Born in 1918, Jane, like Walter, was the product of an intelligent, landed family with roots early into our country's history. Her father's family, the Nichols, had lived in Massachusetts since the 17th century. A distant forebear, Susanna Martin, a Quaker widow, was in 1692 convicted of witchcraft and hanged on Gallows Hill in Salem. During the Revolutionary War, Ichabod Nichols, who had captained a ship to St. Petersburg and the court of Catherine II, was expelled from their Quaker meeting for privateering against British shipping. Late in the 19th century, Jane's grandfather, John White Treadwell Nichols (1852-1920), who owned a textile mill, moved to New York and bought lands bordering the road from Cold Spring Harbor to Syosset. This land continued to be farmed by his descendants until after World War II.

Jane's father, George Nichols, carried on the family textile business. A prominent yachtsman, he maintained the family farming tradition at Uplands Farm, an estate off Lawrence Hill Road, where he and his family moved in 1924. Uplands Farm had been given to his wife by her father, the financier J.P. Morgan (1867-1943), whose Long Island estate was on Matinecock Point in Glen Cove. Morgan's summers were generally spent in England, to the north of London in Hertfordshire. There Jane Page, as a young girl, experienced the pleasures of the English country house life that New York's great wealth was trying to emulate, if not better, on Long Island's North Shore. In the summer of 1939, Morgan's chauffeur, in a casual conversation with a Lab scientist, gave assurances that war was not imminent because Mr. Morgan was still in England.

Jane Page's strong sense of civic responsibility was also present in her mother, from whom she took her first names. Jane Norton Morgan Nichols had two main interests in her later life-social welfare and land preservation. In her early 50s, she enrolled in the New York School of Social Work. Her certification from this program allowed her to be a better liaison between professional social workers and the boards of their community organizations. Later, following her husband's death, she became president of the Huntington Family Service League. It was her long residency at Uplands Farm, where she maintained a prize herd of Guernsey cows until the early 1960s, that led her to become concerned about the increasing pressures of development on open land. As she grew older, she derived great pleasure from the fact that the Nature Conservancy would later take possession of her estate and keep her beloved fields and forests perpetually free of development.

During the 1960s, Jane Page very much followed in her mother's steps, becoming a member of the Board of the Long Island Chapter of the Nature Conservancy and eventually serving as its president. In particular, Jane helped spearhead our local Nature Conservancy's chapter in its acquisitions of selective, small parcels of woodland and open land that would serve as buffers between tracts of up-market family homes. Toward that end, she gave to the Conservancy the land across from St. John's Cemetery, on which her stable stood, to serve as a sanctuary. Later, she strongly opposed decisions made in the Conservancy's Washington office to discontinue acceptance of local lands that could not be part of much larger land parcels. Saddened, Jane realized that this decision meant that even more of her local community would be lost to suburban sprawl.

While her children were still in local schools, Jane began to champion community causes. In 1950, she became director of the Long Island Biological Association (LIBA). Two years later, she became the group's vice president, a position she held for six years. She effectively ran the committee that raised the funds that would permit the LIBA-owned James Lab to have a second floor.

Feeling it tactful to have only one Page as a LIBA officer, she left the Board in 1958, when her husband became LIBA's president. But she very much continued in our camp, hosting one of our annual Symposium dinner parties. I, like previous Lab directors, always took care to direct to their party several of the more lively symposium speakers. Over the past decade, the rebirth of plant genetics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory brought her much pleasure because she again could see Uplands Farm as a site for successful agriculture.

Outside our community, Jane's most cherished philanthropy was the Robert College of Istanbul in Turkey. During her college years at Bryn Mawr, she became fascinated by classical archeology, an interest heightened when she sailed to Turkey on a boat built for their family friend Paul Hammond, who, like her father, was an experienced yachtsman. Excited by the opportunities Robert College and the American College for Girls offered for high-level secondary education, Jane soon became a member of its Board of Trustees. Later, she also became actively involved with the Near East College Association.

In addition to sailing, a pleasure that took her and Walter to Maine's waters virtually every summer, Jane loved horseback riding. Unfortunately, as had been true for her mother, arthritis would dominate her later years. Never one to complain, Jane valiantly persisted in attending Robert College Board meetings, despite obvious periods of physical pain. The cruel stroke suffered by Walter in 1986, when they were sailing on Puget Sound, sadly meant they could not continue to be forceful community leaders. But even then, they remained strong backers of our local Whaling Museum, with Walter taking on its presidency.

The New Year's Day party that the Pages annually held for their friends in the community was a cherished event, bringing together individuals whose commitments to excellence on all fronts made them and their families important players in our nation's cultural and business fabric for almost a century. To our sorrow, Jane and Walter are now gone. So we must strive ever harder to see that the values they so long worked for stay with us.