Katharine Eaton Dreier

Katharine “Kit” Eaton Dreier of Lincoln, Mass., died peacefully at home at 96 on Sept. 28, 2026, her youngest daughter holding her hand.

Kit sang in a chorus, grew vegetables and painted watercolors into her 90s. In earlier years she played tennis and the cello, hosted dinner parties and scribbled effusive letters to friends and relatives worldwide.

She loved raising children, until they grew into teenagers and became perplexing. The kids generally came back around to her in their 20s.

She endured painful losses and challenges, losing her first husband to a mountaineering accident and a daughter to breast cancer. But Kit continued to look out for the wider world, becoming an activist on conservation and climate change, issues that deeply concerned her.

Throughout, Kit maintained her resilience, graciousness, curiosity and sense of humor and joy.

What follows is a detailed story of her life. A condensed version can be found by clicking here.

* * *

Born in Cambridge, Mass., in 1930, Kit was the third child of Gertrude Sturgis Eaton and Richard Jefferson Eaton. Their first-born son, Richard, died in infancy. Kit was close to her older brother, Toby, and younger brother, Jeff.

At age 10, Kit and her family moved from Depression-era Cambridge to a house in Lincoln with an attached barn and a tennis court on 2½ acres of apple trees and pasture. Decades later, she would vividly recall her shock at age 11 upon hearing from a neighbor of Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.

Kit’s father had served in World War I as an officer in horse-drawn artillery. In 1943 he re-enlisted. Kit and her brothers posed for a photograph with their Dad on a train platform from which he departed for World War II. He would go on to serve as military governor of Leipzig during the Allied occupation.

At home amid wartime rationing, Kit’s mother closed the Lincoln house temporarily and moved with the three children to Cambridge to live with her sister, Katharine “Kay” Sturgis, Kit’s namesake. There, Kit attended Shady Hill School, an innovative independent school that played a formative role in her life.

Returning to Lincoln, with her father back from the war, Kit had trouble adjusting to sixth grade in a regimented public school with rows of desks bolted to classroom floors.

A boy seated in front of Kit particularly tormented her. Her patience exhausted, Kit seized a pen by her inkwell and jabbed it firmly into his right shoulder – likely the only act of aggression in her long life.

* * *

Growing up, Kit spent magical summers in Vermont, where the extended family owned several old houses along a winding dirt road between West Dover and Wilmington. She performed in skits and charades in “the Playhouse,” a theater out-building where the family invited friends and neighbors to square dances.

Kit rode horses, picked apples, wild blueberries and chanterelle mushrooms, and played tennis. Heated matches on a court in the woods were invariably followed by a plunge into “the Dunking Pool,” a swimming hole in an ice-cold mountain stream aptly named Coldbrook.

A fanciful sketch in a family guestbook depicted college-age Kit in mid-serve, cigarette smoke billowing above her. Later she would quit smoking at the insistence of her kids.

In summer, Kit and her brothers and cousins helped farmers bring in hay. In autumn, they played in leaves that fell in blazing fall colors.

In winters they tobogganed down a hill behind Aunt Kay’s Red House, aka the Crow’s Nest, an uninsulated cottage with a hand-pump well, an outhouse and roaring fires in a broad central fireplace. In spring, the children helped carry buckets of sap from maple trees, pouring them into a horse-drawn “tomahawk” tank to be boiled into syrup in a sugarhouse.

* * *

Back among the flatlanders, Kit attended high school at Concord Academy, commuting in a Model-A Ford to what was then an all-girl’s private high school. Her watercolors hung in student exhibits as her artistic talents blossomed.

She attended Smith College, spending junior year abroad in Geneva – a year that she would often cite as a favorite -- and graduating in 1952 with a BA in political science. She returned to Shady Hill School to complete its apprentice-teaching program, then taught in Somerset, England, and London.

* * *

In 1956, Kit married Arthur Hinton Read, a Scottish mathematician and mountaineer who had spent World War II decoding Nazi military messages in a top-secret project outside London. Emerging from the church in Lincoln, bride and groom ducked beneath an archway of ice axes held aloft by cheering members of the wedding party.

The couple lived in St. Andrews, Scotland, where Arthur taught at the university. They built a house in a faculty neighborhood, the first of four homes that Kit would oversee building or remodeling during her life.

Their son Rich was born in 1957. Daughter Kate was born two years later. Kit co-founded and directed Almost New, a nonprofit clothing exchange.

Tragedy struck in 1961. Arthur, who had scaled peaks in Canada, Europe and Pakistan, was killed by an avalanche while climbing in the Scottish Highlands.

The closeknit St. Andrews community rallied in support. Although Kit loved Arthur’s parents, she longed for the support of her family and community in the States, where jobs were more plentiful.

In the summer of 1963, Kit -- with her two small children and their yellow labrador, Jock – boarded an ocean liner in Glasgow. They endured a stormy Atlantic Ocean crossing to Montreal.

Kit settled in Cambridge with the children, enrolling them in Shady Hill School. She taught there and at Buckingham school. She played cello in chamber-music groups.

* * *

In 1965, she met Ted Dreier Jr., a psychiatrist and fellow cellist. While courting, they often drove separately, unable to fit both cellos into one car.

Kit and Ted married in January 1967. The couple’s daughter, Lisa, was born that October. Another daughter, Ruth, was born in 1969.

Kit and Ted remodeled a house in Cambridge, where they raised their children. She and a friend opened a clothing and crafts boutique around the corner called Friends Gallery. She volunteered in the peace movement, helping to persuade the Cambridge City Council to make Yerevan, Armenia – then in the Soviet Union – a sister city.

