BY ABBY FOX

East Greenwich lost one of its most devoted and valued history keepers Sunday, when 89-year-old Thaire Adamson, considered the town’s unofficial historian, died.
“She was a walking library: that was her nature, to gather information and put it all together,” said Marion Helwig, president of the East Greenwich Historic Preservation Society, a group Adamson had helped found in 1967. “She loved doing it, and she loved talking about it.”
 

Bob Merriam, who worked with Adamson in the society, said, “Few people have contributed more to preserve the record of this town than Thaire Adamson. Thaire loved this town. As a long time resident, she knew what she was talking about in her many accurate historical articles.”
Adamson’s book, “A History of East Greenwich, RI,” consisting mostly of her writings for “The East Greenwich Packet,” the bulletin for the historical society, is so well-regarded and relied upon, that it’s commonly referred to as “Thaire’s book” or just “the red book.” It was published in 1996.
Adamson was devoted to the historical society and also to the First Baptist Church, where she was a clerk and a deacon, and where she liked to bring her home-made mustard to the annual church bazaar.
She was also a loyal secretary to attorney Earl Shaw, whom she worked with for more than 20 years. “Thaire was very efficient; it was amazing how fast she would get things done,” he said. “She was never absent nor was she ever late.” Until she decided to stop working in September of last year, “I needed her,” he said. “She was very efficient and very observant, right until the day she had to leave the office. She never took a coffee break; she’d work right through.”
The source to go to
Helwig said Adamson has been “a wonderful source of history,” both for the society and for her personally. “She was very proud of her town, her church and her parents,” Helwig said. “She was always willing to take time to talk about it.”
Adamson “knew more about the town than anyone; she was very active in genealogy and I got a lot of information about my family from her,” Gladys Bailey said. Her sister-in-law, Judy, was similarly impressed. “She was amazing person, just a wealth of information to do with historic things in East Greenwich,” she said. “She was a stickler for accuracy; very nice, very thoughtful, always writing notes to people; a very interesting person.”  
Her interest in genealogy is understandable, given her family goes back to the founding members of East Greenwich, said her son, Bruce Roberts, Jr.
“She did so much in her lifetime,” Roberts said. “She touched so many people and did so many things in this town. She was the oldest member of the Baptist Church in East Greenwich, 77 years a member, and the clerk there for years,” he said, and “After Martha McPartland died, she was the town historian.” The volume of a life-time of research remains: “thousands of handwritten pages on East Greenwich,” he said.
The phrase “sharp-as-a-tack” was used by more than one person interviewed about Adamson.
“She was very sharp, and had no end of stories,” Helwig said. “When she’s start on one, maybe she’s think of something else and go off on another. She could talk endlessly about East Greenwich.”
Friends
Alice Bacon, her friend for 53 years, ever since her son was one of Adamson’s students in Sunday school at First Baptist, remembers her as more than a historian.
The women were born a day apart, Adamson on June 27, 1919, and Bacon on June 28, and they were close friends. They liked attending plays and concerts and taking vacations together, from Florida to Prince Edward Island in Canada.
For all of Adamson’s curiosity about small-town East Greenwich, she also had many interests beyond her hometown, Bacon said. She was “an avid reader” of biographies and histories, Bacon said, active in the local book club, and she did a crossword puzzle every day.
She enjoyed traveling, Bacon remembered, to Europe and California, for example. And she liked to take advantage of history when it was happening in her own backyard, Nancy Merriam recalled, like the day aviator Charles Lindbergh was in Rhode Island, not long after his crossing to Paris, and Adamson went to the airport to check out his plane.
Bacon said Adamson had several rituals that endeared her to her friends, like the home-made mustard and toasted almonds she gave every Christmas.
Outside of her immediate circle, Bacon said, generations of people depended on her genealogical knowledge. “Many people would call her for information,” she said. “She’d get calls from all over the country, people trying to trace their families. She knew every house in East Greenwich; she’d say, ‘So and so used to live there.’”
Adamson was “a very neat, good person,” Bacon said. “I miss her terribly.”
Recently, “She had not been eating,” she said. Saturday, Adamson was taken to a hospital, and she died the next day, before Bacon was able to visit her.
“I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “A terrific shock, I’ll tell you.”
Adamson died just one month short of being inducted at the high school’s Wall of Honor, for her contributions to the town after graduating from the class of 1937.
“This town needed Thaire and it will miss her,” Bob Merriam said. “We have lost an outstanding, much loved, important citizen, and a good friend.”