UNITY — Ethel Jarvis was born in Sullivan County’s poor house and grew up to put the county’s house in order.
Jarvis, who served 20 years as a Sullivan County commissioner and filled a host of other roles as a public servant and committed member of the Democratic Party, died Sept. 28, 2020, at Woodlawn Care Center in Newport, at 88.
But it is possible to imagine that when Jarvis was born at the nadir of the Great Depression in the fall of 1931 in what was then called the county’s “Alms House” in Unity — where indigent mothers went to bring their babies into the world — no one foresaw that she would be instrumental in running the county from that same complex 61 years later.
“Ethel was born in the Depression and lived in the Depression,” said state Rep. John Cloutier, D-Claremont, who worked closely with Jarvis going back to when she won her first election as Sullivan County commissioner in 1992. “She came out a fighter and believer in what the Democratic Party could do to make people’s lives better.”
There were signs early that Jarvis, then Ethel Clough, was likely to be a path-breaker.
Ethel entered Stevens High School at 12 years old and graduated at 16, where she earned straight A’s, according to her oldest daughter, Aprille Jarvis, of Charlestown. At 17 she married James “Larry” Jarvis, 19, a recently returned infantryman in Korea whose family had moved from Providence, R.I., to Unity a few years earlier, in 1949.
“Mom would have wanted to go to college but it was not in the cards. No one could afford it,” Aprille Jarvis said.
Following the death of their infant son from pneumonia following surgery, the Jarvises had three daughters: Aprille, Susan and Nancy. Larry Jarvis, who worked at Joy Manufacturing Co. in Claremont through the post-war industrial boom, died at 78 in 2007. He and Ethel were married 58 years.
Ethel Jarvis spent much of the 1950s and early 1960s raising her three daughters, although she also began to become involved in issues outside the home by helping her husband in his duties as a shop steward on the Joy plant floor. They printed the union’s newspaper on a mimeograph machine. Ethel traveled with him to union conventions. They canvassed neighbors with political flyers for candidates — invariably Democrats — the union endorsed.
“That was the seed of her activism,” Aprille Jarvis said.
Then another seed took root when Aprille, then 15, and her mother, then 35, attended a mother-daughter sports banquet together at Newport High School in 1966. They sat next to a friend of Aprille’s and the girl’s mother, who mentioned that she was studying at Keene State College.
“ ‘What, you can do that?’ ” Aprille Jarvis remembers her mother’s incredulous response. “ ‘I want to do that.’ ”
So, at 35 years old in 1966, at an age and time when most women who were already the mother of three preteen and teenage girls and supported by a husband on a workman’s salary would likely have been housebound, Ethel Jarvis became a college freshman.
For the next four years she commuted daily between her home in Unity and the college campus in Keene, joined her senior year by Aprille, who was beginning her freshman year at Keene State (they even took an introduction to art history class together).
At the Jarvis residence in the late 1960s on Lear Hill Road in East Unity, everyone was hitting books.
“We spent many nights, just the four of us, around the kitchen table studying,” said daughter Suzi Hastings, who lives in Newport. “That was a great role model for us.”
After graduating with a degree in education in 1970, Ethel Jarvis taught at elementary schools in Claremont, Goshen, N.H., and Unity. Then in the 1980s she took a job as an administrative assistant for the Selectboard for the town of Unity.
“That’s a fancy name for secretary, but she got to see the inner workings in how to run a town,” Aprille explained. “Working for the Selectboard was what really started her on the road in politics.”
Jarvis had been involved in Sullivan County Democrats for several years and participating in party politics led her in 1992 to seek a seat on the three-member board of Sullivan County Commissioners. In 1992, after emerging the winner in the Democratic primary, she narrowly defeated her Republican opponent 7,769-7,735.
Two years later Jarvis was unseated by the Republican but took the seat back in 1996 and was re-elected every cycle until she stepped down in 2016.
Jarvis, who was only 5 feet tall at most, is perhaps best known for her fight for the county to take back management of the Sullivan County Nursing Home — now Sullivan County Health Care —
She made the issue a centerpiece of her 2006 re-election campaign, Cloutier said.
“She was outraged by privatization. She hung in there for two years and she prevailed. It was probably her greatest fight. Ethel was a fighter,” Cloutier.
But, he added, despite her Democratic Party loyalty, Jarvis could never be accused of being a tax-and-spend liberal.
“She was frugal. She knew every line of the budget and would question it.
Hastings confirmed that, saying her mother “knew where every penny was going and she always reiterated it was the taxpayers’ money they were spending.”
“Mom loved her budget,” Hastings said. “Oh, boy.”
Jarvis, like the proverbial pol, was attentive to her constituents’ needs. She saw responsiveness to their concerns at the core of her responsibility as an elected official, people who worked with her said.
And if that meant bypassing the chain-in-command and intermediaries, so be it.
Ted Purdy, the administrator of Sullivan County Health Care, said Jarvis “in her particular way was always an employee advocate. She wanted to make sure we took care of our employees.”
“It was a little different, certainly,” Purdy said. “But it was understood and appreciated.”
Jarvis’ willingness to speak frankly is attested by her daughter, Aprille, who said her mother could often be overheard on the phone saying to the person on the other end of the line: “You can’t do that!”
That she took her power as a commissioner seriously, Jarvis also leavened it with humor.
She was often referred to by colleagues and family alike as “The Commish” — the title was inspired by the Fox TV series The Commish, which was a favorite of Jarvis and her husband Larry’s and had personal license plates on her dark gray Dodge Caravan stamped “Commish3.”
Ethel Jarvis’s grandson, Kyle Jarvis, saw his grandmother as “driven by fairness and a sense of obligation, whatever it was, to help the underprivileged.” Ethel’s aunt was founder of the Claremont Soup Kitchen and Jarvis herself served on its board.
“That’s what it boiled down to: to do something for people who needed it,” said Kyle Jarvis, an investigator with the New Hampshire Public Defender office.
Jarvis suffered her first stroke in 2014 but it didn’t deter her work as commissioner, which she continued even after she went to live at Sullivan County Health Care.
After less than a year at the county nursing home, Jarvis felt recovered enough to return home. But after a second stroke in 2016, Jarvis moved to Woodlawn Health Care Center in Newport, where a secretary would regularly show up with sheaves of paper for Jarvis to review and sign while she finished out her term.
Born at the county’s Alms House, holding commissioner meetings in the county complex and then residing after her first stroke at the county nursing home, “her life was a full circle,” Hastings said.
Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.
