In Memoriam

Adele Louise Johnson
1938-2025

FLY CREEK—Adele Louise (Merkle) Johnson, a local artist and former librarian, died on Labor Day, September 1, 2025, at her retirement community home in Concord, New Hampshire. She was 87 years old.

Born August 4, 1938 in Port Chester, New York, she was the daughter of Robert R. Merkle and Marie L. Merkle. Her childhood was spent in Twin Falls, Idaho, and Teaneck, New Jersey, and she graduated from Teaneck High School. Adele graduated from Wittenberg University with a BFA in 1960. She spent her junior year in France, studying art history at La Sorbonne and the École du Louvre in Paris. She did studio work at Wittenberg and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, and studied life drawing and oil painting at The New School in New York City from 1961 to 1963. Adele continued drawing and painting throughout her life.

On April 20, 1963, Adele married Edwin Arthur Johnson in St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Teaneck. They lived in an apartment in Leonia, New Jersey, before moving into their first house, in Harrington Park, New Jersey.

From 1960 to 1963, Adele worked at the Soviet and East European Desk for the Foreign Area Fellowship Program at the Ford Foundation in New York City. A new job for her husband brought Adele and her family to Otsego County, New York, in 1975. They found an old farmhouse to fix up in Fly Creek, and Adele found work in Cooperstown. Adele enjoyed Cooperstown’s role in history and literature, the beauty of its hills and valleys, and the warmth of its people. She also delighted in its art scene. Adele initially worked part time at the Village Library of Cooperstown. In May, 1977, she started a decades-long run at The New York State Historical Association, where she became an acquisitions librarian, and where her artistic skills led to having more than 60 works of art published in “New York History” and various books, pamphlets, and leaflets.

Adele worked in crafts from a young age and also made drawings, particularly during family vacations in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. She also chronicled her family with her trusty camera and a careful eye.

After the move to upstate New York, Adele eventually turned her artistic attention to the myriad views and buildings which surrounded her in Otsego County. She did more drawings, reproducing many of them on note cards for local sale. That progressed to matted reproductions of full-size drawings. At age 65, upon retirement, Adele increased her art activity, and soon realized that with a little more effort, she would have enough material for a book. That resulted in the publication of “My Otsego,” in her words, “a collection of what moves me in Otsego County, New York. My wish is that my love of this place will bring pleasure to you, as it has to me.”

Aside from her art and the art that inspired her (particularly that of Paul Cézanne), Adele loved her family; old and new friends; standing up for what she believed in; antiquing, flea markets and craft shows; her gardens in Fly Creek; North Truro and Provincetown on Cape Cod; hiking with friends and acquaintances in the mountains of Italy, Switzerland, and France; walking around her beloved Fly Creek Valley; and her cobalt blue bottle collection, which long resided on her kitchen window sills, as well as the shadows they made on the ceiling at a certain hour of the day.

Adele was predeceased by her husband, Edwin A. Johnson, to whom she had been married for 52 years, and her sister, Phyllis Marie Carstens. She is survived by her children and their spouses: Kristina Marie Levine and Leigh Levine, Christopher E.S. Johnson and Jennifer Griffin, and Philip R.S. Johnson and Elise Blackburn; her grandchildren, Nathan Levine, Charlie Levine, Madeline Johnson, Jake Johnson, Eloise Johnson, and Finn Johnson; and her artwork. Adele loved and was very proud of her six grandchildren.

Donations can be made to www.smiletrain.org, a group that supports cleft palate surgery around the world.