ALTAMONT — Carolyn Sanford Du Brin was a woman with a deep sense of place who cared about history. She loved animals, both as pets and in nature. Her vibrant paintings and words captured her life in all its vivid details. She remained resilient in old age and never lost her joie de vivre.

“Endlessly energetic and creative, she enjoyed painting, gardening, entertaining and cooking, but perhaps most recognizably, writing,” her four daughters wrote in a tribute. “Mother contributed for over 50 years to articles in The Altamont Enterprise, extolling the virtues of nature and wildlife, relating stories of family travels and pets.”

She died on Saturday, Sept. 24, 2022, at her home that she shared with her two daughters, Carolyn Jane du Brin and Kerry Du Brin. She was 94.

Mrs. DuBrin’s first schooling was at New Scotland’s one-room schoolhouse, since enlarged to serve as the town hall. Her favorite subject was history. She never did get the hang of spelling, and was always chosen last for the spelling bees.

She walked a mile to school each day from the 1700s home near the Bender melon farm where she lived with her parents, Edwin Wade Sanford and Miriam Rouse. 

There she explored the woods and farmland on a stick horse, broke her arm falling out of an apple tree, and learned to ride a two-wheeler.

In 1939, when Mrs. Du Brin was 11, her parents bought what she called “the last house in Altamont” at a tax sale. She wrote about the history of the Victorian summer home built by George Coonley in 1887. “My father was an engineer working on highways and business buildings but he was very hands-on renovating and repairing,” she wrote.

The house, on a dirt road, was surrounded by farms. When the winter snow was high, the Sanfords would put on their snowshoes to get to one of the village grocery stores and pull their food home on a toboggan.

“We had 20 acres all our own, with a good stretch of the Bozenkill Creek running at the foot of the back hill …,” Mrs. DuBrin wrote. “With spring came the wild and crazy rushing waters, which gave the creek its name — Bozenkill.”

Mrs. Du Brin would either walk or ride her bike more than a mile to the school on Grand Street. First through eighth grades had classrooms on the school’s first floor and high school classes were held upstairs. She called it a tragedy when the school was torn down to make way for a new elementary school, which her daughters later attended.

“We cheerleaders had something daring and new for a cheerleader uniform — slacks,” wrote Mrs. Du Brin of her high school years in the 1940s. Slacks, however, could not be worn to class.

“The Masonic Temple was the social center for the village. School dances, plays, glee club concerts, the Fireman’s Ball and movies were held there …,” Mrs. Du Brin wrote. “Victory Gardens were also the thing then and we were busily growing our own fruits and vegetables. We had a special cellar for canned goods and root vegetables and a wine cellar for my father’s grape, elderberry, and dandelion wine.”

Mrs. Du Brin’s Altamont High School boyfriend stole a baby crow from its nest for her. She named the crow Mert after the telephone operator in the radio show “Fibber McGee and Molly.” 

He would fly to her shoulder, comb her hair with his beak, and say “Pretty Carol, pretty Carol.”

“My boyfriend had an old Model A Ford ‘convertible,’” she wrote. “Since the canvas roof had rotted off we had an open car. Mert would sit on the top of the steering wheel, watching the road when we took him for a ride. When he saw cars or people, we had taught him to say ‘HONK’ at full volume.”

After she graduated from Altamont High School in 1945, Mrs. Du Brin went to the new Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. She took writing courses at night at New York University, and on Saturdays, she studied at the Art Students League on West 57th Street.

“Having been a country girl, I had nothing in the way of society,” Mrs. Du Brin said in an Enterprise podcast five years ago, describing herself as at first “scared to death” in New York City.

“I was moaning and groaning to my aunt who gave me $100 to go to Arthur Murray and learn how to dance,” she recalled.

She loved studying design. “We had to be able to work the fabric. We made drapes on the figure so that we could see what was going to be,” she said. “And then you could make a pattern from what we did.”

