Advocate for conservation and social justice, former Harvard resident
Mary Jane Gregg, 88, died Monday, Oct. 15, in Concord, N.H., at Havenwood-Heritage Heights, senior housing where she had lived for the past seven years. From 1964 to 1980, she and her family lived in Harvard, where her husband, the Rev. Theodore H. Gregg, was minister of the Evangelical Congregational Church.
Mrs. Gregg cared deeply about conservation, about justice and civil rights in the United States and abroad, about good government, and about the life and work of the church.
As an active member of the League of Women Voters, she was an advocate for improved public transportation. A strict recycler, she promoted recycling at Havenwood-Heritage Heights. Each Good Friday for 30 years, she walked to support the contributions of Sharing, Inc. to serve people with community needs otherwise unmet. She loved the woods and the waters of northern New England. In Harvard, in addition to her involvement with the League and the Congregational Church, she hosted participants in the Harvard-Roxbury summer exchange program and was affectionately dubbed “Mother Nature” by the program’s counselors.
She was born in Bridgeport, Conn., the daughter of Clarence R. Hall and Louise Beard Hall. A graduate of Russell Sage College, she worked in Boston at the national office of what was to become the United Church of Christ. She married Ted Gregg in 1947. Before moving to Harvard, they lived in Vermont, Connecticut, and Reading, where her husband served parishes. They retired to New Hampshire in 1980.
She is survived by her four children, Katherine Campbell of Richmond, Va.; Russell Gregg of Boston; Wonil Gregg of Scottsdale, Ariz.; and Paul Gregg of Waldwick, N.J.; by her children’s spouses; by nine grandchildren; and by her sister, Anne Higgins, and her brother-in-law, Arthur, both of North Haven, Conn. She is predeceased by her husband in 1995 and by a son, Allen, in 1956.
Family services will be at a later date.
Memorial donations may be made to Church World Service, P.O. Box 968, Elkhart, IN 46515; to the Natural Resources Defense Council, 40 W. 20th St., NY, NY 10011; or to the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, 54 Portsmouth St., Concord, NH 03301.
