Katharine Eaton Dreier died on Sept. 28 in Lincoln. She was 96.
Kit sang in a chorus, grew vegetables and painted watercolors into her 90s. In her younger years she played tennis and the cello, hosted dinner parties and scribbled effusive letters to friends and relatives worldwide.
She promoted Vineyard land conservation and environmental causes, and loved raising children, until they became teenagers and became perplexing. The kids generally came back around to her in their 20s.
Kit spent more than 50 summers on Martha’s Vineyard, most of them in a house modeled on a neighboring barn, down a dirt road in the back of West Tisbury’s beyond. She designed the Cape Codder in 1975 with her second husband, the late Theodore Dreier Jr. Its broad double doors opened to views of Vineyard Sound, where she enjoyed taking chilly swims off Saltworks Beach and watching deep-red sunsets over Naushon.
The couple were members of an extended family that maintained Vineyard ties for five generations. The loose-knit clan was based on Seven Gates Farm, a wooded 1,600-acre shorefront enclave and former dairy farm where Kit did a stint on the community’s board of trustees.
Down the beach on Seven Gates was classy, elegant Aunt Margot Wilkie, who threw a birthday party for Kit each July 29 and lived to 101. Inland were Kit’s in-laws, Ted Sr. and Margot’s sister Bobbie Dreier, who helped found Black Mountain College and lived to 99.
Kit was born in Cambridge in 1930 to Gertrude Sturgis Eaton and Richard Jefferson Eaton, and raised in Lincoln. She attended Shady Hill School, Concord Academy and Smith College, graduating in 1952 with a BA in political science.
In 1956, Kit married Arthur Hinton Read, a Scottish mathematician who had spent World War II decoding Nazi military messages in a top-secret project outside London. The couple lived in St. Andrews, Scotland, where Arthur taught mathematics at the university.
Their son Rich was born in 1957. Daughter Kate was born two years later. Kit co-founded and directed Almost New, a nonprofit clothing exchange.
Tragedy struck in 1961. Arthur, an experienced climber, was killed by an avalanche while climbing in the Scottish Highlands.
Kit moved back to the Boston area with the children and taught school. In 1965, she met Ted Dreier Jr., a psychiatrist and fellow cellist. On dates, they often drove separately, unable to fit both cellos into one car.
Kit and Ted married in 1967. Their daughter Lisa was born that year. Another daughter, Ruth, was born in 1969. The couple raised their children in a house they remodeled in Cambridge, where Kit and a friend opened a boutique called Friends Gallery. Working for the Cambridge Art Association, she piloted her Volkswagen bus into congested downtown Boston to install large modern paintings in lobbies of law firms and banks.
Later Kit and Ted moved to Belmont, where she was elected a town meeting member and led historic-preservation and land-conservation projects.
They loved escaping to their Vineyard place nicknamed Cranberry Hollow, planting big gardens, clearing trails and gathering with neighbors for beach barbecues and singalongs. Summers were carefree in those pre-Lyme, lone-star, alpha-gal and Asian-longhorned days.
As the family grew to include a granddaughter, its members marked the years by clambering into a long-armed oak tree for hurried annual photos before racing to departing ferries.
“The renters are coming!” Kit would declare, sweeping her way out of the house.
The home’s sturdy post-and-beam structure came in handy in 1991, when Kit weathered Hurricane Bob alone behind boarded-up windows, tracking reports of 100 mph winds on a battery-powered radio. She emerged to find that waves had swept away dunes, converting the property’s placid one-acre pond frequented by river otters into an ocean inlet. A backhoe restored the pond and rebuilt the dunes, which were stabilized with beach grass and poison ivy.
Back on the mainland, Kit and Ted returned in 2018 to the town where she was raised, moving into a retirement community, the Commons in Lincoln. Kit co-founded the Commons Green Initiative, organizing presentations on climate change, an issue that deeply concerned her.
Ted died in 2019 at 89. To Kit’s great sadness, her daughter Elizabeth (Lisa) Low Dreier lost a battle with breast cancer in 2024.
Kit’s survivors include her son, Richard Read and his wife, Brenda, of Seattle, Wash.; two daughters, Katharine (Kate) Read Villars and her husband Thom, of Norwich, Vt., and Ruth Antoinette Dreier, of Sebastopol, Calif.; a granddaughter, Nehalem Kunkle-Read, of Seattle, Wash.; a brother, Jefferson Taft Eaton, of Lincoln; and a sister-in-law, Barbara Beate Dreier, of Livingston Manor, N.Y.
A memorial gathering will be held at a date to be determined. Arrangements are under the care of Dee Funeral Home & Cremation Service of Concord.
Donations in Kit’s memory may be made to the Vineyard Conservation Society.
This article appears in October 2 2026.