Dorothy Jeanne Farrington Davidson
Feb 6, 1928-March 25, 2024
Dorothy Jeanne Farrington Davidson, 96, “finally got to go home and see everyone, even friends I haven’t met yet” on March 25, 2024.
Born February 6, 1928, to Roswell and Maude Farrington in Westwood, New Jersey, Dot spent her school years there, culminating with graduation from The Douglas College for women (now part of Rutgers) in 1949 and moved to Montreal, Canada, shortly thereafter.
While working at Morgan’s Store, Dot met Donald Shefford Davidson, who was in the advertising department. They courted in his 1949 Studebaker Starliner, skiing and fishing the eastern townships. A notable impression was made on Don at Lac Brome when Dot somehow snagged a huge pickerel sideways. They married in Montreal in 1952, promptly setting off for Chicago, IL, where Don continued studies at the Chicago Institute of Technology. Son Christopher Charles came along and the new family came east to settle for good to Mount Tabor, New Jersey, where son Keith Farrington arrived in 1957.
As Don commuted to New York City for 25 years Dot dutifully fulfilled the housewife role in the seemingly halcyon hamlet of Mount Tabor, active in gardening club, the Methodist Church, community theater, Cub Scouts, YMCA Indian guides. She was a volunteer lunch lady for many years.
Eventually her volunteering in social work led to a career as a caseworker for the Morris County Welfare Board. She was truly an early advocate of the newly “liberated” women’s working rights, simply through dogged example.
Dot was also an exceptional oil painter, printmaker, and textile artist, creating abstract landscapes on a loom Don brought home along with tons of fabric and fax fur scraps from New York’s garment district.
In 1983 they decided to get out of the rat race in the states, move back to the eastern townships, to the “bungalow,” a converted servants’ quarters and gardening building, the last vestige of the Davidson family’s pre-eminence in Waterloo, Quebec, back to the 1800s. They lovingly restored the low-slung 1920’s shotgun-style building, even recreating a pergola for vines and ornamental flower gardens.
Here they created art together and entertained quietly with remaining friends, welcoming wives, grandchildren for decades until, again, in an almost Herculean regrouping, they moved into assisted living in Sutton, Quebec, when Don passed peacefully in 2021.
