Ann Baker

Ann Nicholson Baker, after a life of art, nature, social work and family, died at age 93 on April 11, 2026. Ann was born on February 20, 1933 in Urbana, Illinois, to Mary Wood Nicholson and Alfred Whitall Nicholson, and she grew up in Moorestown, New Jersey, among Quaker relatives, where she wrote poems and fed the family horse, Galumpus.

After graduating from Chatham Hall boarding school in Virginia in 1951, she studied art and art history at Moore School of Art in Philadelphia and Bryn Mawr College. In the mid-fifties, she moved to New York City and enrolled in the Parsons School of Design to further her studies in drawing and wallpaper design. At Parsons she met a fellow art student, Douglas Ussher Baker, whom she married in 1956. She worked for a year at Greef Fabrics, in Manhattan, and had a son, Nicholson, in 1957.

In 1959, the young family moved to Rochester, New York, where their daughter, Rachel, was born. In Rochester, Ann taught art classes at the Memorial Art Gallery and later matriculated at the University of Rochester, where she studied developmental psychology and received a masters degree in early childhood education.

In 1972, she founded a pioneering integrated day care center, Asbury Dare Care, on East Avenue, and later she became a child protective social worker. She was active in Democratic politics, Genesee Valley Land Trust, a founding member of the Highland Park Conservancy, and a frequent volunteer at the Poet’s Garden.

For many of her Rochester years, she lived on Highland Avenue, and then, after an amicable divorce from Douglas, she moved to a condominium in the South Wedge and then to a house on Castlebar Road, where she loved to garden, choosing the right plants for pollinators, and doing creative projects with her four grandchildren.

She always had a cause, and she strove to make the world a better place through childhood education and the appreciation of the beauty of street trees and forest trails. One of her favorite poems was Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Inversnaid,” with its last lines “O let them be left, wildness and wet / Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.”

In 2013, she moved to a retirement community, Pennswood Village, in Newtown, Pennsylvania, where she worked on restoring the wild community meadow, maintaining the bluebird boxes, and organizing firefly viewing outings. She also enjoyed a portrait drawing group, Elderly Women in Elegant Clothes.

In 2023 Ann moved back to Rochester to be with her family. She leaves behind her children Nick (Margaret Brentano), Rachel (Len Parker), her grandchildren Alice (Kaylee Seltzer), Madeline (Matt Present), Nathan (Tyler Pearce), and Elias (Izamar Rodriguez), her step-grandchild Dylan (Amanda Chen), and four great grandchildren, Jemma, Wallace, Morgan, and Gus, along with her former husband Douglas (Janice Barber). She was predeceased by her brother, Alfred Nicholson Jr. of Cape May, New Jersey.

An informal celebration of Ann’s life will be held at Olmsted Lodge in Highland Park on Thursday, June 4, 2026, at 5 p.m. Please come and share your memories.