Obituary: Jane Westervelt, 1927-2022

Shelburne woman traveled extensively to photograph remote regions of the world

Published January 9, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. | Updated January 9, 2023 at 2:15 p.m.

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Jane Westervelt

Jane Edgell Westervelt, 95, of Shelburne, Vt., died peacefully at Wake Robin on October 14, 2022. Jane was born in Paris on April 3, 1927, to General W.I. Westervelt and Dorothy (Jocelyn) Westervelt. She attended North Shore Country Day in Winnetka, Ill., followed by the Masters School in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., and Barnard College.

For much of her life, she traveled extensively, while hiking, climbing, and photographing remote and hard-to-access regions of the world. In the 1950s, she lived in Colorado Springs, Colo., where she worked for the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. In the 1960s, she worked for the Swiss pharmaceutical company, Sandoz, managing podophyllum seed farms in the Swat region of Pakistan. In the late 1960s, she made London her home, while continuing to travel across the Middle East and Central Asia, returning with extraordinary photos of people and places, including the Wakhan Valley in Afghanistan. For her later years, she returned to Vermont, where she lived first in the family home in Burlington before eventually moving to Shelburne. She was a voracious reader with broad literary interests, a consummate scrabble player, a collector of puzzles and a generous supporter of many organizations.

She is predeceased by her brothers, Dirck De Ryee Westervelt and Peter Jocelyn Westervelt, and is survived by her nephew, Dirck Edgell Westervelt, and niece, Abby Brown Westervelt.

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