“A Great Life”
By James VanBever
When Alan Summersby was five years old, she and her family took a train from their home in New Jersey to their summer home on the St. Croix River in Minnesota. During the trip, a woman asked Alan what her name was. The young girl then looked down and told the woman that her name was Alan. When the woman said that’s a boy’s name, Alan’s mother came to her daughter’s defense and told the lady that “she’s named for my husband’s little brother who had died, I wanted to do things a little differently.”
Alan MacLaren Summersby was born on August 8, 1927, in St. Paul, Minnesota, to John “Jack” and Jean MacLaren (Ingersoll) Summersby. She grew up in Summit, New Jersey, and graduated from Kent Place School, which was a private school for girls. Alan would then enter Radcliffe College from where she would graduate in 1950.
As a youth, Alan and her family would spend summers at her mother’s family home on the St. Croix River in Minnesota which was a few miles outside St. Paul. She chronicles those summers in her memoir entitled Our Side of the River: A memoir.
During these summers, Alan recounts the adventures she has with her cousins and brother exploring the St. Croix River and the relationships she had with her aunts and uncles and other family members. She tells of how her family knew F. Scott Fitgerald the great American novelist who wrote The Great Gatsby and other novels and short stories during the “Jazz Age.”
While a student at Radcliffe, Alan met her future husband Richard “Dick” Emmet who was a student at Harvard at the time. The couple started dating and were married on August 21, 1948. The wedding took place on the St. Croix River.
After the couple married they originally lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Dick was now an attorney for a Boston law firm. However, in 1951 the Emetts saw an ad in the Boston Globe for a “200-year-old center chimney [farmhouse] recently restored, with 11 rooms, 5 fireplaces, 6 bedrooms and 3 baths.” The price of the home was listed at $25,000. Although the ad was a bit exaggerated, Dick and Alan bought the home for $23,000. That house was located at 224 Concord Road in the Parker Village or Parkerville section of Westford.
It did not take long for Alan and Dick to get involved in Westford activities. In 1951, the couple became part of “The Mr. and Mrs. Club” which produced a show that was held at the town hall. The title of the show was “TV Highlights” which was an impersonation of some of the early television stars such as Groucho Marx and other early television personalities.
In the early 1960s, Alan and Dick moved back to Cambridge and made their weekend and summer home in Westford. During these years she was a school volunteer for the Boston School Department. However, in 1969 the family moved back to Westford on a permanent basis.
During the early 1970s, Mrs. Emmet began taking courses at Harvard University in Landscape Design. “At first, she became interested in the history of garden design and then, through a developing awareness in the ecological fields, she was drawn to the new field of landscape history.” In her role as Research Assistant at Harvard, Alan “prepared bibliography, arranged speeches and helped students with their projects.”
In 1987, Mrs. Emmet graduated from the Radcliffe Seminar Landscape Design Program and later worked for the Harvard School of Design. She went on to write So Fine a Prospect-Historic New England Gardens which was published in 1996. The book, which was a New York Notable Book, focused on private gardens in New England.
New York Times writer, Michael Pollan, wrote a review of Alan’s book: “SoFine A Prospect deserves a place on the short shelf of recent histories that have helped to recover a forgotten heritage. Alan Emmet has added a significant new dimension to our understanding of American garden history, once treated a little more than a shallow tributary English garden fashion.”
One of Alan’s favorite authors was Edith Wharton whose most famous novels were The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence. In 1901, Wharton bought an 113-acre home in Lenox, Massachusetts, named the “The Mount.” She wanted the home to “meet her needs as designer, gardener, hostess, and writer.” Edith Wharton once commented that she was a “better landscape gardener than novelist.”
In 2002, Alan took part in several lectures offered by “The Mount” which is an organization that honors the legacy of Edith Wharton. The title of Mrs. Emmet’s lecture was “A Conservation Rebel: Edith in the Garden.” Alan’s talk was “part of the complex art of the Civilized Living” lecture series.
Alan and her husband Dick brought their conservation spirit to Westford. The couple donated hundreds of acres of land which became the Nashoba Bird Sanctuary. In addition, they placed their home and land under preservation restriction. The preservation restriction is a state law that “ensures that the buildings and their land will forever be preserved and maintained to reflect their New England heritage.” This meant that the Emmet’s property and homes could “never be split into smaller house lots” and that stone walls on the property could not be destroyed.
The Emmets also placed their Martha’s Vineyard property under a conservation restriction with the Vineyard Conservation Society, permanently precluding future development.
At the October 2021 Westford Town Meeting Alan Emmet was recognized for her community service to the town of Westford. However, her community service was not limited to Westford. In addition to volunteering for the Boston School Department, Alan also spent six years earlier in her life teaching immigrants at the International Institute in Lowell. Mrs. Emmet’s students who could not speak any English spoke French, Greek, and Hungarian.
Alan Emmet died on October 9, 2021, at her home in Westford. She was survived by her children Caroline, Henry, and William. Dick Emmet died in 2007. Alan is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Sources:
Emmet, Alan, Our Side of the River: A Memoir, pp. 3,4,171,172.
“Westford Club to Present TV Highlights in Town Hall April 4, 5,” Lowell Sun, April 2, 1952, p. 12.
Ibid. “Westford,” April 10, 1952, p. 25.
“Lenox Town Hall,” North Adams Transcript, April 4, 2002, p. 25.
Edith Wharton’s Home, “The Mount.”
“Alan Summersby Emmet,” Vineyard Gazette, November 3, 2021.
“Alan Emmet (1927-2021),” by Ron Johnson, The Westford Historical Society.
“Meet Your Neighbor,” by Virginia Kimball, Westford Eagle, January 11. 1979, p. 4.
Ibid. “Move to preserve, protect the past for the future,” by Gail Ferney, April 19, 1990. P. 3.
Ibid. “Westford in the 50s: Poised to end an era,” by Richard Emmet, reprint July 19, 2021, p. 4.