Alice (Scoville) Barry

CORNWALL — Alice Trumbull (Scoville) Barry died on Oct. 15, 2012, at the age of 101, in Ithaca, N.Y.She was born on July 3, 1911, in Rosemont, Pa., the daughter of Katharine (Gallaudet) Trumbull and the lawyer and writer Samuel Scoville Jr. Alice grew up on the Main Line, but spent her summers in Cornwall.Her roots there ran deep; Scovilles arrived in Cornwall around the middle of the 18th century, and they have never left.Alice’s father, “Lawyer Sam,” practiced in Philadelphia but spent as much time as possible in Cornwall. An amateur naturalist, he wrote often about Cornwall wildlife and set some of his adventure books there.Alice graduated from Vassar and married Stuyvesant “Peter” Barry in 1935. Peter started out in law, but became a teacher. Peter and Alice became Quakers and settled in Bucks County, where Peter became the principal of the Buckingham Friends School and Alice the mother of five children.Despite other obligations, Alice was an adventurous traveler. She went alone to Versailles to oversee the funeral of a great-uncle, a trip she chronicled for the local newspaper. She traveled alone into Communist Poland to visit a family to whom she’d sent CARE packages during World War II. There she met Lech Walesa, who called her a friend of Poland. When she discovered a set of 17th-century Spanish documents in a trunk in the attic, she tracked their origins to the archives in Santa Fe, N.M. Arriving there to learn that the pages had been stolen from there a century earlier, Alice donated them to the state and wrote up the adventure in her column. With Peter, she traveled around the world, to Thailand, Africa, India and the Galapagos, as well as England and Europe.Writing was in Alice’s family and in her blood. For years she wrote a lively and popular column for the New Hope, Pa., paper. She wrote a pamphlet on Abraham Lincoln’s suppression of The Journal of Congress, as well as an unpublished biography of her great-great-grandfather, Henry Ward Beecher. She was a voracious reader, who liked reading Georges Simenon in French.Summers were spent in Cornwall, which Alice loved: the lake, the Scoville farm, the North Cornwall church, cousins dotted across the landscape. She told stories about Mrs. Woodchuck Scoville and the runaway carriage; about hiding under the Covered Bridge; about the beetle crawling up a neighbor’s neck during church. The stories made her laugh with delight.Alice loved music, people, conversation and adventure. She played tennis until she was well into her 60s. She took a vast pleasure in laughter, and she viewed life as a series of opportunities for taking delight in the world. Gallant, funny, loving and indefatigable, with an extraordinary generosity of soul, she will be much missed. She is survived by her five children, Frank Barry of Ithaca, Katharine Maclaurin of Peterborough, N.H., David Barry of New Hope, Roxana Robinson of New York City and Cornwall, and Bethany Menkart of Leicester, Vt.; nine grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.