1928 – 2013

Barbara Ann Jewell was the daughter of Willard Brownell Jewell (1899-1969) and Ann Patricia Hennessey (1904-1986).  Her father was a professor  in the Geology Department at Vanderbilt University and  academics were always high on her list of achievements.  She had a brother, John, who was three years older than she was and during her early childhood she looked up to him and was a tomboy through and through, trying to keep up with him and the boys her age in the neighborhood.  They lived on the edge of the Vanderbilt campus and she loved to visit her father’s office and see the specimens displayed there.  Naturally many of her friends were also university “brats”, children of her father’s colleagues, and the collegial life was second nature. 

In school she excelled in every subject except mathematics, which was an alien science to her brain, but she managed to eke out B’s.  On the other hand, Biology was a favorite along with any subject requiring writing skills and she made straight A’s.   By the time she entered high school she was writing poems that were good enough to be published and she took part in every school paper.  The Tomboy days were over – she was a bright, vivacious outspoken girl with many friends and activities acting as the lead in many of the school plays.  Her brother, Johnny, was a star athlete playing and captaining Football, Basketball and Baseball teams and she became addicted to sports, following her high school and college teams through the seasons – an addiction that lasted throughout her life time transferred to The Red Sox, Celtics and Patriots later.

Although they lived in Nashville, her parents were from New England, her father from Little Compton and her mother from Fall River.  In the summer they would take advantage of the college vacation and return to his parents’ farm on Maple Avenue in Little Compton where he would fish and she and Johnny would swim in the ocean and have fun with their Little Compton friends and relatives.  She especially enjoyed talking to her grandmother, Henrietta Maria Brownell Jewell about her grandmother’s life and their ancestors who had lived in Little Compton and Rhode Island for ­over 250  years.  Those talks stayed with her all of her life and fired up her enthusiasm for history and genealogy.

After high school she entered Vanderbilt and continued to excel making her parents (especially her father) very proud, however, when she started dating Franklin (Pat) Pond in 1946 during her freshman year her goal changed and she dropped out of school and married him in 1949.

The next seven years were spent in Kansas City where he worked as an engineer and they had two children, Debra Lee and Steven Walter.  Periodic dust storms off of the Kansas plains brought on an asthmatic condition and that plus her longing for the ocean and Little Compton brought them back to New England where Pat got a job at Pratt and Whitney Aircraft in East Hartford, Connecticut.

After Debra and Steven were established in school she became active in local politics and civic affairs and served on the Republican Town Committee and Glastonbury Redevelopment Agency in their Town, Glastonbury, Connecticut.  Resuming her love of writing, she worked as a reporter for the Hartford Times and Glastonbury Citizen newspapers.  She also enhanced her love of antiques by becoming an antiques dealer – attending shows throughout Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

They moved to Little Compton when Pat retired in 1985, renovating the family farmhouse.  She enjoyed the beach, continued her work as an antiques dealer and as a member of the Historical Society, Sogkonate Garden Club, Sakonnet Preservation Association and Village Improvement Society.  She continued writing poems and followed up at age 65 on her ambition to write a novel by attending The University of Massachusetts (Dartmouth), where she studied creative writing.  Using these enhanced skills she wrote and published the novel Falcons of Ormond, of which she was very proud.

Bedridden the last year of her life but still enjoying every game of the Red Sox, Celtics and Patriots, Barbara died on May 13, 2013 and is buried in the Union Cemetery in Little Compton, not too far from her great grandmother, Deborah Taylor Brownell whose history she had learned from her grandmother, Henrietta during those beloved summers and who is buried across the street in the Old Burying Ground.      

Franklin “Pat” Pond, Husband

April 2020

 

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