Kit went on to work at the Cambridge Art Association. She piloted her Volkswagen bus into congested downtown Boston to install large modern paintings in lobbies of law firms and banks.

She helped curate a major exhibition sponsored by the association, “Creative Collaborations: Artist/Architect,” combining her interests in art and design.

* * *

In the early 1970s, Ted’s parents, Ted Sr. and Bobbie Dreier, gave Kit and Ted a nine-acre shorefront site on Martha’s Vineyard island, where Bobbie had spent childhood summers on Seven Gates Farm. The senior Dreiers lived inland on Seven Gates, a wooded 1,600-acre enclave and onetime dairy farm, in an old farmhouse they called Hickory Hollow.

Following suit, Kit and Ted nicknamed their place Cranberry Hollow. They designed a rustic summer home based on a neighboring barn, with broad double doors opening to views of Vineyard Sound.

Seeking a builder in 1974, Kit spent a day with a contractor who showed her post-and-beam houses he had built, ending up at the most dramatic home. The homeowner, a statuesque woman with striking wavy hair and full lips, invited them to sip wine with her on the lawn as the sun went down.

Asked that evening who the owner was, Kit pondered and came up with the name “Carly.” Given that Kit’s pop-music appreciation stopped just short of the Beatles, she had not realized that she was rubbing shoulders with Carly Simon, the hit singer and songwriter then married to James Taylor.

Kit remained happily oblivious to the Vineyard’s growing status as a celebrity haven. She enjoyed taking chilly swims off Saltworks Beach, gathering with neighbors for picnics and singalongs, growing a large vegetable garden and watching deep-red sunsets over Naushon Island.

In all, Kit and Ted spent more than 50 summers on the Vineyard. They were members of an extended family that maintained island ties for five generations. Down the beach was classy, elegant Aunt Margot Wilkie, who threw a birthday party for Kit each July 29. Margot lived to 101; her sister Bobbie lived to 99.

As the family grew to include Kit’s granddaughter, Nehalem, its members marked the years by clambering into a long-armed oak tree for hurried annual photos before racing to departing ferries.

“The renters are coming!” Kit would declare, sweeping her way out of the house.

The home’s sturdy structure came in handy in 1991, when Kit weathered Hurricane Bob alone behind boarded-up windows, tracking reports of 100 mph winds on a battery-powered radio.

She emerged to find that waves had swept away dunes, converting the property’s placid one-acre pond into an ocean inlet. A backhoe restored the pond and rebuilt the dunes, which were stabilized with beach grass and poison ivy.

* * *

Back on the mainland, Kit and Ted moved in 1994 from Cambridge to Belmont, where they remodeled another house, landscaping its garden berry bushes and goldfish ponds.

Kit was a founding member of the Belmont Land Trust. She was a leader in the organization’s work to establish and protect Belmont’s 88-acre Lone Tree Hill conservation land and restore its Pine Allée, a 120-year-old walkway lined with towering white-pine trees.

She served as a founding trustee of the Judy Record Conservation Fund, raising money to support Belmont conservation projects. Kit was elected to Town Meeting, Belmont’s legislative body. She was active in the Thursday Club, a women’s read-aloud book group founded in 1890.

These activities sustained her during two hip replacements and brief bouts with lung and breast cancers.

* * *

In 2018, Kit and Ted returned to the town where she was raised, moving into a retirement community, the Commons in Lincoln. Ted died the next year at 89.

Kit sang in the residents’ chorus. With her first cousin Anne Watt, a fellow resident, she co-founded the Commons Green Initiative, focusing on climate change.

To Kit’s great sadness, her daughter Elizabeth (Lisa) Low Dreier lost a battle with breast cancer in 2024.

* * *

Reared during the Interwar Period, Kit had raised her children during the tumultuous 1960s and ‘70s, an era that bewildered her at times but never disrupted her poise. She had a long line of au pairs from Sweden, Brazil, Britain and beyond. She encouraged her kids to travel widely and explore, as she did.

Ever resourceful, she excelled in connecting friends, finding acquaintances housing and solving innumerable problems for her kids.

When Rich was in high school, Kit knocked on a door in Cambridge’s Porter Square, obtaining permission from a homeowner for him and a high-school classmate to chain their bicycles to a porch railing each morning before they caught a train to Concord.

When Rich developed an obscure jaw-joint malady during pre-Internet days in Portland, Oregon, she tracked down a Portland surgeon who was pioneering arthroscopic jaw surgery that cured it.

As a talented watercolor painter, Kit could have pursued a career as an artist. She could have become an arts administrator after completing graduate work in museum studies in 1993 at the Harvard University Extension School.

Instead she focused on family, friends and the wider world.

* * *

Kit’s survivors include her son, Richard Read and his wife, Brenda, of Seattle; two daughters, Katharine (Kate) Read Villars and her husband Thom, of Norwich, Vermont, and Ruth Antoinette Dreier, of Sebastopol, Calif.; a granddaughter, Nehalem Kunkle-Read, of Seattle; a brother, Jefferson Taft Eaton, of Lincoln; two sisters-in-law, Barbara Beate Dreier, of Livingston Manor, New York, and Dorly Eaton, of Salzburg, Austria; and two nieces, Dorita Eaton, of Salzburg, and Isabelle Black and her husband, Scott, of Brookline; and a grand-niece, Julia Black, of Brookline.

A memorial gathering will be held at a date to be determined.

Donations in Kit’s memory may be made to the Union of Concerned Scientists or the Vineyard Conservation Society.

Arrangements have been entrusted to the Dee Funeral Home & Cremation Service of Concord.