Life Story: Sarah Dopp Was 'Like the Sinews That Held Us Together'

This “Life Stories” profile is part of a collection of articles remembering Vermonters who died in 2024.

When Sarah Dopp unexpectedly missed choir practice on March 7, friends and fellow congregants at Burlington’s First Baptist Church were worried. She was not one to skip commitments.

Sarah stopped by the church almost daily and had done so the day before, recalled pastor Karen Mendes. On top of singing soprano in the choir, Sarah served as church moderator — essentially, the congregation’s lay leader. She would drop in to sign or proofread something, help with a community project, or attend book group, Bible study or the monthly racial justice vigil she championed. Mendes recalled that Sarah never blindly accepted the Bible’s teachings: “Her question always was, ‘But what does it mean for us today?'”

Sarah was more than the congregation’s heart, the pastor said, “she was like the sinews that kept us all together.”

Sarah’s devotion to First Baptist was one of many substantial commitments through which the 77-year-old “Energizer bunny” made a difference with her determined yet gentle approach, according to longtime friend Joe Perron.

She treasured the past, serving as First Baptist’s historian, and had been president of the board for both the Chittenden County and Vermont historical societies. But the South Burlington native looked to the future, too, founding the city land trust, which has saved 758 acres from development since 2003. That does not include Sarah’s own 40 acres off Cheese Factory Road, which she donated to be conserved last year.

“South Burlington would look a lot different were it not for Sarah Dopp,” land trust member Michael Mittag said.

Sarah Dopp in her South Burlington woods in 2019 Credit: Courtesy

Her land conservation and historic preservation accomplishments earned her the 2014 Hildene Award, which she shared with Paul Bruhn, the late cofounder of Preservation Trust of Vermont. During the ceremony, Sarah called herself a “small player,” and accepted the award as one of many “across Vermont, making important contributions to our communal quality of life and the future of our state.”

Until 2020, Sarah juggled all of her volunteer activities with shifts as a medical technologist at the University of Vermont Medical Center. Though she retired in 2003, she kept working part-time, logging 52 total years of service, according to Ellie Russell, who hired Sarah in 1968 and became a close friend.

Sarah’s calendar was so packed, Russell said, “I used to complain I had to make an appointment with her.”

On the evening of March 6, the friends had a long-planned visit. It was raining, and Sarah hadn’t yet had time to eat, Russell recalled, but she drove to Shelburne anyway. “If she said she’d do something, she did it,” her friend said.

The old pals chatted over food. Sarah appeared normal but tired, Russell said.

By the morning of March 8, Sarah’s friends had become very concerned. She lived alone and her landline was ringing busy. A church friend and a neighbor went to check on her and called 911. The certifying physician concluded she had likely died the day before of a heart attack.

Sarah’s heart, steadfastly put into so many worthy causes, had given out.

At the memorial service, Mendes said tribute after tribute made it seem like Sarah had cloned herself. “Each of us felt like we had all of her,” the pastor said.

But amid all the bustle, Donna Harley said her friend and neighbor of almost four decades savored her downtime and loved nothing more than sitting with a good book and her cat in her lap. “She was such a big part of things, but she liked the small things the best,” Harley said. “She’d call me when the first asparagus came up.”

Books and music filled the Mayfair Park home in which Sarah grew up, the only child of Leroy and Katharine Dopp. Her first cousin Katrina Van Dopp recalled “floor-to-ceiling books” spilling far beyond the library. Also: a piano.

Katharine, an accomplished musician, was the First Baptist organist for decades and, after she died in 1999, was the namesake for an annual recital on the 1864 pipe organ. Sarah, of course, had raised the money to restore the instrument. She financially supported the recital, which will continue in honor of mother and daughter.

Sarah Dopp in high school Credit: Courtesy

According to her friends and cousin, Sarah had a happy childhood and was very close to her parents, who both worked for UVM Extension. In a 2023 interview with Seven Days, Sarah recalled walking with her father to Al’s French Frys. South Burlington was still dotted with farms, and she biked to school and to the grocery store without traffic worries. “It was a very different world back then,” she said.

Sharon Bushor and Sarah met as first-year students in the UVM swimming pool after both failed the mandatory swim test. They were also in the same rigorous, science-heavy medical technology program.

