Helena Van Vliet

HELENA VAN VLIET 1898-1978

On December 11, 1978, one week before her 80th birthday, Helena died at her home on the farm on which she was born. She was active, alert, and enthusiastic until her death. Independent, self sufficient, and broadly knowledgeable were characteristics immediately apparent to those who met her. The fragility of life is never so clear as when the robust among us succumbs. Helena was robust. She came from families who resided in that area of Clinton from the 1750's. She was connected to all the initial settlers of the Pleasant Plains area. Marriages in the 18th and 19th centuries between the Van Vliets, Garrisons, Leroys, Sleights, Travers, and Trempers connected her to all of the early history of Clinton. And it was her knowledge and interest in the history of Clinton through which most of us knew her best. But Helena was a much broader person than her retiring personal style ever let on. By the age of 36 she had completed a career as a missionary which few of us knew about. After graduating from Rhinebeck High School in 1916, she obtained her nurses cap at Brooklyn Methodist Hospital in 1919. Four years later she left the operating room at Brooklyn Methodist to serve her first of three periods in China at University Hospital at Nanking. The overwhelming need for competent surgical nurses drew her to serve her fellow man in a place far from her Pleasant Plains childhood. Not only did she beome fluent in Chinese in order to teach the Chinese nurses at University Hospital in Nanking, but she also became a qualified electrical maintenance engineer recognized as such by a Lloyd's of London subsidiary. Recognizing the need to have electrical power in the surgical emergency room after 9 P.M. when all the power in Nanking was shut off, Helena made it her business to learn to operate the hospital's electrical generating plant to provide emergency service to patients. She returned to Brooklyn Methodist in 1935 following a trip around the world She had lived through that period in China when there were two wars in progress simultaneously - one with the Japanese and the other an internal struggle with the Communists.

These were times of real danger for an American in China. Ten years later, 1945, she returned home to Dutchess to help raise the children of her sister who had died. Eighteen years of service in the operating rooms of Vassar and Northern Dutchess Hospitals closed her 44 year career in nursing in 1963. She now had time to restore her 18th century home in Pleasant Plains where she had spent her childhood. Her home was formerly the Dutch Reformed Church and school and later a school until the 1850's. For the next 15 years she carried on the traditional family interest in Clinton and Dutchess history. Her father, George S. Van Vliet, a historical colleague of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, had been one of the founders and was first Vice President of the Dutchess County Historical Society in 1914. She was a carpenter, electrician, photographer and collector of Clinton history. She was an active member of and contributor to the Pleasant Plains Presbyterian Church and Fallkill Grange. She served the community as an active member of the Environmental Commission, Clinton Library Board, Community Day, Town of Clinton Historical Society and Dutchess County Historical Society. She had received awards of achievement and distinction from both historical societies She was the Town of Clinton Historian and Vice President of the Dutchess County Historical Society. Her absence, traveling in her blue car searching for another piece of Clinton history, or taking another historical photograph, will be felt by all of us.

William P. McDermott In the Newsletter of the Clinton Historical Society