Remembering Our Past, Supporting Our Future

Documenting a property’s past while providing for its future is a rare feat, but that’s exactly what Jacqueline Rousseau did through her bequest to The Trustees last year.

Jacqueline volunteered for years at Long Hill, taking photos of the gardens as they changed through the seasons and evolved over time. Jacqueline passed away in November 2022, and as a member of the Semper Virens Society, left a six-figure bequest to The Trustees. In addition to that generous contribution to help secure the property’s future, she donated hundreds of photos that documented more than a decade at Long Hill.

“We needed a volunteer photographer to record all kinds of projects, like our first botanical labels at Long Hill and different flowerings at different times of the year,” said Dan Bouchard, a longtime Trustees horticulturist at Long Hill. “Jackie would come in a few mornings a week to take photos. She was well known and well liked at the property.”

A native of Salem, Jackie was looking for something to do in retirement after she had worked as an engineer in the turbine engineering division of General Electric in Lynn for 41 years.

“You could see the engineering part of her brain. She was really particular about the details,” Dan said. “If things weren’t just right in the photo, she would come back later and take more to get it right.”

Over the course of 12 years in the 1990s and early 2000s, Jackie visited the property hundreds of times—meeting with staff and other garden volunteers to determine what she was to take photos of that day. In all she took and donated nearly 600 photos documenting more than a decade of change at Long Hill.

The photos are crucial to understanding the property when a restoration takes place, such as the one The Trustees recently completed at Long Hill. From Jacqueline’s estate we received three binders totaling nearly 600 slides, which will be digitized and stored in our digital management system.

Later in life, after her years of volunteering, Dan would visit her from time to time at her new home in Danvers.

“We would talk about Long Hill, and she felt really fortunate that she was part of the garden there,” Dan said. “She had very fond memories of helping us, and I think that’s why she donated her photo collection to us. It was a big part of her life.”

Jackie didn’t just take photos of flowers; she was a gardener too.

“When she moved [to Danvers], she donated some beautiful peonies to us—and we have those still in our cutting garden,” Dan said. “When they’re blooming, we think of her.”