I. Thomas Stone

I. Thomas Stone

Hanover, NH - I. Thomas Stone died October 6, 2025 in Hanover, NH.

Of all the titles Tom Stone wore, which could seem as plentiful as the countless miles he walked, none got more use than the simple word friend. There was his wife and best friend, Sally; his children and grandchildren; his academic colleagues and students, and those who began as passing acquaintances, only to become much more.

And then there was Frank, a young man struggling with mental illness who had the good luck to cross paths in Potsdam, NY, one day with Tom, who was walking to teach a university class. Seeking no fanfare or recognition, Tom quietly became a de facto guardian – the financial angel on Frank's weary shoulders.

The many compassionate roles Irving Thomas Stone filled in life ended Oct. 6 when he died, family all around him, after years of living with Parkinson's disease, which he bore with characteristic stoicism.

Teacher, researcher, writer, and devoted choir singer, Tom was a professor of anthropology emeritus at the State University of New York at Potsdam. He was 87 and lived with Sally at Kendal at Hanover.

Born on May 9, 1938, in Battle Creek, MI, he was the son of Arthur P. and Lorna (Shepherd) Stone. He attended schools in Battle Creek and Hickory Corners, MI, and completed high school at Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, MI.

In 1960, he graduated from Dartmouth College with a bachelor's degree, magna cum laude, in philosophy. He was a member of Dartmouth's Mountaineering Club, was active in the Northern Studies Program, and won the Frost Prize Play Competition. For his three-act play "The Time for the Wolf" he drew from two summers he spent at a weather station in the Canadian Arctic wilds, where musk oxen and a wolf were among his neighbors.

In 1959, Tom was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and during the 1959-1960 academic year he was a Senior Fellow. In 1960, he entered the anthropology graduate program at Cornell University as a Woodrow Wilson National Fellow. Following his initial year at Cornell, he was awarded a Cornell University fellowship and successive National Institute of Mental Health research training fellowships. He received a master's in anthropology from Cornell in 1963 and a doctorate in 1966.

During his career, Tom's academic positions included research associate in charge of rural studies with the Cornell Program in Social Psychiatry; assistant professor of anthropology and research associate in the Center for Appalachian Studies and Development at West Virginia University; assistant professor of anthropology at Knox College in Galesburg, IL; and associate professor and professor of anthropology at SUNY's Potsdam campus. While teaching at Potsdam, he was recognized as a rigorous academician who was strongly committed to interdisciplinary approaches, a commitment reflected in his own teaching, research, and publications and through his contributions to the establishment of interdisciplinary academic programs.

Throughout his career, social anthropology - the comparative study of variation and change in the nature of human social worlds - was the focus of his teaching and research. His early anthropological fieldwork included studies of the Inupiat in Northwest Alaska, the effects of community social change on psychiatric epidemiology in Maritime Canada, and the social dynamics of poverty in mining and mountain hollow communities in southern Appalachia. Beginning in the 1970s, he analyzed the interaction of community organization and systems of law and normative authority in a series of sociohistorical studies, including publications on the Akwesasne Iroquois in New York and Canada, communities of miners in the Yukon and Alaska, the Herschel Island whalemen's community in the Beaufort Sea, the early Mormon church, the 19th century Hopedale Community, and indigenous Inuit society in the Canadian Arctic. His subsequent research dealt with morality and moral conflict, and included the ongoing study of communities created by early Euromerican adventurers in the far north and 19th century religious movements.

He was a Fellow of the American Anthropological Association, and a member of the American Sociological Association, the International Society of Political Psychology, the Law and Society Association, and several other professional organizations. He was an active member of St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Hanover, where he especially cherished his association with the St. Thomas choir. He had also been a member of the University Chorus of the Upper Valley.

On Dec. 22, 1962, Tom married Sarah Fearnside, who is known as Sally.

In addition to his wife of nearly 63 years, he leaves a son, Jay (Wendy), of San Marcos, CA; a daughter, Jennifer Randolph (John), of Hanover; five grandchildren, Sydney Stone, Margot Johnson (Brandon), Joshua Ramirez, Sarah Ramirez (Abdu Mohamed), and Kaia Randolph; and one great-grandchild, Jennifer Johnson. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Memorial Fund of St. Thomas Church, Hanover, or to the Episcopal Relief and Development Fund.

Numerous friends wrote tributes when Tom and Sally celebrated their 50th anniversary, among them the Rev. John Good, Tom's Cranbook roommate, who recalled the warm respect Tom and his loving family showed to his developmentally disabled younger sister.

Tom's lifelong forgiving nature was also memorable, even to someone in the "forgiving sin business," like John.

"My friendship with Tom is my most enduring treasure," he wrote, giving voice to what so many others have thought for so many years.

A private burial service took place at the Pine Knolls Cemetery in Hanover, NH. An on-line guestbook can be found at rand-wilsonfh.com