"OUR WOMEN OF SANDWICH"
(2020 Summer Exhibit)
PATRICIA G. HEARD
(1930-2011)
Patricia Gather Heard grew up during World War II in an affluent family in a large country town in the English Midlands, Ashbourne, Derbyshire. Upon graduating from a prestigious English University, Nottingham, one of only three women in her class, she was asked - if she wasn’t going to get married right away what would she like to do – secretary, nurse or school teacher? These were the only common career paths for educated women of her day. During the Korean conflict she met and married a handsome Yankee serviceman from an old New Hampshire family who was then stationed in England. With him she immigrated to the colonies, ironically settling down in the town where the rebellion that separated her new country from old began, Lexington, Massachusetts.
As part of the wave of city folk that flocked to the beautiful, depressed country town of Sandwich in the sixties, she, with her husband and children came to summer in the town center in the old family homestead purchased fifty years prior by her husband’s grandfather, Arthur Heard. It’s funny that a progressive “women’s libber”, Liberal from England faced with the difficulties of immigration would fall in love with the stoic, conservative county town. But fall in love she did with the town and its history, finding her groove as a writer and historian, becoming the world’s leading authority on the acclaimed portrait painter, native son Albert Gallatin Hoit. Following in the footsteps of her husband’s ancestors, she dedicated herself to Sandwich and its history through a lifelong service to the Sandwich Historical Society.
Adam Heard
June 2020
As part of the wave of city folk that flocked to the beautiful, depressed country town of Sandwich in the sixties, she, with her husband and children came to summer in the town center in the old family homestead purchased fifty years prior by her husband’s grandfather, Arthur Heard. It’s funny that a progressive “women’s libber”, Liberal from England faced with the difficulties of immigration would fall in love with the stoic, conservative county town. But fall in love she did with the town and its history, finding her groove as a writer and historian, becoming the world’s leading authority on the acclaimed portrait painter, native son Albert Gallatin Hoit. Following in the footsteps of her husband’s ancestors, she dedicated herself to Sandwich and its history through a lifelong service to the Sandwich Historical Society.
Adam Heard
June 2020
