The tireless volunteer, skilled gardener and beloved mother and grandmother died peacefully in her own home on Interlaken Avenue — “Mrs. Hart’s house,” to friends and neighbors — in the company of loved ones. Hart was able to live at home until the end of her life thanks to a rotating cast of local caretakers enlisted by her daughter, Nancy Beattie, to keep her company and help out around the house.

“Nancy put together the most incredible group of caregivers you could imagine,” said Marilyn MacIvor, another one of Hart’s daughters. “They were trustworthy. They loved my mother and my mother loved them.”

MacIvor said that Hart was “never lonesome.” Every morning, she’d have a breakfast of eggs, bacon, toast and coffee — a breakfast MacIvor said “helped keep her going” into old age.

An immaculate dresser and consummate hostess, Hart pinned on a brooch every day — even when she stayed in her bathrobe. She was known for offering good cups of tea and cookies to her many guests.

Ruth and Dr. George Hart, 1988 (Enterprise file photo)

“She always welcomed people into her house, and so there were people in and out all the time,” MacIvor said. “She was always stimulated and up for good conversation and just amazing, really, with what she could do.”

Spend an hour in Hart’s sunny back room and you saw a parade of colorful, hungry birds at the cluster of feeders she kept on her porch: rose-breasted grosbeaks, black-capped chickadees and cardinals. The latter was Hart’s favorite type of bird. She sat in her chair in that back room and watched the birds every day, MacIvor said. The big picture windows facing Lake Placid and the mountains made her feel connected to nature.

“This property has seen a moose, foxes, deer, raccoons, lots of birds,” MacIvor said. “She could be a part of nature and everything. She loved it.”

A note on the house: It was MacIvor’s father, Lake Placid’s renowned Dr. George Hart, who loved it first. He only told Ruth he bought it after the fact.

“He was out in the mornings and he made house calls, and my mother was often out doing her thing,” MacIvor said. “He came home one morning and she wasn’t (there), and so he left a note on the kitchen table that said, ‘Ruth, I just bought a house.'”

Ruth Hart and Carol Nevulis are pictured here during Hart's 101st birthday celebration in May 2020. (Enterprise photo — Elizabeth Izzo)

George and Ruth were married for 67 years, until his death in 2014 at the age of 97. They met in Montreal, both graduates of McGill University. While George served as a flight surgeon in the U.S. Army during World War II, earning the Silver Star for his service at Iwo Jima, Ruth worked at Sun Life, a financial services company, where she wrote the first minimum wage act for the nation of Iran. She also volunteered with the Red Cross.

“You went where you were needed, even if you weren’t,” Hart told the Enterprise last year.

After marrying and moving to George’s hometown of Lake Placid, the Harts had four daughters together: Marilyn, Nancy, Ruth Mary and Elizabeth. George had a general practice and Ruth answered the phone. Over the course of his career, he delivered 2,500 babies in Lake Placid.

MacIvor said her parents were intelligent people who loved to teach their daughters new things.

“She is the smartest woman I have ever known. The smartest woman, maybe the smartest person — but my father was also brilliant,” MacIvor said. “My father taught us the appreciation of music. (My mother taught us) geography, paying attention to politics.”

Ruth Hart smiles at her 104th birthday celebration — a drive-by birthday parade — last spring. She would’ve been 105 years old on May 3. (Enterprise photo — Lauren Yates)

Hart would read a few newspapers every day and kept up with Canadian news — she was from Kenogami, Quebec, now part of the city of Saguenay — by watching CBC, MacIvor said.

“She understood everything and she shared it with us. She was always learning,” MacIvor said. “I had a friend whose mother taught her nothing and she had to go to someone else always to find out. I never had to go to someone else.”

She remembered that, in 1963 when Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” was on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, her parents made a point of taking the whole family to see the masterpiece.

“They made us aware of the world and how to appreciate it,” MacIvor said. “She planted the seed. She planted a lot of seeds of knowledge in us and they grew.”

Planting seeds — of knowledge, of preservation, of flowers — was Hart’s life’s work. While her full-time job was raising her four daughters, Hart also volunteered for an exhaustive list of community boards and organizations: the Lake Placid Center for the Arts, the Garden Club of Lake Placid, Women of St. Eustace, St. Francis Academy, Mountain Lake Public Television, the North Elba and Lake Placid Zoning Boards and the Lake Placid Olympic Organizing Committee.

Ruth Hart sits with great-grandchildren Muir, center, and Drew Shouldice, at her home in Lake Placid on April 30, 2023. (Enterprise photo — Lauren Yates)

During the 1980 Olympic Winter Games, Hart was the chair of dignitary host services and arranged for the donation of more than $150,000 — $602,000 today — in floral products for the more than 300 bouquets handed out to medal winners. Her famous garden on Victor Herbert Road, located within the former foundation of St. Eustace-by-the-Lake Episcopal Church, is documented in the Archives of American Gardens, part of the Smithsonian Institution’s Horticulture Services Division, and can be viewed here: tinyurl.com/ruthgarden.

Hart was also instrumental in developing and upholding the modern North Elba-Lake Placid Joint Land Use Code. MacIvor said that Hart was responsible for the code’s directive to preserve the village’s “character of community,” a charge later used to prevent Wal-Mart from setting up shop in the 1990s.

“She was really proud of having a major role in that, and also for keeping Wal-Mart out of Lake Placid, because Wal-Mart would’ve killed Main Street,” MacIvor said.

Hart was big proponent of common sense, MacIvor said, and another one of her contributions to the land use code shows it. Appendix six of the code reads “When all else fails, use common sense.”

In a May 22, 2010 column for the Lake Placid News, Naj Wikoff wrote “Ruth’s fingerprints are on many significant achievements in the community.” At the time, the LPCA was hosting a month-long art exhibit in Hart’s honor, called “Heart 2 Hart.”

Hart’s family agrees: Their matriarch was a bright, vital woman who’ll be missed in her adopted hometown of almost 80 years.

“My mother brought a lot to this town and she brought a lot to us as a family,” MacIvor said. “She was just brilliantly smart and she didn’t ever have a job where she worked outside the home. She gave all to her husband and daughters, and what she contributed to the community is incredible.”