(Editor’s note: a longer version of this obituary appears on the website of the Dee Funeral Home, which is handling arrangements.)
Katharine “Kit” Dreier
Katharine “Kit” Eaton Dreier, a mother of four and a land-conservation advocate who grew up in Lincoln and returned to the town in her 80s, has died at 96. She passed away peacefully on Sept. 28, 2026, at home in the Commons in Lincoln, her youngest daughter holding her hand.
Kit sang in the retirement center’s chorus, grew vegetables and painted watercolors into her 90s. In earlier years she played tennis and the cello, hosted dinner parties and scribbled effusive letters to friends and relatives worldwide.
She loved raising children, until they grew into teenagers and became perplexing. The kids generally came back around to her in their 20s. Kit endured painful losses and challenges, losing her first husband to a mountaineering accident and a daughter to cancer. But she continued to look out for the wider world, becoming an activist on climate change, an issue that deeply concerned her. Throughout, Kit maintained her resilience, graciousness, curiosity and sense of humor and joy.
Born in Cambridge in 1930, Kit was the third child of Gertrude Sturgis Eaton and Richard Jefferson Eaton. Their first-born son, Richard, died in infancy. Kit was close to her older brother, Toby, and younger brother, Jeff. At age 10, Kit and her family moved from Cambridge to a house atop Bedford Hill in Lincoln with an attached barn and a tennis court on 2½ acres of apple trees and pasture.
In 1943, Kit’s father, Dick, a World War I veteran, re-enlisted in the Army, ultimately serving as military governor of Leipzig during the Allied occupation. At home amid wartime rationing, Kit’s mother Gertrude closed the Lincoln house temporarily and moved with the three children to Cambridge to live with her sister, Kit’s namesake, Katharine (Kay) Sturgis.
Kit attended Shady Hill School, switching to Lincoln public schools after her father returned from the war. She attended high school at Concord Academy, commuting in a Model A Ford with a rumble seat. Kit attended Smith College, spending junior year abroad in Geneva and graduating in 1952 with a BA in political science. She returned to Shady Hill School to complete its apprentice-teaching program, then taught in England.
In 1956, Kit married Arthur Hinton Read, a Scottish mathematician and mountaineer who had spent World War II decoding Nazi military messages in a top-secret project outside London. Emerging from St. Anne’s in-the-Fields Episcopal Church in Lincoln, bride and groom ducked beneath an archway of ice axes held aloft by cheering members of the wedding party.
Kit and Arthur lived in St. Andrews, Scotland, where he taught at the university. Their son Rich was born in 1957. Daughter Kate was born two years later. But tragedy struck in 1961. Arthur, who had scaled peaks in Canada, Europe and Pakistan, was killed by an avalanche while climbing in the Scottish Highlands.
The close-knit St. Andrews community rallied in support. Although Kit loved Arthur’s parents, she longed for the support of her family and community in the States, where jobs were more plentiful. Kit settled in Cambridge with the children, enrolling them in Shady Hill School. She taught there and at Buckingham school.
In 1965, Kit met Ted Dreier Jr., a psychiatrist and fellow cellist. While courting, they often drove separately, unable to fit both cellos into one car. The couple married in January 1967. Their daughter Lisa was born that October. Another daughter, Ruth, was born in 1969.
Kit and a friend, Ariadne Forbes, opened Friends Gallery, a Cambridge clothing and crafts boutique. Kit went on to work at the Cambridge Art Association, piloting her Volkswagen bus into congested downtown Boston to install large modern paintings in lobbies of law firms and banks.
In 1975, Kit and Ted built a rustic house based on a neighboring barn on Martha’s Vineyard. In all, she spent more than 50 summers on the island. Once their children were raised, the couple moved in 1994 from Cambridge to Belmont, where Ted worked at McLean Hospital and Kit was elected to Town Meeting.
Kit helped start two conservation organizations, the Belmont Land Trust and the Judy Record Conservation Fund. She was active in the Thursday Club, a women’s read-aloud book group founded in 1890.
In 2018, Kit and Ted returned to Lincoln, moving into The Commons. With her first cousin Anne Watt, a fellow resident, Kit co-founded the Commons Green Initiative, addressing climate change.
Ted died at 89 in 2019. The couple’s daughter Elizabeth (Lisa) Low Dreier died of breast cancer in 2024. Kit’s survivors include her son, Richard Read and his wife, Brenda, of Seattle; two daughters, Katharine (Kate) Read Villars and her husband Thom, of Norwich, Vermont, and Ruth Antoinette Dreier, of Sebastopol, Calif.; a granddaughter, Nehalem Kunkle-Read, of Seattle; a brother, Jefferson Taft Eaton, of Lincoln; two sisters-in-law, Barbara Beate Dreier, of Livingston Manor, New York, and Dorly Eaton, of Salzburg, Austria; and two nieces, Dorita Eaton, of Salzburg, and Isabelle Black and her husband, Scott, of Brookline; and a grand-niece, Julia Black, of Brookline.
A memorial gathering will be held at 2:00pm on Wednesday, Dec. 9 at the First Parish in Lincoln. Arrangements are under the care of Dee Funeral Home & Cremation Service of Concord. Donations in Kit’s memory may be made to the Lincoln Land Conservation Trust.
