Polly Welts Kaufman ’51

Polly Welts Kaufman ’51, of Harpswell, Me.; Jan. 22. She was the former program director of elementary and middle school libraries for Boston Public Schools. She cocreated and cotaught the core course for training women to serve as librarians in the Boston Public Schools while at the University of Massachusetts. As a founding member of the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail, she was lead author of all the BWHT guidebooks. She moved to Harpswell in 1991 and was a visiting professor at Bowdoin College for a year and then became an associate professor at the University of Southern Maine, where she remained from 1995 to 2014. During her tenure, she created an original course in the history of the inhabitants of the Casco Bay Islands and developed women’s history trails in Portland and Brunswick. She was also a Fulbright Scholar teaching American Studies in Norway from 1999 to 2000 and developed a walking trail to statues of named women in Oslo that was printed in both Norwegian and English. She wrote and/or cowrote numerous books and articles, including being coauthor of Her Past Around Us: Interpreting Sites for Women’s History. She was the author of National Parks and the Woman’s Voice: A History; Boston Women and City School Politics, 1872-1905; and Women Teachers on the Frontier. Her scholarly work focused on the personal experiences and practical achievements of diverse women in American history, and she was a lifelong advocate for the empowerment of all women. She was on the board of the Pejepscot Historical Society, serving as its president during the 1990s. Her lifelong affection for the natural world, especially Haskell Island, led to the publication of The Changing Tides of Maine: Rediscovered Poems (2021). She and her since deceased husband, Roger W. Kaufman ’50, hiked all 48 of the 4,000 footers in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. She is survived by a daughter; son Roger Jr. ’83; and a brother-in-law.