Ellen Louise Wiley: A Century of Service to Pittstown

A May 2012 article in the Troy Record celebrates one of the most remarkable figures in Pittstown's recent history — Town Historian Ellen Louise Wiley, who marked her 100th birthday in the family home where her grandmother had also lived to the remarkable age of 103.

Wiley's secret to longevity was characteristically selfless. "I think you have to keep busy and do things for others," she said. "Mine has been a very busy life." And it was. She began teaching art in 1937, and over a career spanning more than three decades she taught everything from first grade through twelfth grade, from general art to mechanical drawing — sometimes running two classes simultaneously. Her mother, Alice Sherman Wiley, had been a schoolteacher before her, working in the one-room country schools that once dotted the Pittstown landscape. Wiley herself attended the Upper School in the Village of Tomhannock, and those one-room schools finally disappeared in 1953 when the Tomhannock Reservoir was built.

Her nephew Paul Wiley recalled being one of her last students in Pittstown that year. "She was the last art teacher I ever had," he said. "She taught four of us boys mechanical drawing and a general art class to the other students in the same classroom at the same time" — and did so with characteristic finesse.

Wiley retired from teaching in 1969 and immediately threw herself into a new vocation: preserving Pittstown's history. She served as town historian for four decades, keeping daily records of news and events. Together with Beryl Harrington and Evelyn Bornt, she spent ten years co-writing Pittstown Through the Years, published by the Pittstown Historical Society in 1989 — a chronicle of the community's history illustrated with photographs.

At 100, blind and slightly hard of hearing, Wiley had no plans to step down. "I'm happy because I'm still able to get about," she said. When asked what she had loved most about teaching, her answer was simple and luminous: "It was the fellowship with the children. I touched many lives and I was always kind to them — even the children no one else was kind to."