The following is a reprint from the Spring 1996, Volume 51, No. 2 Bulletin.
The roots of our president, Rita Langdon Clough, run deep in Vermont. She was born near Rutland in Castleton, a community her Langdon ancestors helped build.
Members of the Langdon family were early settlers there and were among the area’s leading businessmen engaged in truck and dairy farming, operation of a foundry and a cider mill.
Rita attended schools in the area, graduating from West Rutland High School and the State Normal School in Castleton, now known as Castleton State College where she studied to be a teacher. After graduating from the teacher’s school she taught in Shaftsbury, Vt., for two years then moved to North Attleboro, Mass., and taught 41 years while residing in nearby Pawtucket, R.I.
In 1950 she married the Rev. Maxwell L. Clough, the minister of the Central Falls Congregational Church (see this PDF) which gives some history and background of the church). The Cloughs had two children, Langdon and Heather. The Rev. Clough, a past president of the John Clough Genealogical Society, died in 1985 at the age of 75.
Her son, Langdon, the immediate past president of The Society, is an adjunct professor at Northeastern University in Boston and the owner of The Gallery West in Warwick, R.I., and has a master’s degree from the University of Vermont.
Rita’s daughter, Heather, is a social worker with a master’s degree from the University of Rhode Island and is an adjunt professor at Rhode Island College. She also attends Harvard Divinity School.
Rita presently is president of the Church Women United in the Blackstone Valley Unit and also is president of the Women’s Group of the church she attends. Through the years she has worked with children’s choirs and has been Sunday School director, has sung in her church choir for years and has been active in women’s societies.
She loves music, especially classical and opera for listening, but enjoys all kinds for singing. In her retirement years she enjoys reading all the good books in her library that for years she had only time to skim. Rita spends time organizing and sorting family memorabilia, hoping to make scrap books for her children of items that tell of the late Rev. Clough’s life as well as hers and their children.