Mrs. John H. Wachter, born Evelyn Sidman, died 15 April 2008 in Coronado, CA. Burial services will be held on Thursday, 24 April 2008 at Trinity Cemetery in Saugerties-on-Hudson. An active contributor to the preservation of Saugerties local history, she was a descendant through her grandmother, Eva L. Schoonmaker, of the original Dutch settlers of Saugerties. (Eva Schoonmaker was born and married in the original 1726 Schoonmaker homestead still standing on Main Street). Mrs. Wachter's great-grandfather John Simmons, as Manager of the Ulster Iron Works from 1828 to 1863, helped lay the foundation for Saugerties' industrial prosperity in the Nineteenth Century.
The home of Mrs. Wachter's grandfather, Ovid T. Simmons, originally known as the "Mansion House" and later as Hill Crest on Barclay Heights, was a Saugerties landmark for over a hundred years. The main building survives as the headquarters of the Knights of Columbus. The history of the Mansion House which Mrs. Wachter authored in 1996 may be consulted in the Saugerties Public Library. John Simmons' papers were abstracted by Jean Wrolsen and published serially in the Old Dutch Post-Star in 1990 and the surviving Ulster Iron Works records were presented by Mrs. Wachter to the Manuscript Collections of the New York State Library in Albany.
The husband of the deceased, John H. Wachter, passed away on 6 March 1997 at age 93 and is interred in the Simmons Plot in Trinity Cemetery, where Mrs. Wachter will be laid to rest beside him. Their two children, Professor Kenneth W. Wachter, of Berkeley, CA, and Lucy Wachter Freeman (Mrs. John T. Freeman) of Coronado, CA, are the sole survivors.
Born in Brooklyn, NY, on 3 July 1910 as Evelyn Ardelle Sidman, Mrs. Wachter was the only child of Edward A. Sidman and his wife Emma Simmons. Throughout her girlhood, Mrs. Wachter and her mother visited her grandmother at Hill Crest during the summer months, joined by her father over weekends. In winter she attended school in Brooklyn, graduating from The Packer Collegiate Institute in 1928. On Mrs. Simmons' death in 1937, her property was inherited by her sole surviving child, Mrs. Sidman, who, sadly, also died less than two years later. Hill Crest then passed to Mrs. Wachter, who devoted her efforts to taking good care of her heritage, aided by the unfailing help of the late Elmer Newkirk, Sr., of Valley Street, a figure whom many older residents of the town will remember with affection.
In 1930 Mrs. Wachter graduated from Wellesley College and in the spring of 1931 con onore from the International Centre at the Villa Collina Ridente in Florence, Italy. On her return to Brooklyn, in mid-1931, she found the Great Depression well under way. She had become fluent in French and Italian, and from 1938 to 1942 she worked in the Foreign Publicity Department of Universal Pictures in Rockefeller Center, New York. She wrote and edited publicity releases for the foreign market, often based on private interviews held with movie personalities.
Mrs. Wachter's marriage to then Lt. John Henry Wachter of Brooklyn took place on 10 November 1945 at the First Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn where the couple had met prior to World War II. Lt. Wachter had received his honorable discharge from military service at Camp Atterbury, Indiana, the previous month. After living on Brooklyn Heights for five years and after the births of their two children, Kenneth and Lucy, they bought a house in Westfield, NJ, which became their home for 40 years until, in April 1990, they left the East Coast for California.
During the 1950s, when their children were small, the family pattern of summer residence in Saugerties began again. Mrs. Wachter and the children enjoyed the charms of Hill Crest while pater familias, pursuing his legal career at a law firm in New York, could only be present only for weekends and vacations. The family was joined at Hill Crest by Mrs. Dorothy S. Coleman and her daughters of Washington, D.C., later noted authorities on antique dolls and costumes, harking back perhaps to hours spent among the dusty trunks of antique clothes and playthings in the Hill Crest attic.
Such separation of the family for most of the summer weekdays became so distasteful that Mrs. Wachter reluctantly decided to sell her Saugerties properties including Hill Crest and its acreage. Following the sale in 1954, the John Hiltons conducted an auction of the contents of the house, many of which were antiques. Thereafter, Mr. and Mrs. Wachter made periodic pilgrimages to Saugerties and to Trinity Cemetery until they moved to California.
Mrs. Wachter was a member of the Saugerties Lighthouse Conservancy, the Saugerties Historical Society, and the Ulster County Genealogical Society. In New Jersey, she was a member of The Presbyterian Church in Westfield and active in PTAs, the Westfield Chapter of the National Society of Daughters of the American Revolution, the College Women's Club, the Women's Club of Westfield, the Westfield Women's Republican Club, and the Republican Conservative Action Club of Union County. She also belonged to the Society of Mayflower Descendants, having uncovered three Mayflower ancestors on her father's line, and served numerous terms on its Board of Assistants. Soon after its founding, she joined the Descendants of Washington's Army at Valley Forge on the service of Peter Van Etten. Under the nom de plume of "E. Sidman Wachter" she was political columnist for the Rahway, NJ, "News Record" for ten years.
With deep roots in Saugerties, through her Schoonmaker, Fiero, and Trumpbour ancestry, Mrs. Wachter took pride in them all. She devoted much time and effort to genealogical research, including Mr. Wachter's forebears along with her own, and set herself to tracing her father's Sidman ancestry. The result was a 563-page genealogy published in 1981 entitled "Sidman-Sidnam Families of Upstate New York" in hard cover. It is now accessible on the world-wide web. She also authored four monographs on unrelated Sidman families and published several articles in genealogical journals.
Evelyn Sidman Wachter, political columnist for the Rahway News Record and the Westfield Leader in the 1970s and early 1980s, died in her home in Coronado, California, on 15 April 2008. She was 97 years old. When the Bauer family took over the News Record, and later the Westfield Leader, beginning its transformation into the modern newspaper of today, Kurt Bauer enlisted Evelyn Wachter to write a weekly independent commentary on local, national, and international issues. Her columns remain a primary source for the intellectual and political life of Westfield in the later-middle 20th Century.
Evelyn Wachter was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1910, with family roots in Saugerties-on-Hudson. She was educated at Packer Collegiate Institute, Wellesley College, and the Villa Collina Ridente in Florence, Italy. Having written for Universal Pictures in New York, she moved to Westfield with her husband John in 1950, For 40 years she was active in Westfield affairs. including the Westfield Women's Club, whose Bulletin she edited, the DAR, Mayflower Society, Presbyterian Church, and Westfield Genealogical Society. She is survived by her son Professor Kenneth Wachter of Berkeley, CA, and her daugher, Lucy Wachter Freeman, of Coronado, CA.
Evelyn Sidman Wachter, (Mrs. John Henry Wachter), passed away peacefully in her home in Coronado, CA on April 15, 2008 from the natural causes of old age. She was 97 3/4. She entered Packer in the Sixth Grade in 1920 and was a graduate of the class of 1928 of the Collegiate Program. She served as Editor of the Packer Alumna from 1940 to 1945, having joined the Editorial Board in 1933. An essay of ``Reminiscences of Packer in the 1920s'' was submitted to the Alumni Magazine in 2003. She graduated from Wellesley College and the Villa Collina Ridente in Florence, Italy. She worked in publicity for Universal Pictures in the 1930s, moved to Westfield, New Jersey, in 1950 with her husband John to raise her two children, and was the political columnist for the Rahway New Jersey News Record throughout the 1970s. In 1981, she published the genealogical volume Sidman-Sidnam Families of Upstate New York, now accessible on the internet. Throughout her life she held fond memories of her years at Packer.