Polly Freese

Polly Shepherd Freese passed away Feb. 25 at the age of 94. She was born April 14, 1930, in Needham to Joe Van Reypen Shepherd and Dorothea Powell Shepherd. She was a graduate of Hopkinton High School and the Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital School of Nursing.

In May 1953, she married Carl Gates Freese Jr., a graduate of Harvard and Boston University School of Medicine. They first lived on Peterborough Street in Boston, then settled in Needham to raise their family. Polly and Gates were active in the Christ Episcopal Church, where they developed close friendships with a half-dozen other couples in a group collectively referring to themselves as the “Rat Pack”; she survived all of them. She was an active volunteer at the Pollard Junior High School library during the years that her children attended school there. In 1978, after an injury forced Gates to close his ophthalmologic practice in Wellesley, they moved full-time up to Francestown, New Hampshire. When he reopened his practice in Peterborough, she served as his secretary.

Polly and Gates loved to camp and travel. They went on two cross-country camping trips when their family was young, and spent many winters traveling across the South with their camping trailer. After Gates passed away in 2001, she traded the trailer for a campervan and spent many more winters traveling to Florida and Texas. She was an active birder with a substantial life list, and served for several years on a team of birding docents at Goose Island State Park in Texas. She provided years of dedicated volunteer work at the Serendipity Shop (the “Dip”) in Peterborough, until it sadly closed due to COVID. She worked on the Patriotic Purposes Committee, helping to organize events for veterans around Memorial Day and Veterans Day. Finally, she served on the Francestown Cemetery commission for many years, helping to manage the cemetery in which she will be laid to rest.

She was preceded in death by her three siblings, Garet, Robert and Judy. She is survived by daughter Nancy, son Jonathan and wife Sallie Mack and children McKenna and Jean-Paul Jacquet-Freese and grandson Gideon, Camber Freese, Meia and Morgan Astbury, and Zak Forest and Caitlin Daniel and grandson Kai, and by son Stephen and wife Carolyn and children Ben and Erica Freese, Samantha, Emma and Zoe Freese and Chris Perez.

The family plans a small graveside service later in the year. Donations in the memory of Polly may be made to the Francestown Volunteer Fire Department.

Obituaries are submissions, typically from funeral homes, that are not subject to the same level of editorial oversight as the rest of the Hopkinton Independent. Obituaries may be edited for grammatical and factual mistakes and clarifications and shortened for space considerations.