Martha Millspaugh Webster

Martha Millspaugh Webster, a former feature writer and reporter for the Baltimore Sun who also worked for the Baltimore City Health Department, died Saturday May 5, at Heron Point Retirement Community in Chestertown, MD. She was 95. Mrs. Webster was born in Columbus, OH, in 1923. She moved with her family to Roland Park in Baltimore in 1932, when her father, M. Laurence Millspaugh, took over leadership of the family’s Baltimore silver manufacturing company, Samuel Kirk & Son Inc. In Baltimore, Mrs. Webster attended Bryn Mawr School, where her mother was Board Chair, and graduated in 1941. She then attended Vassar College, achieving Phi Beta Kappa in her junior year and graduating with honors in the Class of 1944-5. During World War II, she joined the American Red Cross (ARC) and was sent to Italy in August 1945. There she worked in ARC clubs in Naples, Leghorn, Milan, and Rome, as staff assistant and later as program director providing social service and recreational programs for American soldiers waiting to be shipped home after the war in Europe had ended. After the war, Mrs. Webster was one of the first women to receive a Fulbright Scholarship to study political science in Europe and spent two years in Geneva and Paris, living in an apartment with the Baltimore Sun correspondent, Janetta Somerset. When she returned to Baltimore, Mrs. Webster joined the Baltimore Sun where she wrote feature articles, a radio column and a ladies’ club column for the Sunday Sun. She later became a reporter on the Evening Sun. During that time, the author William Manchester and his wife introduced her to her future husband, Bayard Webster, who was then Assistant City Editor of the Evening Sun. Her career then moved to the Baltimore City Health Department, where she was an administrator for the Baltimore Plan of Housing Rehabilitation, one of the three components of the national urban redevelopment movement in the Housing Act of 1954. In 1957, Martha and her family moved to Allendale, NJ, when her husband Bayard Webster began working for The New York Times where he was an editor on the Times science desk and a science writer. Martha began devoting herself to raising her three children and volunteering with the New Jersey Audubon Society, the Fyke Nature Association, and her children’s schools. She was a dedicated bird watcher who took several birdwatching trips across the country and around the world. In 1993, Martha and Bayard Webster moved to the Heron Point Retirement Community in Chestertown, MD, on the Eastern Shore, where she organized lectures for the community of Chestertown on politics and election issues, and was an editor of the quarterly publication the “Heron’s Beak.” Mrs. Webster was the great, great-granddaughter of Samuel Kirk, who founded the international Samuel Kirk & Sons, Inc. silver manufacturing company in Baltimore in 1815. The company was later headed by Mrs. Webster's father, M. Laurence Millspaugh, and later her brother, Samuel Kirk Millspaugh. It was the oldest silversmith firm in the U.S. when it merged in 1979 with the Stieff Company of Baltimore to become the Kirk-Stieff Company, which continued in business until 1999. A memorial service will be held at 1:30 p.m. on Saturday May 12, at Heron Point, 501 E. Campus Avenue, Chestertown, MD. Martha Webster is survived by two sons, Kirk Webster of Middlebury, VT, and Anthony Coates Webster of Jersey City, NJ; a daughter Jacqueline Webster Harwood of Bethesda, MD; and two grandchildren.

Martha Millspaugh Webster

March 13, 1923 - May 5, 2018