The dance lessons paid off. “I met my husband at Marble Collegiate Church,” said Mrs. Du Brin of the famous church then led by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale. She went on, of Mr. Du Brin, “He was a wonderful dancer and I could dance.”

The man who would become her husband, Harry Lawrence Du Brin, had served in World War II under General George Patton from Africa through Italy and into Germany, she said.

Mrs. Du Brin earned the money for her wedding dress by hand-painting 500 Christmas cards. The dress was white satin.

“I made it over for two daughters and my maid of honor,” said Mrs. Du Brin in 2017. “So it’s worn four times and now it’s hanging in the closet for my granddaughter if she ever wants it.”

The couple married in May 1948 in Mrs. Du Brin’s childhood home, decorated with lilacs. “We were married by candlelight in front of the living-room fireplace,” Mrs. Du Brin wrote. “A friend played our hall piano.”

Decades later, after her husband had died, Mrs. Du Brin wrote, “Marriage should be an equal partnership between two best friends who can talk to each other, who can discuss plans and options for mutual decisions — city or suburban or country living; house, condo, or apartment; money, banking, savings, investments; job chances and demands; vacation; friends and in-laws; social organizations and hobbies; children.

“There’s no one design, not everything needs to be shared …,” she wrote. “Love, tenderness, and attention to a partner’s needs and desires all are essential to marriage … Marriage is a wonderful way to travel through life.”

The newlyweds settled in Greenwich village, near NYU where Mr. Du Brin studied law. Mrs. Du Brin worked for Advance Pattern, the world’s third largest pattern company, as assistant to the advertising manager, for $32.50 a week. “He was getting his G.I. money,” said Mrs. Du Brin of her husband.

They had a two-room flat, which they soon shared with their first daughter. “It was kind of crowded because we had a living room and we had a kitchen. So we had our choice of sleeping in the kitchen or the living room, and the baby had to sleep in the kitchen or the living room along with us.”

Eventually, the Du Brins moved to Queens where Mrs. Du Brin ran a rooming house on Metropolitan Avenue. “It was very convenient because we were directly over a bar grill, a newsstand, a beauty parlor, and a big grocery store,” she said.

“Just 10 years after I had gone off to college, I came back with three daughters,” said Mrs. Du Brin. “So the youngest was born up here.”

Mr. Du Brin, in 1955, had transferred from a job in New York City to Albany. 

The Du Brins moved into the last house in Altamont, now 101 Bozenkill Road, and eventually the Sanfords moved into a smaller house nearby.

“Harry and Carol moved permanently to Altamont in 1955 and both became very active in the community. Carol immersed herself in the Altamont Reformed Church, engaged in assisting village historian Arthur Gregg in researching local history, and volunteered for years with the Albany area Red Cross,” her daughters wrote.

In the 1970s, Mrs. Du Brin began writing a column for The Enterprise titled “Nobody Asked Me, But…”

At the same time, she served as an editor and transcriber for village and town historian, Arthur Gregg, in his later years. “Arthur’s eyes were failing on him so I would go to his home and read him his research,” Mrs. Du Brin wrote. “We sat next to each other, his hand patting my knee. ‘Thank you, dearie,’” he’d say.”

Her interest in accurate and relevant history never flagged.

When she was in her nineties, Mrs. Du Brin wrote to The Enterprise, upset that the Doctor Crounse House was being neglected by the village; it was later torn down.

“Dr. Frederick Crounse was not only the first doctor for Altamont (then Knowersville) but he was also very active in the Anti-Rent Wars in the 1800s,” Mrs. DuBrin wrote. “He took a role supporting the farmers who were fighting the old Dutch patroon system that had settled our area.”

Lansing Christman, a poet, television news pioneer, and one-time editor of The Enterprise, had asked Mrs. DuBrin to assemble notes on Dr. Crounse’s role in the Anti-Rent Wars, which The Enterprise printed as booklets. Lansing Christman’s brother, William, wrote “Tin Horns and Calico,” the definitive book on the wars, and had left the notes when he died.

