Eleanor A. Medford

Eleanor Ashley Medford, an artist, gardener and avid tennis player who made the Delaware Valley her home for nearly seven decades, died on April 15, 2025 at the age of 93. Her two children, John Medford and Sarah Medford, noted the cause of death as complications from dementia. Since 2004, Eleanor had been a member of the Kendal at Longwood community in Kennett Square, PA. Her husband, Charles Brinton Medford II, predeceased her there in 2005.

Eleanor Hudson Ashley was born in August of 1931, in Waban, Massachusetts, the eldest of two children born to Raymond E. Ashley and Elizabeth H. Ashley. (She had one younger brother as well as three older stepbrothers from her father’s previous marriage.) Educated at Dana Hall School in Wellesley, MA, from which she graduated in 1949, Eleanor enjoyed literature and the arts and became an avid skier and tennis player. She went on to Smith College, where she earned a B.A. in Fine Arts in 1953, and she did post-graduate work in sculpture the following year at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Following her 1954 marriage to Charles Brinton Medford II of Swarthmore, PA, Eleanor moved to Philadelphia and the couple settled in suburban Wallingford. For decades, they enjoyed collecting early American furniture of the region and sailing on the Chesapeake Bay, where they kept a cruising sloop on the Chester River. Eleanor was a knowledgeable gardener, combining her interests when she illustrated several books on bulbs and flowering plants for the American Horticultural Society.

Throughout her life, Eleanor was most active as a painter and a printmaker. Her work was represented in several corporate collections, and she exhibited in Philadelphia from time to time; she also taught painting and printmaking at the Community Arts Center near her home in Wallingford, which also offered her an introduction to ceramic arts. Eleanor found primary artistic inspiration in the Maine coastline, specifically the rockbound, pebbled landscape around Ogunquit that she’d come to know from early childhood summers.

Eleanor is survived by her two children, John Medford and Sarah Medford; their spouses, Karen Medford and Doug Sherrod; her four grandchildren, Sydney and Pearce Medford and Fletcher and Eden Sherrod; and her brother, Peter Ashley.