Abigail LePage was the most-recent speaker at the Amos Fortune Forum in Jaffrey Friday, speaking about her long family history in Jaffrey and current work at the cutting edge of making enabling technology for the semiconductor industry.
In “Ten Generations: Deep Roots and Scientific Pursuits,” an interview-style discussion facilitated by interviewer William Baker, LePage spoke about her family history in Jaffrey and her career at Kimball Physics in Wilton.
LePage has ties to the Shattuck and Cutter families, both of which are longstanding families in Jaffrey. She said that she was often told that their family stretched back generations in Jaffrey, and started to research her ancestry to prove that fact.
LePage told several stories of the Shattuck Inn, and some of the august personages who used to stay there, including writer Willa Cather, who stayed at the inn as a summer retreat. She became a friend of LePage’s great-aunt, Eleanor. Another was Howard Johnson, who, apocryphally, learned to make ice cream from LePage’s great-aunt her great-aunt’s mother, who were making it for the Shattuck Inn, and went on to open an ice cream shop that became a large restaurant chain.
LePage said that she still considers Jaffrey “home.”
“I didn’t always know that I would come back. I loved growing up here. I love being outside. I loved horseback riding. I like playing with the goats,” LePage said.
Before LePage was born, her father was a physics teacher and loved innovation. He had a business building and designing houses, and in the early satellite era, had a business installing satellite TV dishes.
“It was hard not to get something from that science background,” LePage said.
She attended Bates College with a major of physics and astronomy, though at the time she was initially more interested in the astronomy. But as she began to be involved in labs, she began to fall in love with physics.
After college, she said she was looking to come back to Jaffrey, and started looking for potential careers. That’s when she came across Kimball Physics in Wilton. She went for a visit and said it was “eye-opening.”
“I got really lucky to find something that was in the field, that was so close to Jaffrey,” LePage said.
Now, 27 years later, LePage is still at Kimball Physics, making vacuum chambers. They sell their products to NASA, SpaceX, Toshiba and Sony and Apple.
The next Amos Fortune Forum is Tricia Rose Burt, speaking on “Conformity to Courage: This is No Time to be Timid.” Friday, Aug. 15. Forums are held at the Jaffrey Meetinghouse at 8 p.m. and available on YouTube on the Amos Fortune Forum page.