HANOVER — While her family can’t quite certify whether Sylvia Nelson ever read Thomas Wolfe’s best-known novel, they will attest that this lover of literary fiction never put much stock in the premise that inspired the title of You Can’t Go Home Again.
And they and her many friends and neighbors in her native Hanover will tell you that she spent the last three decades of her life dispelling the truism. Or at least showing that she could go home again, right up until she died on Aug. 9, after a short illness, at 87.
“The move back to New Hampshire was huge and transformative for our mother,” said Plainfield resident Mark Nelson, who grew up in New Jersey with sisters Kate and Suzanne. “It was a return to the community to which she was deeply connected. She reconnected with family members, and was able to do the kinds of things, like connect to the artistic community, to connect to the community’s history, that were much harder to do where we were in New Jersey.”
The connections began and ended with her childhood home on Brewster Road, which her father, Dartmouth psychology professor Chauncey Allen, had built in the late 1920s, and which Sylvia and her husband, Harry Nelson, who worked on Wall Street, bought shortly after returning to Hanover in 1988.
Around that house, she spent childhood winters tobogganing, sledding, skiing and building snow forts with neighborhood kids, most of them also kids of faculty, among them Tom Greene.
“It was a perfect area to grow up in,” said Greene, who now lives in Bethesda, Md.
During and after World War II, Sylvia built her network wider still, while singing in school and at the Church of Christ at Dartmouth College — which almost everyone in town calls the White Church — and excelling as an athlete.
“We were part of a group that put on a skating exhibition at (Dartmouth’s) old Davis Rink,” childhood friend Nancy Hayward Mitchell recalled. “She was a beautiful, beautiful figure skater. And boy, she was a good field hockey player.”
Before she left for Vassar in 1949, to hone and showcase those skills along with her facility with the English language, Sylvia took note of Chauncey Allen’s devotion to the Hanover Historical Society.
“He was on it at the same time as my mother,” Mitchell said. “It was a natural when both of us came back to town, to pick up where our parents left off.
“She became more involved than I did right away.”
And Nelson never let up, while simultaneously serving on the boards of Dartmouth College’s Hopkins Center for the Arts and its Hood Museum of Art. Almost from the start, she was inviting Dartmouth professors to share their scholarship on local history, and recruiting friends old and new to volunteer at Webster Cottage on North Main Street.
“Not long after we started spending our summers there, Sylvia drafted us to sign up to work,” Greene recalled. “It was always a pleasure. She was such a vital person.”
The vitality shone through most on those spring days that the society opened the cottage, an old in-town farmhouse once occupied by Daniel Webster, to the second-graders from the Bernice A. Ray Elementary School, which Sylvia attended and learned her Grade 2 lessons from its namesake.
“Sylvia would dress up in colonial costume and stand in each room, explaining the furniture, and what each of the other women in costume would be doing,” Mitchell said. “She was in her element at Webster Cottage, explaining to young people what life would have been like for young students. Part of her secret, I think, was that with her small stature, she didn’t tower over them. She didn’t have to look down or stoop way down to get to their level.
“That was a wonderful part of her persona.”
Sylvia had had plenty of practice, with her own kids, her grandchildren — and the succession of dogs that lived with her and Harry, including four Scottish terriers and a Wheaten terrier.
“She had a softness, I think, and a solicitousness that just inspired trust,” Mark Nelson said. “They knew, ‘Oh, yeah: This is a safe port in a storm.
“ ‘This woman isn’t going to do anything but love us.’ ”
Duncan McDougall noticed the same quality, whenever Sylvia and Harry Nelson came to events for one of their favorites causes, the Children’s Literacy Foundation. The organization currently holds about 1,000 literacy events a year in the Twin States, visiting more than 170 communities and attracting 45,000 young readers.
“During their time on our board of directors (2005 to 2011), I’d estimate that CLIF probably increased the number of children served by about 60%,” said McDougall, the foundation’s longtime executive director. “The idea of nurturing a love of reading and writing among low-income, at-risk and rural kids who might not have access to books or libraries. After each event that Sylvia would come to one, she was always happy to give guidance, help the kids pick just the right book.”
Nancy Mitchell believes that much of her friend’s interest in and way with the young came from her middle-school years, when she encountered kids from the then-more isolated villages of Etna and Hanover Center, where many lived on farms or deep in the woods and attended one-room elementary schoolhouses.
“It was an amazing thing for both of us, to branch out and meet these new friends,” Mitchell said. “We often talked about how it brought new experiences for all of us. I also think that experience was very important in our work with the historical society. She would reach out to people who bought the schoolhouses, to see what life might have been like for those students, who had their own churches and activities.”
Even after Mitchell stepped back from her day-to-day commitment to the society, and after Nelson relayed the presidency to Cyndy Bittinger, “we often talked about the needs for younger ones to come along and take over some of these things.”
Nelson was also active with her alma mater, serving on Vassar’s board of trustees.
While looking ahead, Sylvia Nelson also made time to look back: For 28 years, she volunteered to clean gravestones in the Dartmouth College Cemetery during the annual restoration visits by Minxie and Jim Fannin of Fannin-Lehner Preservation Consultants.
“She wasn’t afraid to roll up her sleeves,” Minxie Fannin said from their headquarters in Concord, Mass. “She was one of our very best cleaners. She cleaned almost every day we’d be up here. Sometimes she’d come twice a day. Even last year, when she wasn’t strong enough to work, she still came by, about every three days, to see how we were, to catch us up on the news. She regarded it as a responsibility for the historical society.
“She’s what we called Old Hanover. ”
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304.