Margery Foster, who was a founding trustee of the Island Institute, passed away quietly Sept. 22, 2007 at her home in Francestown, N.H. after a period of failing health. Her many friends and admirers in Casco Bay and along the Maine coast will remember her keen mind, sparkling wit, indomitable will and great love of adventure.
The daughter of Brent and Grace (Butler) Foster, Margery Foster was born in Boston in 1914 to parents who passionately believed in education; if she went to the library each week and read the books selected by her mother, she could escape household chores, an agreement which afterwards influenced her fierce devotion to learning and intense impatience with housekeeping. After skipping several grades, Margery Foster earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from Wellesley College in 1934 and her Ph.D. in Economics from Radcliffe College in 1958. Her doctoral thesis, published as “Out of Smalle Beginnings, An Economic History of Harvard College in the Puritan Period, 1636-1712” focused on the general economic factors of the Puritan era that influenced the development of Harvard College.
After retiring from her academic life at Douglas College at Rutgers and corporate responsibilities that included serving as the first woman on the boards of directors of the Prudential Life Insurance Company and Public Service Electric and Gas Company, Margery restored a six-room John Calvin Stevens cottage on Great Diamond Island off Portland in the early 1980s. Shortly thereafter, developers proposed a massive 238-unit condominium and gated community at the abandoned historic Fort McKinley property, galvanizing Margery and hundreds of other islanders throughout Casco Bay to oppose that scale of development for the islands.
As a trustee of the Institute in its formative years, Margery was a fearless and daunting foe of ill-planned development schemes such as the initial Great Diamond proposal that ended, as she accurately predicted, in bankruptcy. As a member of the Institute’s development and finance committees, Margery hosted many long strategy sessions from her porch overlooking Casco Bay that ended late in the evening with a serving of her favorite beverage, coffee strongly laced with Bailey’s Irish whiskey and topped with vanilla ice cream.
After Maine’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) granted permits for an overboard discharge pipe that would empty on to the island’s clam flats on the dubious logic that since the flats were already closed due to pollution, another discharge would not further degrade them, Margery helped lead the appeal to the Environmental Protection Agency in Boston, over DEP’s intense objection, to overturn that ill-conceived ruling. The battle ultimately played out over six years, by which time the real estate bubble of the 1980s had burst, financially ruining Great Diamond’s developers, along with Maine Savings Bank.
Margery Foster’s intense commitment to island conservation and the unique aspects of island culture will forever be remembered throughout Casco Bay and in Portland, two places which she dearly loved in Maine.