Mrs. Du Brin was proud of her own family history and wrote of Colonel Jonah Sanford, who fought in the War of 1812, and her great-grandfather, Edwin D. Sanford, who fought for the Union in the Civil War. “He became a blacksmith and somehow managed to send all his children to college. Three sons became lawyers, one son became a pharmacist, one daughter became a nurse, and one daughter became a schoolteacher. I’m very proud of them all,” she wrote.

In 1976, Altamont’s mayor, the late Larry Warner, thought villagers might best celebrate the nation’s bicentennial by financially supporting a needy family somewhere in the world. Mrs. Du Brin chose a Navajo family living in the  Southwest and became close to the young brother and sister — Douglas and Debra Holston.

She helped the family with monthly payments through the Christian Children’s Fund and was proud that both of the children went on to graduate from college, the first in their community to do so, she said.

Douglas Holston and Mrs. Du Brin exchanged letters for decades. Debra Holston visited Altamont for her high school graduation present. “She was a musician touring the Indian areas with a Navajo Christian band and so for her graduation present, I got her an electric guitar,” said Mrs. Du Brin.

In the 1980s, a boat-tailed grackle lived and traveled with Mrs. Du Brin, “flying free at destinations but always flying back to sit on my head,” she wrote, adding that, no, he never pooped on her.

“He bathed with me in the tub, using my knee as a resting spot after seriously splashing around in the hot water,” she wrote. “He also liked to ‘share’ our meals — and particularly my husband’s Scotch on the rocks!”

She named the bird Beetoven. “I couldn’t spell. I didn’t know there was an ‘h’ in Beethoven,” she said. “I was getting classical music in, even if I couldn’t spell it.”

One of the places she traveled with Beetoven was to the Navajo reservation where she met with the Holston family. “Douglas’s mother had on a beautiful bird necklace, and she took it off and put it on me,” pronouncing Mrs. Du Brin as “The Bird Lady” in Navajo. Mrs. Du Brin, who collected Native American art, treasured the necklace.

In her later years, Mrs. Du Brin divided her time between Florida and Altamont. Her handwritten missives arrived at The Enterprise by mail.

She wrote of living with her daughters in a house on six-and-a-half acres in Fruitland Park, Florida. “I call it our Eden but, instead of a serpent, we have a resident 10-foot alligator fondly called Bufort,” she wrote. “He occasionally suns on the back lawn. The house is on Eagle Nest Road and we have the eagle’s nest, again in our backyard.”

In 2001, Mrs. Du Brin had organized an Earth Day clean-up of the Guilderland cemetery at Osborne Corners. She perched on a stone bench at the top of the hill that bore the Du Brin name and she pointed out the gravesites of buried friends nearby. She also told the history of the place, where there had been a Reformed church and a Lutheran church.

“We chose this spot right under the oak tree,” she said, “with a view of the mountains.”

“She was a role model to many,” her daughters concluded their tribute, “and her love and support, vibrancy and enthusiasm will be missed by all.”

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Carolyn Sanford Du Brin is survived by her daughters, Carolyn Jane du Brin, Kerry Du Brin, Susan Du Brin and her husband, Webb Baugh, and Robin Du Brin and her husband, Douglas Howe.

She is also survived by her grandsons, Michael Diakiwski and his wife, Madeleine, and Christopher Diakiwski; by her granddaughter, Alison Baugh, and by her great-granddaughter, Poppy Jane Diakiwski.

The family is planning to hold memorial services in the village of Altamont in the spring of 2023.

Memorial messages may be left at www.altamontenterprise.com/milestones.

Donations may be made to the Carolyn Du Brin Memorial Fund at the Navajo Preparatory School, in honor of her support for school-aged children on the Navajo Reservation, at 1220 West Apache St., Farmington, NM 87401, or to the Altamont Reformed Church, in honor of her service at the church, at 129 Lincoln Ave., Altamont, NY 12009.