Marjorie D. Nelson, homemaker, volunteer

Marjorie Demarest Nelson, a homemaker and retired community volunteer, died of complications from a stroke Sept. 19 at the Broadmead Retirement Community in Cockeysville.

The former Ruxton resident was 91.

Born Marjorie Anne “Midge” Demarest in Baltimore, she was the daughter of Clayton Demarest Jr., an Atlantic Insurance Co. executive, and Marguerite Bahlke Demarest.

She grew up on Queen Anne Road in Windsor Hills and was a 1941 graduate of Forest Park High School. She later resided with her family on Norwood Road in Guilford.

She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at Hollins College in 1945 and studied painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Family members said she spent her summers and winter breaks during World War II as a Johns Hopkins Hospital volunteer.

In 1946, she married N. Travers Nelson, a Baltimore resident who later became an engineer at Bethlehem Steel’s Sparrows Point plant.

Mrs. Nelson was an avid gardener and worked for 10 years with the Greater Baltimore Medical Center’s grounds committee in the 1960s and 1970s. She enjoyed birding in Baltimore and in Maine.

Mrs. Nelson and her husband volunteered as tutors for two decades at Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church on Park Avenue in Bolton Hill, where the couple had married.

She, her husband and children began attending Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church in Woodbrook in Baltimore County when it opened in 1960 and remained active in the congregation. She was a church supporter and became involved in the design of its sanctuary and landscaping in the early 1990s.

For more than 50 years, she and her family spent summers on Isle au Haut, Maine.

A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. Nov. 12 at Brown Memorial Woodbrook Presbyterian Church.

Survivors include two sons, Travers C. Nelson of Baltimore and David C. Nelson of Westport, Conn.; two daughters, Anne N. Apgar of Baltimore and Elizabeth C. “Liza” Nelson of Brunswick, Maine; a sister, Carolyn D. Wells of Shrewsbury, Mass.; nine grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter. Her husband of 63 years, the retired superintendent of the Bethlehem Steel rod and wire mill, died in 2009.