Elmire Conklin
11/7/2021
Elmire Marina (Langlois) Conklin, a 67 year resident of Warwick, NY, passed away on November 7, 2021 at Schervier Pavilion after a long illness. She was 94 years old.
Born on October 23, 1927 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, she was the daughter of Thomas Huxley and Marina Louise (Holmes) Langlois.
Elmire was an activist for environmental issues before environmental politics and ecology were mainstream conversations. An early promotor of anti-litter laws in New York State, she supported bottle deposit legislation. Elmire was a middle school science teacher for the Monroe-Woodbury School District and was one of New York State’s first teachers to introduce sex education into school curriculum.
Elmire was a founding member of the Orange County Land Trust and an active member of the Orange County Genealogy Society, where she has contributed volumes of her and her parent’s lifelong work on the family genealogies. Elmire worked and advocated for the identification, location and protection of family, church and community cemeteries in Orange County and personally found many obscure family plots discovered in her genealogy research.
Elmire learned to appreciate music originally listening to her father’s harmonica and mandolin, and she played daily on her piano at home. She sang with the Warwick Chorale for forty years with performances in New York City and locally. Music was her most soothing tonic while residing in Schervier Pavilion.
Elmire worked many summers as the nature counselor at Camp Quinibeck on Lake Fairlee, VT to support her sons attending nearby Camp Pinnacle, owned and operated by the family of former Warwick resident, Allan Newton. Her sons all have a deep appreciation of nature developed over years of catching frogs, turtles and salamanders around the family homestead on Spanktown Road. All the boys are backyard birders thanks to their mother.
When her boys were growing up, Elmire founded a local 4-H chapter which fostered many farm-centric programs including raising bees and pheasant chicks for release in the wild. Early spring brought 250 day-old chicks to be raised for 6 weeks under the program.
Supporting a deep commitment to lifelong education, Elmire earned a Masters degree in botany from Columbia University. Elmire contributed hundreds of pressed flower and fern collections for permanent keeping at Columbia. She also earned a holistic healing certification from the Barbara Brennan School of Healing.
She is survived by two sisters: Zoe Langlois Titchener of Downers Grove, IL and Caroline Lizette Smith of Fort Collins, CO; her three sons: Huxley Howard Conklin of Westport, MA, Matthew Sanford Conklin of Westminster, VT and Nicholas Langlois Conklin of Warwick, NY; and five grandchildren: James, Elliott, Katherine, Nicholas and Benjamin. She was predeceased by her husband of 60 years, Howard and her two sisters, Esther Stewart and Florence Langlois.
The family will receive friends for memorial visitation on Saturday, November 20 from 10:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. with a funeral service at 11:00 a.m. at Lazear-Smith & Vander Plaat Memorial Home, 17 Oakland Avenue, Warwick, NY. The family requests that all those attending please wear a face mask. We thank you in advance for honoring their request.
To view the funeral service online, use this link at the time of the service:
https://client.tribucast.com/tcid/7549210058
In lieu of flowers, the family requests that you consider a memorial donation in Elmire’s name to the Orange County Land Trust, PO Box 269, Mountainville, NY 10953 or the Orange County Genealogy Society, 101 Main St., Goshen, NY 10924.
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