Pam Ayres was born in January 1929 and grew up in Onancock, Virginia. Her daughter, Rebecca, recalls her as a talented artist who “could build just about anything.” Pam designed the home she and her husband Charlie built on Pungoteague Creek on the Chesapeake Bay, near where she had grown up, and built most of the wooden furniture in it. She kept horses and many other animals that she rescued and nursed back to health. With the help of Rebecca’s two older brothers, Pam built the stable, sheds, and pasture fences—to say nothing of the seawall and dock they constructed with wood discarded by the local lumberyard. She loved to travel, grew vegetables and flowers, and, says Rebecca, “was always fiercely independent, maintaining her 18-acre property long after my dad died in 1989.”When Pam was a young girl, her grandfather, who had been a member of a New York City rowing club in the early 1900s, taught her to row. Yet, in Rebecca’s childhood on the Chesapeake, she recalls family canoes, outboard boats, and kayaks, but never a rowboat. “Mom always talked about getting a rowboat one day, but for some reason, we never did,” she says.

Rebecca Ludden

While the weather was good Rebecca, Eric, and Pam were able to work outside. When winter came, they were forced inside to Pam’s basement where they had heat but much less space.

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