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Margaret Ellery Ashton

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Margaret Ellery came into the Ashton family by marriage, as the wife of Clarence Ashton — a match made later in his life, to a woman of a younger generation. Where Briarmont knew Clarence as the hard machinery behind the Hartwell timber enterprise, those close to the household knew Margaret as his equal in will: strong-minded, unbending, and unafraid to press her husband where the town's men would not.

She was a leading figure in the Briarmont Yarrow League, the women's civic society founded in 1910, and among the driving powers behind the effort to rein in Elias Hartwell's greed. It was Margaret, more than most, who pressed Clarence to do something about the man whose estate he would one day be charged to settle.

Her only child was Benedict Ellery Ashton, born in 1882, and in his name her own was kept — the Ellery she brought into the marriage passing to her son for life. She outlived Clarence, who died in 1916, and lived on into the Oakridge era before her own death in 1925, three years before his brother Edmund.

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