Jane Edgell Westervelt, 95, of Shelburne, Vt.,
died peacefully at Wake Robin on October 14, 2022. Jane was born in
Paris on April 3, 1927, to General W.I. Westervelt and Dorothy
(Jocelyn) Westervelt. She attended North Shore Country Day in
Winnetka, Ill., followed by the Masters School in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.,
and Barnard College.
For much of her life, she traveled extensively,
while hiking, climbing, and photographing remote and hard-to-access
regions of the world. In the 1950s, she lived in Colorado Springs,
Colo., where she worked for the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. In
the 1960s, she worked for the Swiss pharmaceutical company, Sandoz,
managing podophyllum seed farms in the Swat region of Pakistan. In
the late 1960s, she made London her home, while continuing to travel
across the Middle East and Central Asia, returning with extraordinary
photos of people and places, including the Wakhan Valley in
Afghanistan. For her later years, she returned to Vermont, where she
lived first in the family home in Burlington before eventually moving
to Shelburne. She was a voracious reader with broad literary
interests, a consummate scrabble player, a collector of puzzles and a
generous supporter of many organizations.
She is predeceased by her brothers, Dirck De
Ryee Westervelt and Peter Jocelyn Westervelt, and is survived by her
nephew, Dirck Edgell Westervelt, and niece, Abby Brown Westervelt.
This article appears in Jan 11-17, 2023.
“Auntie”Jane as we called her, was always part of our family. The dynamic trio of Jane, Ann August, and our mother, Martha Gogel, was such fun to be around. Always there were discussions ideas, adventures, puzzles, crosswords, scrabble, hiking, gardening, books, travels, bushwhacking, skiing, theaters, operas, tea time, exotic meals made together.
I love you dearest Auntie Jane!