Helen Semple Porter Dyson, 102, a resident of Battles Wharf, died Friday, May 13, 2011.
She was born in 1908 to Philip Henry Porter and May Semple Moss Porter in Clinton, Ky., and arrived in Fairhope, then a very small town with unpaved streets, on one of the Bay Boats after being delayed at the Cawthon Hotel by the 1916 hurricane.
Discovering the Orangic School, she returned each fall for the school year and upon graduation attended Rollins Collins. She came back to Fairhope to take Marietta Johnson’s Teacher Training Course and was its oldest graduate. She taught First Life, basing her curriculum on the world of nature and was a supporter of the school with both time and money. In 1934, she and her Organic classmate, Sam Dyson, were married.
Entering into many town activities, she was one of the founding members of FaHera and the Wisteria Garden Club where she campaigned for the preservation of native flowers and plants and their use in the landscape.
She was an avid and knowledgeable birder, continued reading classical literature and Austrian economics until her 100th year and kept her native garden.
Her years as a student at the Organic School were at the height of Marietta Johnson’s fame in the U.S. and Europe. Fellow students included the David K. Tone children (law partner of Clarence Darrow), Elizabeth and Priscilla Meade, younger sisters of Margaret Meade, the William Belknap family (Blue Grass Hardware of Louisville, Ky.), Charles Klingen Smith (son of Frank L. Smith, vice president, treasurer and director of Ford Motor Co.), Mrs. Sydney Lanier (wife of the poet), who provided her estate in Greenwich, Conn., for Johnson’s summer school; gifted teachers who came to learn Organic methods, artists and playwrights atttracted through Johnson’s lecture tours and her winter course.
She was preceded in death by her husband.
Survivors include two children, six grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
A gathering of gratitude and remembrance will be held at a later date. Her body was willed to the USA Medical Center.
The family requests memorial donations be made to the Eastern Shore Land Trust, P.O. Box 754, Point Clear, AL 36564.
