet Stone and Bob and Barbara Dole. Also Kathy and Marie Barr and their families of Greenfield, IN and the children of Les Barr Andrew, Matthew and Jenny Barr originally of Greenfield and her close friends and neighbors Jan Peters with whom she shared her Christian faith and Meryl Suhr also of Greenfield. She is also survived by her brother Bruce Hutcheon, who was a US Coast Guard rescue diver and the USCG's representative honor guard and pall bearer for the funeral of President Lyndon B. Johnson, and his wife Kathy and their family, including their children Scott Hutcheon and his daughter Abby, her favorite niece of Colorado Springs and Mom's beloved niece Laura, of San Diego who she helped with assistance for her college education. She is also survived by her son Ian Redpath Carpenter Harrison, Indiana's finest chef and owner of Carnegie's restaurant in Greenfield, a culinary institution since 2000 and Ian's wife, another of Mom's many best friends, Jody Thomson, who has always been there for her every step of the journey since they met, her other 'adopted sons' my brother's best friends Lance Adams, David Vandivier and Rob Branigin, and also myself, her eldest son, Steve Harrison who is a professional sailor formerly living on the island of Mallorca, Spain until May 2021 when I returned to Greenfield for the honor and the privilege of accompanying my mother on her last journey. We were able to make one last trip out East to Rhode Island and Maine to see a couple of her best friends, June Stewart and Mom's cousin Judy McLaren of Smithfield, RI who were very close to her, and to see Mom's home village of Foster, RI and to go to the beach and see the ocean one last time, to see Newport and Ocean Drive and walk on Cliffwalk again and enjoyed lobster rolls at the Ocean Mist on the beach in Matunuck. A highlight of the trip for Mom as an artist was being able to meet the great artist and great friend of mine Sasha Kouznetsov, who was happy to give her a personal show of his paintings, with which they enthusiastically connected as fellow artists, creators and lovers of the beauty of this world, which along with our family, will sadly miss the light she brought to so many of us. But Mom's light shone through in everything she did and all she gave to us, and through all her endeavours and the way she lived her life for others more than for herself, she left the world a better place. For this and so much more, I am deeply and eternally grateful to her. She gave me everything a mother could give and as I reminded her when she could no longer remember these things, she will always be my hero.
A brief Genealogy:
Sheila Hutcheon was born on the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, on December 21, 1943 in Tampa, Florida in a quonset hut on the side of the airfield tarmac at Southeast Air Base (1939) which is now known as MacDill Air Force Base, where her father Lt. (Ret. Captain) Frank George Hutcheon (b.1918 Providence, RI -d. 2010 Columbus, IN) worked for the Army Signal Corps building the first radar station on the west coast of Florida and her mother Norma Ellen McCabe (b. Feb 19, 1919 Cranston, RI - d. Jul. 23, 1995 Columbus, IN) and daughter of Flora McCabe, was a Registered Nurse. After the war, the young family moved back to the old New England village of Foster, Rhode Island where Mom grew up attending classes in a red one room schoolhouse next door to where she lived in the Aylesworth House (1824) which has been the town of Foster's police station since 1965 and when we visited in July the Chief was kind enough to allow us to visit her old bedroom which is now his office. Her father Frank donated the land for and helped build the Foster Volunteer Fire Department, and was instrumental in the strict zoning laws which maintain the historic character of the village without commercial development to this day.
Sheila's grandfather Frank W. Hutcheon and his wife Agnes Redpath emigrated in 1904 from Perth, Scotland to Providence, Rhode Island, a Scottish ancestry which made Mom proud, passed onto her by her grandmothers Agnes Redpath-Hutcheon and Nana Murray, and her mother's side of the family came to America in 1634 on the ship "Bevis" with William Carpenter, an English immigrant from Cornwall who first settled at Weymouth, Massachusetts and "who was named to represent that town in both 1641 and 1643 in the Plymouth County General Court. In 1645, William Carpenter and other Weymouth residents began a new settlement at Rehoboth, Massachusetts, where he served as the town clerk, a post also held by several of his descendants. Numerous early records bear his signature. By the time William Carpenter's will was executed in 1659, he and his family had become respectable citizens enjoying a fairly good standard of living. He was a large property owner, both at Rehoboth and nearby Pawtuxet. In addition, he owned more livestock than the average settler. William Carpenter's household items indicate that he had prospered. One of the more remarkable aspects of his will was the mention of an excellent private library, certainly a rarity for even the clerk of a small village and perhaps equaled only by the collections of some of Boston's more prominent residents. The books reveal a man of intellectual curiosity and scholarly inclinations. In addition to the usual religious texts, William Carpenter owned books on various subjects, including Latin books, Hebrew and Greek grammars, and a Greek lexicon. He is known as the "Father of Patriots," the only American Colonial with as many as 227 male descendants who actively served in the American Revolution." (from the Genealogy of Ancestors of Norma Ellen Hutcheon: Family trees of William Carpenter of Rehoboth, Massacusetts and James Hamblin of Barnstable, Massachusetts Vol.1, a full genealogy of his wife's family lovingly compiled by Sheila's father Frank G. Hutcheon). William Carpenter of Rehoboth's descendant Col. Thomas Carpenter (1743-1807) served as Commander of a Rhode Island regiment in Sullivan's Expedition to Rhode Island and New York (approx. 4,500 soldiers in total) the success of which resulted in the deaths of hundreds or thousands of Native Americans, both British-allied Wampanoag and Iroquois, in several battles and skirmishes but mainly by starvation outside a British fortress in Canada after their crops and villages in the eastern and central New York valleys were burned, breaking the Iroquois Nation who was allied with the British, a regrettable fact for which on this solemn day our family would like to take a moment to express our sincere remorse and sorrow to the indigenous people of America, who helped us survive upon our arrival on this continent, their home. I am not sure if Mom was aware of the result of Col. Thomas Carpenter's participation in Sullivan's Expedition but she was proud of her family's service in the Revolutionary War which made her a member of the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution). Other ancestors on her mother's side fought on the side of the Union in the American Civil War in the coastal campaign in South Carolina maintaining a garrison on Hilton Head, South Carolina, an island to which her parents retired in their later years.
Among Mom's other ancestors from Cape Cod were sailors and ship captains such as the Hamblin brothers of Barnstable, Massachusetts, Captain Simeon Hamblin (b. 1807-d. 1892) who went to sea at 11 and became a "Master" at age 19, and was skipper of the schooners "Edward," "American Eagle," "Eliza," "Ann" and "Steel." His brother Capt. William Hamblin (b. 1812-d. 1893) was skipper of the schooners "Resolve," "Victor," "Young Travante" and "George Washington." No wonder Mom always loved sailing and the sea."
A Memorial Service for Sheila will be held in the near future with date forthcoming. Flinn and Maguire Funeral Home, 2898 North Morton Street, (U.S. 31 North) in Franklin.
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