Tribute to Rose
Ellwood Bryan by Iola Pritchard, retired State Food Conservation Specialist,
and Ada B. Dalla Pozza, State Agent, Home Economics. Rose retired in 1956 and
died Nov. 27, 1975.
An unknown author wrote, “I am going your way, so let us go
hand in hand. You help me and I’ll help you. We shall not be here forever. One
day the kind old nurse will come and rock us all to sleep. Let us help one
another while we may.”
This is really the philosophy of Extension and surely it
was the philosophy of Rose Ellwood Bryan, whom the kind old nurse rocked to
sleep November 27, 1975.
Rose Ellwood was a friend to people and she was one of the all-time
“greats” in North Carolina Extension Service. She worked as Durham County Home
Demonstration Agent for several years. Then she was made agent-at-large and
worked wherever she was needed—where a county program was weak, when an agent
was ill for a period of time, or where no home economics agent was employed for
a given county.
She came to the state office in October 1946 as a
specialist. Her artistic ability (her mother was an artist who studied in
Paris) was soon used to promote a crafts program across the state, this often
amid opposition at both state and federal levels. Her firm commitment to
quality has been the foundation on which one of the best Extension Crafts
program in the nation has been built.
Her love for people and a desire to help meet many of their
economic and health problems was enough reason for Rose Ellwood to spend
countless hours, many beyond a normal working day, many off-duty, teaching people
to conserve food properly. Rose Ellwood believed that the marketing of crafts
and home conserved products could help families through economic crisis. Today
there are many people from the mountains to the coast who will testify to this.
Rose Ellwood Bryan retired in 1956, but her influence on
people, professional and lay, will be felt for years to come. Many of us whose
lives she touched will join the poet in saying:
“May the God that looks down on his people
To weigh them in body and mind
Be sure not to lose her pattern
But make many more of her kind.”
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