1909 – 2003

FARMINGTON – Maxine Hayden Hoyt Richmond, 94, died Friday, April 11, at the Sandy River Center for Health and Rehabilitation where she had resided since September of 2001.

She was born in Phillips on June 7, 1908, the only daughter of Floy Kelley Hoyt and Cony M. Hoyt, both of whom were descendents of pioneer Phillips families. This was a major factor in her interest in Phillips area history and in her love of sharing with others what she had learned about her ancestors and their life and times. After her graduation as valedictorian of the Phillips High School, class of 1926, she attended Colby College and later graduated from the University of Maine in Farmington with a bachelor’s degree in education. In May of 1928 she married Russell Carl Richmond, her father performing the ceremony. The couple lived in Phillips all their married life and Maxine remained there after retirement, alternating between her home in town and the camp on Toothaker Pond. Her teaching career started in a rural one-room schoolhouse where she filled in during one of her high school vacations. The experience left her with lifelong love of education.

In January, 1943, she started teaching fulltime in grade six. Soon, she was assigned to only grade six, the age group whe preferred, and she remained there for 33 1/2 years, until her retirement in 1976. In her later years of teaching, she educated several second-generation sixth-graders, delighting in telling them stories about their parents’ antics. Another pleasure of hers was reading to her class almost every day, hoping to nourish a love of reading that, to her great joy, often worked.

After retirement, she became the secretary of the Phillips Historical Society and happily spent hours researching town histories, records, genealogies and cemetery records for information sought by authors and descendants of earlier area families. She savored going back to the schools as guest speaker, detailing life in the 1800s and 1900s, especially that relating to Maine history and rural school life. She also was, for several years, secretary of the Phillips Zoning Board of Appeals.

One of her talents was creating artwork pleasing to children – cartoon characters, holiday scenes, animal forms and fairy tale characters. For more than 40 years she decorated stores, a church, the local post office and special events for the holidays as well as doing signs, posters and promotional materials for the historical society and other groups and businesses. A special source of pride to her was to sense an artistic talent in a young student and encourage him or her to pursue it.

For every year but one from 1958 to the late 1990s, she developed colorful entries for the Phillips Old Home Days parade floats, always with the hope of providing a smile or response from children of all ages along the parade route. Because she knew so many townspeople, so much town history, and so many historical anecdotes, she provided color commentary of the parades on WKTJ radio into her late 80s.

She is survived by her daughter, Yvonne Rowe, professor emerita of Colby College; her son-in-law, William R. Rowe; her grandson, Marc D. Fisher, co-owner of Franklin Broadcasting; maternal and paternal cousins; several nieces and nephews from her marriage and a few hundred of her beloved sixth-graders.