Lebanon, NH – Margaret “Peggy” Jane Pierce was born March 6, 1943, in Greenfield, MA. She was the third child of Robert Gage and Grace May Pierce. Peggy grew up in a house on Gerrett Street with her three siblings, Robert Jr., Donald and Dorothy “Dolly.” She played varsity field hockey, basketball and softball and participated in the Girl Scouts and the International Order of the Rainbow Girls.
More than anything, Peggy loved horses and attended numerous summer camps in Massachusetts and Vermont where she could ride and care for horses, starting first as a camper and continuing as a counselor.
Upon graduating from Greenfield High School in 1961, Peggy attended Green Mountain College in Poultney, VT, where she was a member of the Outing Club and on the staff of “The Mountaineer,” the college’s campus newspaper. In the fall of 1962, Peggy met the man she would later marry at the Moosilauke Ravine Lodge in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Upon graduation, Peggy continued her education at the University of Colorado in Denver, graduating in 1965 with a degree in biology.
On October 3, 1965, Peggy married Blair Carter Wood Jr. from Cedar Falls, IA. The couple first lived near Seattle while Blair completed his service with the Army and later moved to Boulder, CO, where Peggy worked as a research assistant at the Sommers-Bausch Astronomical Observatory.
On July, 12, 1970, Peggy gave birth to her first daughter, Heather Margaret, and within weeks the little family drove with their two Samoyed dogs and all their belongings to a house on Mascoma Lake in Enfield, NH, where they lived until moving into a house they built on Eastman Hill in Lebanon, NH. On January 13, 1974, Hilary Blair was born, and Peggy spent several years caring for her daughters and Samoyed dogs, riding her Morgan horse, Patriot, and tending a flourishing vegetable garden. Together, the family hiked all of the four-thousand “footers” in the White Mountains and skied at the Dartmouth Skiway. Every summer they camped in Acadia National Park on Mount Desert in Maine and visited the family cabin in northwestern Wisconsin, where they paddled the Brule River from its source to its mouth in Lake Superior.
When her daughters started attending school full time, Peggy became a librarian at the Lebanon Public Library, a job she loved. In addition to being an avid outdoorswoman and athlete, Peggy was a voracious reader – a habit she bequeathed to her daughters.
Peggy was also a breast cancer survivor. When she and Blair took up bicycling, they would ride The Prouty, an annual fundraising event for the Dartmouth Cancer Center. The ride features several lengths, including a 100-mile route around the Upper Valley. On several occasions, Peggy and Blair rode that route twice in a single day.
In 2005, Peggy retired, and she and Blair moved to a home they built in Montezuma, CO, on an old mining claim named The Defiance at the end of a miles-long dead end road in Summit County. There they continued hiking, skiing (both downhill and backcountry), bicycling and mountain biking. A few years later, they purchased a second home in Moab, UT, where they spent the springs and falls hiking and biking in the High Desert. Peggy continued her gardening with a wild flower garden at their Colorado home and when she was not outdoors, read countless novels by the wood stove.
Sometime around 2017, Peggy began to show signs of cognitive decline, which was eventually diagnosed as Alzheimer’s Disease. She and Blair moved to a home they built in Missoula, MT, where Blair cared for her with the help of two devoted caregivers. In the early hours of December 27, 2025, Peggy died peacefully in her bed with Blair beside her. She is survived by her daughters Heather Wood of Waterbury, VT, and Hilary Wood of Missoula. She is also survived by a grandson, Damian Blair Jensen of Missoula and her sister Dolly Pierce of Concord, NH.
There will be a memorial gathering for Peggy and Blair from 2:00 to 5:00 on December 12, 2026 at The Norwich Inn in Norwich, VT.
Click here to sign the guest book or honor their memory with flowers, donations, or other heartfelt tributes