Bushor said Sarah adored English literature as much as science but chose a medical career, inspired by her mother’s close friend, a woman who was a pathologist — unusual for the time. When Sarah graduated in 1968 and landed her first blood bank position at what was then the Medical Center Hospital of Vermont, Bushor recalled, “She was so proud to have been born there, been a candy striper there and [then to] work in the laboratory there.”

Sarah rose through the ranks to supervise blood compatibility testing for transfusions and organ transplants. Working quickly and meticulously was sometimes a matter of life or death: “Somebody could be bleeding out,” Russell explained. Sarah became known for efficient but scrupulous attention to detail — as anyone whose meeting minutes she ever reviewed would later note with a mix of chagrin and respect.

Her volunteer work may have overshadowed her career, but Sarah prized both. South Burlington City Council chair Tim Barritt recalled their many respectful, thoughtful interactions regarding conservation, but he was especially touched when she wrote thanking him for an article he penned about platelet donation.

A job exchange allowed Sarah to live for a year in the early 1970s in England, a place she had long loved for its literature and history. “That was one of her happiest times,” Bushor said. “She felt like she was born in the wrong century and, actually, in the wrong country.”

Sarah returned to England regularly, bringing back gravestone rubbings and a taste for warm beer. She earned a master’s in English literature, named cats Crumpet and Peggotty (after the housekeeper in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield), hosted tea parties and post-Christmas Boxing Day gatherings.

No one recalls Sarah seriously dating or lamenting the lack of a mate or offspring. She remained, by all accounts, contentedly single, though she cultivated close relationships with her neighbors’ children. One, Corie Pierce, said she can still picture Sarah tossing balls gamely but “awkwardly” to Pierce’s baseball-obsessed son.

Sarah had moved to the cluster of three households on a gravel drive off Cheese Factory Road in 1986, where she rented a converted barn owned by her friend and former UVM professor Betty Bandel.

Over the years, Sarah took over property maintenance and eventually coordinated in-home care for her older, single friend until Bandel’s 2008 death, upon which she bequeathed the barn home, her brick farmhouse and land to Sarah.

Sarah’s neighbors and tenants, Pierce and her partner, Chris Dorman, had pledged to take care of Sarah the same way.

Pierce is the farmer and owner of Bread & Butter Farm, which she and a former business partner established in 2009 on 143 acres of conserved dairy land across Cheese Factory Road. When the farmers won the competitive bid process to buy the parcel near Sarah’s recently inherited property, they had not yet met the woman who had been working quietly for years to persuade the landowners not to sell to developers. Sarah hoped it could stay open for the benefit of all “critters,” as she called them, humans and others.

“I feel really strongly that all communities ought to have some green lungs around them,” Sarah said later in a Seven Days article about a proposed South Burlington zoning change that would have, literally, paved the way to development on some previously protected land.

As the threat of climate change loomed and Lake Champlain water quality worsened, it pained Sarah to see more asphalt poured. She did recognize the need for more affordable housing, though, and, in the case of Pierce’s family, she could do something about that.

In 2009, Pierce, Dorman and their young son moved temporarily into a mobile home on the farm with no prospects for a permanent home nearby. To their immense relief, almost as soon as she biked over to introduce herself, Sarah offered to rent them Bandel’s brick farmhouse.

The couple said Sarah kept the rent stable and encouraged them to request payment extensions if needed. She was a stalwart supporter of the farm through the years, from her earliest visits to buy greens when Bread & Butter was raising little else. Without an affordable, stable home for her family near the farm, Pierce said she’d very likely have given up her dream, which is now a thriving, diversified, organic operation and community hub.

“Not only did she give us a house, but she gave us a sense of home,” Dorman said.

Even as they grew close, Sarah was careful never to impose. A longtime board member of the Craftsbury Chamber Players, she hosted pandemic-era concerts in her field and would ask Bread & Butter to mow the space in advance. When music director Fran Rowell called in 2021 about a last-minute date, she recalled Sarah hesitating. Rowell later discovered that, rather than bothering her neighbors, Sarah jumped on her riding mower to clear one acre herself.

Sarah’s renovated barn home lacked a washing machine, so for 14 years, she did laundry at Pierce and Dorman’s farmhouse. Never once, Dorman said, did Sarah arrive without calling first and leaving a note of thanks if no one was home.

The original print version of this article was headlined “‘She Was Like the Sinews That Held Us Together’ | Sarah Dopp, November 21, 1946-March 7, 2024”