Jean Calhoun Bacon "Jill" Bryant

CORNWALL - Jean (known by all as "Jill") Calhoun Bacon Bryant, age 93, of Valley Road, passed away July 5, 2023, at Sharon Hospital. She was the widow of Jack Walsworth Bryant, who died in January of 2020.

Jill was born May 29, 1930 in Morristown, NJ, the daughter of the late Alfred Howe Terry Bacon and Jean Ellinwood Calhoun Bacon.

?In 1947, she graduated from Hopkins Grammar School in New Haven, and then earned a BA from Mount Holyoke College in 1951 and an MS in Library Science from Columbia University in 1954.She met her husband Jack while working at the Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore in 1957, and they married in Cornwall on October 11, 1958. Jill spent the 1960's devoting her time to raising her sons Chuck (b.1961) and Dave (b.1964), before eventually returning to work as a school librarian in the mid-1970's. In 1988, she returned to Connecticut to live in her childhood home ("Haywards", the home of Cornwall's haywarden in the 1870's) and worked at the Berkshire School library in Sheffield until her retirement in 1995.

She spent the next 28 years living the quiet country life she'd always treasured, taking walks up and down the valley, puttering about in her garden and arranging flowers, and reading and napping on her beloved back porch overlooking the brook and Coltsfoot Mountain beyond. In their retirement, Jack and Jill spent a good deal of time traveling to the great houses of the Hudson Valley and to Europe.
In the summers, she served as the cornerstone of the annual pilgrimage to the family Camp in the Adirondacks, passing on ancestral tales to the next generation, and in 2020 at the age of 90, she beat her father's record by a year and became the oldest in the family ever to visit the remote camp. Like her father, she spent a good deal of time poring over voluminous family letters, diaries, and ancestral charts from the 19th century, befriending scholars in Japan, and taking enough notes to fill a book that she never wrote. She volunteered at the Historical Society, at the Cornwall Library, and at the Women's Society of the Congregational Church.

In her last 35 years at Haywards, she must have baked thousands of cookies, as a gesture of good will and appreciation for many different residents of Cornwall, but she was especially fond of feeding cookies to her grandchildren, who gathered around her for vacation weeks in the summer and for all the winter holidays.

She is survived by her sister, Marjorie Ellinwood Bacon Gracey (age 87) of Cornwall, her sons and their wives Rhys and Kempley, and her 5 grandchildren: Bethany, Helena, Benjamin, Lincoln, and Daisy.

A memorial service will be held at the United Church of Christ in Cornwall at the Cornwall Village Meeting House at a date still to be determined.
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Memorial contributions may be made to the United Church of Christ and/or the Cornwall Volunteer Fire Department.