Gay Gilpin Johnson, 91, a longtime volunteer manager of Awbury Aboretum, a private park in East Germantown where she had lived in one of its homes for six decades, died July 7 of an infection at Chestnut Hill Hospital.
In addition to volunteering at the 55-acre park near the Washington Lane SEPTA station, Mrs. Johnson provided fundraising and gathered documents relating to the arboretum’s history. She was instrumental in founding the Awbury’s Neighbors Association and in 1985 the Awbury Aboretum Association, a nonprofit organization that owns and operates the park, founded in 1916 by Francis Cope, a wealthy Quaker merchant.
She also established the Aboretum Nature Association and wrote grants that kept it funded.
Born in West Chester, Mrs. Johnson graduated from the Baldwin School and Vassar College. After college, she worked for a time at College Cevenol in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, France.
Returning to the United States in the late 1940s, she worked for the American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia, where she met her future husband, Eric Johnson, a Quaker who had worked abroad with the AFSC during World War II and who would later teach English at Germantown Friends School for nearly three decades. Mr. Johnson died in 1994.
The couple were married in 1948 and operated the International Quaker Center in Paris, France, from 1952 to 1954.
Although not raised a Quaker, Mrs. Johnson attended Germantown Monthly Meeting for most of her life and supported many Quaker interests and causes. She joined the meeting in 2014.
She served on the board of the Northwest Interfaith Movement and was particularly active in NIM’s Dialogue for Racial Justice program.
She is survived by a son, Jeffrey G. Johnson, of Long Beach, Calif.; daughters Rebecca Warner Johnson, of Philadelphia, and Emily Cooper Johnson, of Seattle, Wash.; and four grandchildren. A sister, Margaret Hall, and a brother, Vincent Gilpin, preceded her in death.
A Quaker memorial meeting is planned in October at Germantown Monthly Meeting. – WF
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