William H. McElwain died at home April 19 after a long illness.
Mr. McElwain was a 1941 graduate of Harvard College and an Army Air Corp veteran of World War II in Sudan, Guam, and Japan, during which time he achieved the rank of 1st lieutenant.
He went on to graduate study in agriculture, at the University of California, and French, at the University of New Hampshire and in Aix-en-Provence. He was a farmer, educator, mentor, adventurer, community organizer, and free thinker.
At Brickyard Farm in Litchfield, N.H., he grew or raised everything from corn, carrots, cattle, to chickens and pigs, from 1947 to 1965. In the mid-1960s he combined career change with adventure, first going to live and study in Aix-en-Provence with his wife, Katchen, and his three children, then teaching French, an interest he had since his days at the Noble and Greenough School in the mid-’30s.
Mr. McElwain and his family moved to Amherst, N.H., in 1965. He taught history at the High Mowing School in New Hampshire. He then moved to Weston in 1969 to earn his master’s degree in history at Northeastern University.
He became a community organizer, coordinating volunteers at Low Cost Housing Corps in the South End of Boston, bringing people in from the suburbs to rehabilitate old houses and apartment buildings for inner city people with limited financial means. Students from public and private schools, teachers, doctors, lawyers, and many others took part in the effort. Not long after he began working there, he managed to convert the large vacant lot in front of the low-cost-housing office into a community garden despite Boston City government red tape and obstacles.
He combined farming with community organizing as a project director of the Weston Youth and Conservation Commission. He organized a youth-operated farm, a recycling program, and a town-wide maple sugaring operation, featuring a maple sugar house on Weston Junior High School land. The agricultural program he created inspired people of all ages in Weston to grow vegetables on town land, selling the produce at a reasonable cost to inner city markets in cooperation with Boston Urban Gardeners. The concept became known as Green Power, and the idea spread to surrounding towns.
Mr. McElwain also began writing a regular column in the Weston Town Crier, covering a range of topics from agriculture and recycling to current events.
After the death of his wife in the early 1980s, he gathered volunteers to start a farm on the land he still owned in Litchfield. His objective to produce and provide low-cost, fresh, organic food to low-income people of Boston public housing projects resulted in the success of Nesenkeag Farm.
He is survived by his partner, Mary Noble, of Milton; his children, Louisa McElwain, of Santa Cruz, N.M., Amy McCoubrey, of Philadelphia, and Donald McElwain, of Bristol, Vt.; his sister, Charlotte Allen, of Concord; and his brothers, David McElwain, of Lexington, and Robert McElwain, of Portsmouth, N.H.; seven grandchildren; and four nephews and a niece.
Funeral services were private.
Donations may be made to the Green Power Program, Land’s Sake, 27 Crescent St., Weston, MA 02493.
Arrangements were by Chapman, Cole & Gleason Funeral Home.