Melissa Mather

Melissa Mather Ambros, was an author and documented her families' story of moving to rural Vermont, in her gripping memoir called the “Rough Road Home”. They became homesteaders and raised cows for milk, cultivated beautiful gardens and grew some infamous potatoes! Excerpts from her book were featured in a series of Saturday Evening Post articles in 1958.

She was born Nov. 12, 1917, in Chicago, to Arlisle Mather Brown, an English teacher, and Alfred Bruce Brown, an electrical engineer. She launched an exceptional academic career in Montclair, N.J., where she and her sister, Mary, and brothers Bruce and Ted enjoyed an idyllic childhood. She graduated from high school at 15 and pursued a degree in English literature at Oberlin College, from which she graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1939. The following three months she toured England by bicycle, a solo trip that launched her lifelong passion for making and for touring beautiful gardens.

Returning to the U.S., she entered Tob-Coburn Fashion School in New York City on a full scholarship, and a year later, she took a job as a stylist in a department store in Baltimore. She met her first husband, Lt. Robert Lee Coughlin, at a dance at Fort Meade.