Roberta Elizabeth Marsh Crittenden, mother, teacher, Peace Corps volunteer, dedicated her life to discovery and learning. She passed away at her home in the Sautee Valley, May 20. She was 97.
Roberta was born in the Valley at the home of her grandparents to Herbert and Elizabeth Lumsden Marsh. She returned in 1979 with her husband, William Robert Crittenden, following his retirement as Superintendent of Central State Hospital in Milledgeville. Mrs. Crittenden then taught in White and Habersham County Schools’ Gifted Programs for several years.
While raising seven children in Milledgeville, Roberta earned a Master’s Degree in Early Childhood Education from the Women’s College of Georgia and established a private kindergarten in her home. She was particularly responsive to the educational needs of the immigrant children whose parents had found employment at the State Hospital after fleeing social and political turmoil of their native lands. In 1968 she volunteered for a teaching position in an all-black elementary school. Aghast at the conditions in the black schools, she pushed for changes that helped pave the way for desegregation of Baldwin County public schools.
Mrs. Crittenden traveled extensively, participating in a number of scientific projects with EarthWatch Expeditions International, both on her own and with family members. Those adventures included sailing on a clipper ship to observe hump-backed whales as well as studies in China, Nepal, New Guinea, Greece, Chile, Norway, and the Arctic region of Canada.
Roberta’s teaching career didn’t end with retirement from the public schools. She taught in Cordova, Alaska, where she constructed and directed an oral history curriculum project that was recently recognized for its historical significance by the Cordova Historical Society. At age seventy she joined the Peace Corps and accepted a position as reading instructor in a rural parish on the island of Grenada in the West Indies. In addition to her work in the school system there, she spent two afternoons each week with an adult Grenadian woman who wanted to learn to read. By the end of Mrs. Crittenden’s two year Peace Corps service, her protégé was reading and, for the first time in her life, writing to relatives in England. In 1992, Roberta joined World Teach and moved to Elblag, Poland to work as an instructor of English as a second language. Friends she made there later visited her in Sautee.
Bill and Roberta Crittenden were founding members of the Sautee Nacoochee Community Association. Roberta’s passion for both environmental stewardship and historic preservation was evidenced locally by her contributions to the development of SNCA, her initiatives to conserve the natural landscapes of the Sautee and Nacoochee valleys, and her significant support of the African American Heritage Site at the Sautee Nacoochee Center.
Roberta was fond of this maxim by Marcel Proust: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes, in seeing the universe with the eyes of another, of a hundred others, in seeing the hundred universes that each of them sees.”
Roberta Crittenden is survived by her seven children, 12 grandchildren, and
14 great-grandchildren. A private celebration of her life will be held in the family cemetery later this summer.
Those wishing may express condolences to the Crittendon family by visiting www.hillsidememorialchapel.com.
Arrangements by Hillside Memorial Chapel, Clarkesville. 706-754-6256
