Evelyn Eleanor Currier, who founded the North of Highland Camping Area in Truro in 1954 with her husband, Malcolm, and ran the office before it was passed down to a son and then a grandson, died on May 25 at Season’s Belleaire Memory Care in Belleaire, Fla. She was 108.
“She never drank, never smoked, and lived life very simply, always spending time outdoors,” said her son Brad about her longevity.
Said her daughter Cheryl, “She had good genes.”
Evelyn was born in 1916 on the West Royalston farm of her maternal grandparents. Her father, Clement Leonard, was a volunteer fireman with a firewood business; her mother, Edith Leonard, was a nurse who also worked on the family farm where Evelyn spent childhood summers tending pigs and horses with her four brothers. During the school year she lived in Templeton, where she excelled in academics and earned a varsity letter in track.
She pursued nursing at Cambridge-Mt. Auburn Hospital, getting her R.N. in 1937 and later earning a public health certificate at Simmons College and working jobs as a private duty nurse, a Red Cross visiting nurse in West Virginia, an epidemiologist for the Mass. Dept. of Public Health, and, once she began having kids, as a school nurse.
Evelyn fell in love with Malcolm Currier, the son of one of her patients. They married in 1942 and lived in Norfolk, Va. while Malcolm was stationed there in the U.S. Army during World War II. In 1944, after the birth of their first child, Evelyn returned to Templeton to care for her brother Guy as he was dying of cancer.
The couple settled in Weston; Malcolm became a postal worker, and they had three more children.
The family took summer camping trips to Ogunquit, Maine — until a neighbor told them they should try Cape Cod, where the water was warmer. Their next camping trip was to Nickerson State Park in Brewster. They loved the Cape, said Cheryl, but Malcolm was unhappy with the campground, which allowed motorcycles and dogs and had no quiet hours.
He decided to open a family campground, setting his sights on 60 wooded acres at the Truro seashore. He worked with a local realtor to track down the various parcels’ 13 different owners, many of whom didn’t even know they owned the properties that had been passed down through generations.
With a friend’s $5,000 loan, the Curriers persuaded all but one of the owners to sell to them and, with the help of Evelyn’s brothers and parents, cleared the land for campsites. In 1954, the North of Highland Camping Area — with strict quiet hours and a long list of rules banning everything from open fires to obscene language — was born.
Evelyn was at the helm. She ran the office for 30 years and penciled reservations into a “gigantic, almost a yard across and two-feet-tall book,” said Cheryl. “She would try to give people the best site possible for their equipment and for the amount of time they wanted to come. She knew exactly the logistics for each one of these sites — how level it was, how big it was.”
Brad remembers his mother as “a force of nature” who followed a rigid routine of hard work. She would never walk from one place to another, he said, but “literally run” from the office to the family cabin, where his sister Joan would have meals ready. “Then she would run like crazy back to the office,” he said. “She was like a hummingbird. She stopped moving only long enough to eat.”
Longtime campground employee Gary Forbes of Falmouth has fond memories of the tiny but powerful Evelyn (“I don’t think she weighed 100 pounds!”) running around in her Bermuda shorts, her reading glasses bouncing on the beaded chain she wore around her neck.
“She was always on the go,” said Gary, who now does electrical work at the campground. “And if she told you to do something, you’d better do it!”
Somehow, she found time to bake her famous molasses cookies — keeping up the practice until she was 98 — and to be an active member of the Women’s Society at Weston Methodist Church.
Cheryl is still astounded by her mother’s ability to balance work and children. “I don’t know how she prioritized her time so well. She never complained about that.”
Once the season slowed, the family went to Provincetown for ice cream cones in the evening and flippers at Clem and Ursie’s on Sunday mornings, said Brad.
After stepping back from the campground and passing the reins to her son Stephen, Evelyn spent time with Malcolm at their house on Marco Island, Fla., which they had purchased in the 1960s, and at Truro’s High Head in “the pink house,” which they bought after their children were grown.
She was active in the Wesley United Methodist Church on Marco Island, where she was a founding member of the Marco Island Shell Club, and in the Christian Union Church in Truro — where she volunteered at the public library and as a tour guide at the Truro Historical Museum and where she was named Senior Citizen of the Year in 2011.
Evelyn is survived by her children, Joan and husband Russell Page of Wilmington, N.C.; Stephen and ex-wife Anita Schafianski of Bradenton, Fla.; Cheryl and ex-husband John Witney of Seminole, Fla.; and Bradford and wife Nancy of La Jolla, Calif. She also leaves seven grandchildren (two of them, Brandon and Greg, now run the campground), eight great-grandchildren, and one great-great-grandchild.
She was predeceased by her husband, Malcolm, and by her brothers, Guy, Ray, Byrl, and Duane.
Throughout her life, Evelyn stayed open to adventure. “Up until probably 106,” said Brad, “it didn’t make any difference what she had been doing or how tired she was. If you said, ‘Do you want to do…’ she would say, ‘Yes!’ ”
He added, “She was a badass — long before anyone coined the term.”
