Ina Shaw: Pioneering spirit, independent and proud

Ina Shaw and her husband, John, after their wedding in 1897. (Courtesy photo Lebanon Historical Society) Right, her "dream house" where she spent later years; below, the red tearoom she owned and later moved to her property as a summer home. (HT photos)

One of Lebanon’s most interesting properties went up for sale last month.

It was home to one of its most interesting personalities ever.

Ina Blaisdell Shaw lived in the tiny, three-room “caretaker cottage” in her older years.

The Lebanon Voice did a story about the property a week ago, but we felt compelled to write another story after hearing about this woman’s remarkable life.

The cottage is about a tenth of a mile down the hill from her family home at 134 Dixon Road in West Lebanon where she was born Ina Blaisdell on Sept. 24, 1876.

She attended school at the “Popple Hill” School about a half-mile from her house, later teaching there which helped her earn money to later board in Milton and attend Nute High School. She graduated in 1896.

At the age of 20 she married John Shaw, and they built a house in East Rochester at the corner of Grove and Hickey streets.

John Shaw was a barber and ran a shop where Boucher’s is today.

When Ina Shaw reached the age of 45 in 1921 she got her driver’s license, an unusual feat for a woman in those times.

Ina Shaw worked in shoe shops off and on her entire working life. When her husband died in 1942 she continued until she retired at the age of 77 in 1953.

Ina Shaw interrupted her shoe shop career in the 1920s when she had built and operated a tearoom serving ice cream and sandwiches on the old Route 16 in Rochester.

It was in 1968 that she moved to the “caretaker cottage,” which she called her “Dream House,” a short distance down the road from her birthplace. The three-room cottage had been a railroad section house in Eastwood in Lebanon near Route 202, site of the former rail bed.

She bought the section house for $200 and had it moved to its present location for less than $100.

Her pet dog “Tippie” was her constant companion in the first years after the move.

Ina Shaw at some point had the old tearoom she had run on Route 16 moved to an area up the hill into thick woods a few hundred feet from her cottage.

In her later years this is where she would spend her summers, out enjoying the flowers and animals of the forest.

At the age of 86 she fell and broke her leg, and doctors predicted she would never walk again, but she did.

In 1970 at the age of almost 94, she received the Boston Post cane, given by the former Boston newspaper to the eldest citizen in many New England towns.

She lived in the cottage till she was past 100 years old. On the celebration of her 100th birthday she received a congratulatory letter from then-president Gerald Ford.

Her property bordered that of Lebanon Historical President Nancy Wyman, who said Ina Shaw even in her 100s always remembered Wyman’s name, even though they only saw each other once or twice a year.

People who knew her said she lived in that house almost till when she died in March of 1978 at the age of 102.

(Many thanks go out to the Lebanon Historical Society and Barbara Sewell

in writing this report and for furnishing the pictures.)