Sara Cline Caldwell, 87; led effort to restore Wayside Inn

When fire devastated Sudbury's historic Wayside Inn in 1955, Sara Cline Caldwell knew exactly what to do to bring the inn back to its former glory.

During the fire, she encouraged her husband, Robert J., to get out of bed at 3 a.m. and ask firefighters to direct their hoses so the front facade remained intact for photographs.

Later that day, she and her husband were the hosts for a meeting at their nearby home, where plans were made to mail 40,000 brochures to start a letter-writing campaign to the Ford Foundation, which then owned the 17th-century inn, to seek funding.

Mrs. Caldwell, who died of pneumonia Feb. 24 at her home in Naples, Fla., helped found the Ladies' Committee of the Wayside Inn to oversee its restoration. She was 87.

For more than half a century, the Caldwells lived in a converted one-room schoolhouse on the inn's estate. In 2000, they moved permanently to their winter home in Florida.

"Mother had a tremendous enthusiasm for everything related to history in New England and its antiquities," said her daughter, Katherine C. Ives of Lincoln. "She was very dedicated to preserving things as they had been and making that history available to schoolchildren and others in the Boston community, and that drove her effort to rebuild the inn."

Years before the fire, Mrs. Caldwell started a tradition at the inn: Viennese waltz evenings, held about five times a year.

"The men had to appear in full dress [in coattails] and the women in formal gowns," Robert said. "Those evenings were very popular." The waltz evenings lasted about a decade.

Mrs. Caldwell, a native of Chattanooga, Tenn., may have come by her lifelong love of history naturally. Her father, a historian and photographer, once dressed up like Daniel Boone and lived for a year in the Great Smoky Mountains, apart from his wife and children, to research a book about the muzzle-loading rifle, said Mrs. Caldwell's daughter, Sara C. Junkin of Weston.

Mrs. Caldwell also wrote a book about Chattanooga and its historic sites, Junkin said.

In Chattanooga, Mrs. Caldwell graduated from Girls' Preparatory School in 1933 and from the University of Tennessee in 1947.

In 1949, she earned a master's degree in remedial reading from Boston University and tutored children at the Middlesex and Fenn private schools in Concord.

She met her future husband when each was traveling with parents in Mexico. Their romance blossomed on the return freighter trip home, her husband said. They were married for 63 years.

While Robert served in the military, the couple lived in Connecticut and California. Mrs. Caldwell's interest in history determined where they lived. In Connecticut, they chose a home that had been a tearoom. In California, they lived in a house that had been a storage shed for gunpowder.

The couple moved to Massachusetts in 1947, so Robert, an engineer, could take courses at Massachusetts Institute of Technology while pursuing his military career.

At first, the couple lived in the principal's house on the grounds of the Wayside Inn. When the one-room Southwest School went on the market in 1948, the couple bought it.

"Many people don't realize that there were three one-room schools on the Henry Ford property," Mrs. Caldwell told a local paper some years ago. "The little red schoolhouse that inspired the poem, of Mary and her little lamb, was the most famous."

The inn was originally licensed as Howe's Tavern in 1716 and renamed the Wayside Inn 1897, 34 years after Henry Wadsworth Longfellow celebrated it in his book "Tales of A Wayside Inn." Automaker Henry Ford bought the inn in 1923.

Robert supervised much of the work on the schoolhouse that was designed by Boston architect Royal Barry Wills. "Sara had the job of putting the finishing touches on it and deciding what kind of paneling to use," he said.

To satisfy the authenticity of the schoolhouse's era, Mrs. Caldwell got wallpaper printed in France. They also bought a nearby small building and turned it into their carriage house, connecting the two buildings and adding a swimming pool.

On their 30 acres, Junkin said, Mrs. Caldwell grew flower and vegetable gardens and the family kept sheep, horses, and dogs.

Mrs. Caldwell was active in other groups besides the Wayside Inn restoration effort, including several garden clubs, the Florence Crittenden League for unwed mothers, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and the National Society of Magna Carta Dames. She became a member of the last group after a genealogical search showed that she was a descendant of one of the signers of the Magna Carta, the 1215 charter of English political and civil liberties.

For all her years in New England, her family said, Mrs. Caldwell never completely lost her soft Southern accent. Mitzi Cotter of Weston, a member of the Wayside Ladies' Committee, said Mrs. Caldwell epitomized "the very word `lady.' Sara was a real Southern lady. She was always gracious, charming, and helpful."

In addition to her husband and two daughters, Mrs. Caldwell leaves a son, Herbert C. of East Greenwich, R.I., seven grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. A memorial service is scheduled for the Martha Mary Chapel at the Wayside Inn in Sudbury at 11 a.m. April 2. Burial took place in Lincoln.