LEBANON — There was a time years ago, if you were out and about in the Upper Valley and lucky enough to cross paths with Adele Patch, it was likely you would be going home with some of her homemade jam or bread.
Patch always had an ample supply of both in her purse or trunk of her car, and it didn’t matter whether you were a friend or a stranger. What mattered was putting a smile on your face.
“If she saw someone in the parking lot when she went shopping she would hand out jam or bread,” said her oldest granddaughter, Sarah Lindberg, of Lebanon. “She loved to make people smile.”
Patch, who died April 24, 2026, at the age of 94 after a years-long battle with dementia, was well known in the area for her sociable nature and generous spirit. She would often tell others to never forget her famous four F words to live by: faith, family, friends, and fabric.
“Everybody loved Adele,” said her longtime friend and quilting partner, Colleen O’Neil of Cornish. “In the Upper Valley she was known by one name, like Cher or Oprah. If you said Adele in the Upper Valley, people knew who you were talking about. She was like a mini celebrity. She was always cheerful, looking for the good and wanting to make people happy. And she did.”
Well-known for the prodigious amounts of jams, bread and quilts she made over the years, Patch set an example of what one can accomplish with hard work and a cheerful outlook, despite a trying youth.
“Her zest for life and tenacious attitude were something I wish I could emulate,” said granddaughter Christine Decato, of Lebanon. “She was fearless, generous and left a smile on everyone she encountered.”
Patch could find something good in everyone and every circumstance, which was even more remarkable after her very difficult start in life, said another granddaughter, Christa Beasley, who lives in Arizona.
Patch was born in 1932 in Lowell, Mass., and grew up in Woodsville in a family of 13 children on a dairy farm, where she learned to milk cows. Beasley said her grandmother often spoke of her childhood of poverty with no electricity, scarce food, clothing made of potato sacks and her abusive and alcoholic stepfather.
But that all began to change when Patch went to the Grafton County Field Day at the county farm in Haverhill in the summer of 1952, where she won a milking contest and met her future husband, Donald Patch, of Lebanon. They were married that same year and shared 51 years together until his passing in 2003.
“Her stories of meeting grandpa at a cow milking contest and marrying him soon after, only to grow this great life over 50 years with him, always stuck with me as a reason that really anything is possible in life,” Beasley said in an email. “I feel like Grammie lived many lifetimes — a childhood she wanted to escape, a hardworking mother and wife, an eccentric quilt maker, berry picker and jam and bread making grandmother.”
Decato said her grandmother had a renegade streak, “shattering glass ceilings” and proving for herself equal to life’s obstacles, overcoming any in her path.
“She was the best role model for a young woman like myself, and I’m thankful to have had her as a guiding light throughout my life.”
When Patch made her loaves of maple, oatmeal, and wheat bread, the process felt more like a bakery than a home. Lindberg said her grandmother had purchased a “huge bread mixer” from the Cardigan Mountain School in 1972 for $300. Her recipes weren’t for one or two loaves but eight at a time. And she always had some in the trunk of her car to give away, or perhaps exchange, for something she needed. Lindberg said her grandmother often liked to barter.
“She came from the old school. You don’t pay for things; you give them bread or jam,” Lindberg said, chuckling at the memory.
The Patch grandchildren all remember their summers at the Patch farm, for the fun they had and the life lessons learned.
“The largest percentage of memories I have from my childhood were with my Grammie and Grampa up on the farm,” Decato said. “No worries. No nagging. Just fun. Mornings began with mandatory hugs and moved on to pancakes, swim lessons, running in the fields, afternoon 4-wheeler rides, scooping up polliwogs, and filling buckets upon buckets with berries.”
Each year, she put up hundreds of pints of different jams, including blueberry, raspberry, and blackberry, after picking them, often with her grandchildren.
“We would go on a four-wheeler with her to pick wild berries,” said Lindberg, who cared for her grandmother when her dementia left her unable to live alone. “Grammie was the fastest berry picker in the world.”
Outgoing and rambunctious, Patch also had a “calmer center,” Decato said.
“Her hand holding was top tier, and after every visit or when settling into bed for the night she would always remark, ‘you made my day,’ and she meant it.”
Like berry picking and jam-making, Patch had a near obsession with sewing quilts, mostly for others or for a good cause. After taking a quilting course at Lebanon College in 1980, she was a founding member of the Northern Lights Quilting Guild in 1982.
“She made hundreds and hundreds of quilts, and she made beautiful quilts,” Lindberg said. “Her grandchildren would get them when they got married.”
O’Neil joined the Guild, which grew to about 100 members, in the 1990s.
“Adele made bed-size quilts and quilts of all sizes,” she said. “She was forever giving quilts away. If you visited her, you came out with a quilt, jam or bread or maybe all three. She was so generous.”
The Guild was like a “fellowship” for quilters to share their projects and make quilts for community service, O’Neil said. Among the places the Guild donated to were David’s House, Habitat for Humanity, Dismas House, Good Beginnings, The Upper Valley Haven, TLC Family Resource Center, WISE, and the Jack Byrne Center for Palliative & Hospice Care, along with many others over the years. The Guild has also sent quilts out of state in response to natural disasters, to families perhaps displaced by a fire or tragedy, to sick children, to foster children, and more.
“We called them our Comfort Quilt Project,” O’Neil said.
Lindberg said her grandmother made quilts and wall hangings for some of the firehouses in New York after 9/11. “She was proud to have done her part to help people heal.”
Patch won awards for her quilting and instructed to have all her quilting materials donated to the Guild after her death, Lindberg said.
When she learned she could no longer drive, Patch was not upset, unlike many with a new restriction in their lives.
“As long as she had her fabric and sewing machine, she was fine,” O’Neil said.
After her passing, Lindberg informed Patch’s longtime friend, Mart Hulswit, in New York City. Patch first met Hulswit — an actor on the soap opera “Guiding Light” who died in July — and his wife, Maria, when she waitressed at Lander’s Restaurant, and the couple was occasional customers. In a guest book, the Hulswits recalled visiting the Patch dairy farm and learning of Adele’s love and talent for quilting. When the Patches later sold one of their prized cows to a buyer in Austria, they stayed with the Hulswits as guests in New York.
“A few years later, when she learned that we had volunteered at St. Paul’s Church for many hours to serve the professional firemen that were retrieving the many dead that had been crushed when the Twin Towers were struck and destroyed, she sent us a quilted pillow bearing the image of the U.S. stamp that memorialized that tragedy,” the Hulswits wrote. “And when we expressed our gratitude, she made us a full quilt of that image. It has been one of our prized possessions ever since. We shall never forget her.”
“My grandmother was a force,” said Beth Stone of Lebanon. “She was one with the sun, the wind, the rain, the fields and the sky.”
Stone said she has embraced all the knowledge her grandmother passed along from her “barnyard degree.”
“I’ve taken all her woodsy, barnyard wisdom and ran with it. She’d always say to me, ‘Beth, you’re a nut, but it takes one to know one,’ and then she’d follow that up with a wink and her unrivaled laugh, which I’ll carry with me forever.
“I really do believe she helped make me the independent, strong, stick-up-for-myself, no-nonsense woman that I am now.”
Patrick O’Grady can be reached at pogclmt@gmail.com.
