Memoriam
Sydney Rollins Badmington
Sydney Rollins Badmington, 88, died Oct. 2, 2009. She donated a conservation easement on her 8.87 acres on Little Sunapee Road in New London in March of 2003. Syd Badmington wanted to restrict development, preserve open space and protect the Little Lake Sunapee watershed. She knew that without these protections, under New London cluster zoning her land could have up to eight dwellings built on it. She explained, "I didn't think it was big enough to count very much, but when I think of all the property around the lake that has been built on, then I had to do it."
She was born in Boston and moved at a young age to Newport, NH, where her father ran the family woolen business. She moved to Little Sunapee Road in New London in 1961 where she raised her four children. In the early 1960s, she ran a nursery school in her living room, and soon began work at King Ridge Ski Area, where she worked as office manager for 20 years. She served as emergency dispatcher for the town before retiring.
Syd was active in town affairs - investing countless hours over many years, passionately protecting the character of her community as a member of the Planning Board. When her children were grown, Syd began to follow her taste for adventure and the unconventional. She explored India, South Africa, Norway, Nepal, Russia, Alaska, Kamchatka, Mongolia, and many more corners of the world.
Her son, Rich Badmington, observed about his mother’s living legacy, “The courage to make a decision about a permanent easement comes easier to those who know in their hearts and feel in their soul that nature is not there to be consumed but sustained. As a mischievous young kid, I explored every corner of these woods and the brooks that run through them.
“Today, thanks to my mother’s care of her land, I can return with my own children and open their eyes to the small wonder of this space. They will one day experience the very same joy.”
[This property is listed as #44 in the Protected Properties section of our web site.]
Lincoln Gordon
Lincoln Gordon, Ausbon Sargent land donor died on December 19, 2009 at age 96. Dr Gordon donated a conservation easement of 35.7 acres in February 1995. This property was one of Ausbon Sargent’s earliest easements which protected vital Lake Sunapee and Otter Pond shoreline - including 1,000 feet of shoreline along Lake Sunapee, 1,075 feet of shoreline along Otter Pond, and 1,075 feet road frontage along Rt. 11. The protected land cannot be subdivided or built upon and the property must remain forested. [The property listed as #4 in the Protected Properties section of our web site. The property was sold to Dick & Jean Dulude in 2003.]
Lincoln Gordon was a diplomat, educator and political economist who was the American ambassador to Brazil in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and the president of Johns Hopkins University in the late 1960s. He was the author of books on government, the economy, energy and national security, foreign policy in Europe and Latin America, and Brazil’s emergence from military dictatorships to partnership with the nations of North and South America.
After the election of President John F. Kennedy in 1960, Dr. Gordon served on a task force that developed the Alliance for Progress, the program that provided aid intended to dissuade Latin America from revolution and socialism. Dr. Gordon took up the ambassadorship in Brazil in 1961. Later, President Lyndon B. Johnson praised his service as “a rare combination of experience and scholarship, idealism and practical judgment.”
Thaddeus Johnson
Thad Johnson died November 25, 2009. He and his wife Virginia donated a 92 acre conservation easement on their property in Sutton Mills in August, 2008. Their conservation easement protects 92 acres of woodlands with frontage on three public roads. The property borders the west side of Route 114, the north side of Village Road, and the east side of scenic Corporation Hill Road. The addition of this easement expands a corridor of conserved properties from the southeastern side of Kezar Lake southward to Sutton Mills. Additionally, the easement has miles of hiking trails created by Thad Johnson – a project begun when they moved to the farm in 1970 and when they added more acreage in 1986. He bought a used dozer and, over a 10-year period, constructed the trails on the land in Sutton Mills.
Thad grew up in South Dakota and received his BS in Civil Engineering from the University of Colorado. At the end of WWII, he was able to pursue a career in engineering – working for Standard Oil Company in Venezuela. A Master of Science degree from Harvard University's School of Engineering led him and his growing family back to South America to design and supervise construction of large infrastructure projects in Argentina, Bolivia, and Brazil.
In his retirement, Thad dedicated himself to the things he loved most and, for the first time, had the leisure to pursue: fixing things up, playing the guitar, singing Bach Cantatas, rebuilding engines, collecting his own firewood, running (he ran the Boston marathon three times), dancing (square and round), skiing, and hiking in Europe. For the past 20 years, he enjoyed making an annual trek in winter by car to the land of his birth (the West) with his wife of 57 years, Virginia, and their dogs (two generations of Labradors). [Visit our web site Protected Properties/Trails/Sutton to get a map of the wonderful trails on the Johnson easement # 85.]