Jane B. Smith, 95

LACONIA — Jane Bennett Willingham Smith died Nov. 26, 2025, at the age of 95, at the Taylor Community in Laconia.

Jane will be remembered for her quick wit, warmth, and lifelong search for meaning. The mother of five children, she quietly took on roles uncommon for women of her era — fixing computers and appliances, changing tires and oil, managing household finances, and returning to school in her mid-40s to earn a master’s degree in education. Over the course of 17 years teaching at New Hampton School, she rose to lead the English Department.

Jane was predeceased by many friends, her beloved parents Fred and Margaret Bennett, as well as two husbands, novelist and screenwriter Calder Willingham Jr., and diplomat Frederick Smith Jr. Her youngest son, Christopher Willingham, died in 2015. Fred’s daughter, Meredith Chase Smith, passed away in 2006.

Both marriages spanned decades — and were based on appreciation for intellectual stimulation, travel, music and philosophy. But her life’s longest relationship was with the town of New Hampton.

Over eight decades, she saw the elm trees that once lined Shingle Camp Hill fall to disease and become the stumps her children climbed and played upon. The interstate arrived and the first gas stations and restaurants reshaped — but never diminished — her connection with the town.

Born April 2, 1930, in Brooklyn, New York, Jane grew up in an apartment across from Prospect Park, where she learned early to love books, the rhythms of language and systems of thought. She attended Berkeley Institute in Park Slope, where she wrote a monthly column for the school newspaper under the pseudonym “Penwright Leaky.” After graduating in 1947, she went on to Wellesley College, earning a bachelor’s degree in English literature in 1951. After college, she worked at Woman’s Day magazine reading short story manuscripts submitted by aspiring writers.

In 1953, a Woman’s Day coworker introduced her to Calder Willingham, a writer with a Georgia southern accent who was as moved as she was by Corinthians 13 and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. They were married Sept. 15, 1953 — the same day Calder’s stage adaptation of his novel "End as a Man" opened at the Theatre de Lys in New York. Programs that night were handed out by Jane herself, still in her white wedding dress.

They lived in New York for a short time before moving to her family home in New Hampton, a place that would connect both her childhood and her adult and family life.

In 1941, when she was 11, her mother — a schoolteacher by day and teacher of immigrants by night — discovered an advertisement in The New York Times offering summer lodging at New Hampton School while students were away. She fell in love with the freedom of small town life, making friends who taught her to run through the woods and toughen her feet walking on stones in the streams.

Her parents made friends with Grace and Frederick Smith Sr., the then-headmaster at New Hampton School, and they returned year after year. Eventually, her family purchased a former New Hampton School property on Shingle Camp Hill.

After Calder’s death in 1995, Jane reconnected with Grace and Frederick Sr.’s son, Frederick Smith Jr., a childhood friend who shared her love for that “small gore of land.” They married and remained together until Fred’s death in 2020. Though separated for safety in Fred’s final days because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jane was ultimately able to sit by his bedside and hold his hand before he passed.

Throughout her life, Jane traveled to dozens of countries — climbing the Great Wall of China, visiting South Africa after the end of apartheid, hiking Machu Picchu, and standing beneath the Christ the Redeemer statue in Brazil — but no place ever captivated her heart like New Hampton.

There, Jane raised five children, taught hundreds of students to love language, wrote poetry and filled her home with animals — including a beloved, long-lived Dachshund named Jessie. The house was raucous and welcoming, but Jane was its quiet backbone.

People in the town still remember her walking down Shingle Camp Hill to sing in the choir or teach Sunday school at New Hampton Community Church, one of the most special places in Jane’s world. She was active in town life, serving in multiple town volunteer positions over the years, including as a member of the Gordon-Nash Library Board of Corporators.

Her faith was deeply important to her. Though she wrestled with belief for much of her life, she ultimately came to define it this way: that there is a Power that generated the cosmos and is present in all its creations.

“The afterlife? Who knows? But I believe that those who try to live in Love will have peace in their lives and at the end,” she wrote in a reflection the year before moving into the Taylor Community.

For years, she was an active member of both the Pemigewasset Choral Society and the New Hampshire Friendship Chorus. She often wrote personalized poems for those she loved on birthdays and milestones. A collection of those poems and other writings was later gathered by her family into a book titled "Postcards from New Hampton."

In 2001, she wrote a poem called "Cemetery Hill," reflecting on a walk through the town cemetery as the sun set and she brushed snow from the gravestones with her mittens, “from etched names, of faces, in one tick of time, we knew and loved.

“A while ago, an earnest local citizen in a lengthy civic meeting expressed concern that building houses in the valley could block the cemetery view. ‘Whose view? Who lives up there?’ I chuckled, I’m afraid, then bit my tongue.

"I felt, I guess — feel it still — I hope and long to know that those who rest upon the hill share vistas wider than our village or our snow.”

Jane will be laid to rest across the road from her former home on Shingle Camp Hill in the New Hampton Community Cemetery, where she walked the family dog, skied across snow-covered fields, and buried both husbands and a son.

The children, grandchildren and friends she leaves behind will remember her when they hear choral music, warm themselves with the mittens, socks and blankets she knitted, ski or play golf, swim at Wellington State Park, and open the many well-loved books she left behind — especially her favorite, Charles Dickens’ “Great Expectations.”

Jane is survived by her son Fred Willingham of Holderness, Fred’s son Mackintosh Willingham of Stowe, Vermont, and Mack’s fiancée Shay; Mack’s mother Charlene; daughter Sara Willingham of Concord, and Sara’s daughter Leah Willingham of Boston; son Mark Willingham of New Hampton; daughter Pamela Mckiney of Pembroke; granddaughter Ellery Willingham of Portsmouth, and Ellery’s mother and stepfather Victoria and Bob; stepson Tom Willingham, his wife Jean and his three children; and Fred Smith’s three surviving children: daughters, Allison Hill Smith of Ithaca, New York, and Tory Tashian of Novato, California; and his son, Adam Smith of Arlington, Virginia.

A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 13, at New Hampton Community Church. A reception at the church will follow.

In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to New Hampton Community Church, 14 Church Lane, New Hampton, NH 03256.

Wilkinson-Beane-Simoneau-Paquette Funeral Home & Cremation Services/603Cremations.com, 164 Pleasant St., Laconia, is assisting the family with arrangements. For more information and to view an online memorial, visit wilkinsonbeane.com.