Ada Dalla Pozza Pays Tribute to Rose Ellwood Bryan, 1975

 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.”