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Ruth Thayer: Keeping History at the United Church

The United Church of Chester is celebrating a special anniversary and nobody knows more about it than Ruth Thayer. That is because Ruth is the historian of the United Church and the anniversary celebrates a very special moment in church history: Seventy-five years ago, in 1941, two Chester churches, the Congregational Church and the Baptist Church joined together to form the United Church of Chester.

The church will celebrate the event in a special service on Sunday, Nov. 13 to which previous pastors have been invited. The Reverend Bonnie Scott, transitional senior minister at The United Church on the Green in New Haven, will participate in the service. Reverend Scott was ordained while serving at the Chester church. The Reverend Lee Ireland is currently the United Church’s interim minister, having taken over after the retirement of Reverend Kathy Peters in June 2015.

Ruth has been the official church historian for four years, but has been a Chester resident for far longer.

“I’ve been here 48 years,” she says.

For many of those years in Chester, Ruth was the town’s visiting nurse as well as the nurse for Chester Elementary School. When she started in 1970, the positions of public health nurse and school nurse were combined. Subsequently, in 1975 the Chester visiting nurse service merged with Essex to form the Visiting Nurses of the Lower Valley.

For a time, Ruth continued her school-nursing role under the aegis of the new agency, but by the mid-1980s, the demands of homecare for patients had become so great that the agency gave up the school nurse function. At the time she retired from nursing in l996, Ruth was a supervisor and administrator with the agency.

When Ruth was school nurse, Chester Elementary School had far more students.

“I had 430 health records,” she recalls.

She also remembers when there were so many children in town that the United Church constructed an extra building in the church parking lot to house all the Sunday school classes. Now it is the site of a local Montessori school.

Her immersion in the church history documents has given her perspective on population fluctuation.

“Over 200 years, things swell and then decline,” she says.

In retirement, Ruth has had time to do extensive research into her family’s genealogy, which stretches to Sweden and Canada. She spent childhood summers in St. Stephen, New Brunswick, where her grandparents lived. When she contacted the University of New Brunswick about family history, she was told another American had also contacted them for the same family information.

“And so I found a relative in Colorado,” Ruth reports.

Since those early visits to Canada, Ruth has been a regular traveler, with trips throughout the United States and Europe, many done with Elderhostel, now known as Road Scholar. Her last journey abroad was two-week trip to Tuscany.

Ruth herself was born in Massachusetts and did her training as a nurse first at Hartford Hospital and then later at a degree program at St. Joseph’s College in Hartford. Before she and her husband moved to Connecticut, they lived in New Jersey and in Baltimore, Maryland.

“Baltimore was very interesting, exciting because it was in the 1960s with the Civil Rights Movement,’ Ruth says. “But we wanted to move back to New England.”

Ruth’s three sons, Ken, Tom, and Alan grew up in Chester and Ken and Tom still live in town. Alan is not far away in West Haven.

“I know I’m very lucky to have them all so close,” she says.

Tom has now largely taken over what was one of Ruth’s passions for many years: her vegetable garden.

“Tomatoes, cukes, squash, all kinds of vegetables,” she says. And those vegetables went for a good cause: “We ate them all,” she adds.

Ruth remains active in the Chester Garden Club and was the originator of the club’s annual tea, upcoming on Saturday, Nov. 5, at the United Church. Some 20 years ago, Ruth recalls going to a program designed as a tea party where, as guests sipped, a couple in period garb gave a presentation on Victorian tea.

“I thought, ‘We could do something like that,’” she recalls.

And so, for the last 18 years, the Chester Garden Club has. Various garden club members bring their own china services and decorate individual tables, and each year there is a different kind of entertainment. This year’s performers will be a Sweet Adeline singing group. More than 100 people attend the tea, many regulars who sit at the same table year after year. It is, Ruth points out, a major fundraiser for the garden club.

Since she became historian, Ruth has been working with some 200 years of church documents and archival material, organizing the historical records to make them more easily accessible. At the moment, Ruth says the dining room table of her home is filled with the memorabilia she is assembling to make display boards for the upcoming church anniversary. They will illustrate the story of the two churches and how they came to be one. Ruth thinks the display will remain at the church until the first week in December, when it will give way to a familiar annual event.

“It’s the Christmas fair,” Ruth says, “You know, the first week in December.”