Katherine Chatterjee died May 18 at her home on Great Island, overlooking Long Reach. She was elected to the Harpswell Select Board in 1998, becoming the first woman to hold the position in the town.
As a selectman — her contemporaries say she insisted on the traditional title despite her gender — she helped guide Harpswell through a dynamic period at the end of the 20th century. The town was negotiating with the U.S. Department of Defense to transfer the former Navy fuel depot that would become George J. Mitchell Field. Harpswell also began planning for a new town office, temporarily resolved a dispute with Brunswick about the town line, and closed its trash incinerator — the last municipal incinerator in the state.
Chatterjee served from 1998-2000, then returned for a partial term in 2006 and 2007 after Gordon Weil stepped down.
She was “smart, informed, unafraid and unreluctant to challenge the old ways and consider new ways,” said Jack Sylvester, an Orr’s Island resident who was treasurer during her first stint on the board. He remembers her as a budget hawk who always wanted to make sure Harpswell was getting value for its money.
A campaign poster from her 2006 run includes a pledge that she will be fair, open and available to her constituents, and says: “I have no vested interest, except the well-being of the Town.”
Her son, Yarmouth resident John Jones, said she believed she always could learn something by listening, and she tried to make sure all sides felt heard.
Even after she left public service, Chatterjee frequently attended Select Board and town committee meetings to say her piece.
“I always thought so much of her because she always did her homework,” said Mary Ann Nahf, chair of the Harpswell Conservation Commission.
Chatterjee also remained active with the road association for Long Reach Lane, where a causeway is threatened by rising sea levels and was damaged in the January 2024 storms.
Chatterjee believed strongly in the value of education. She went to work immediately after high school, but later earned her bachelor’s degree through a distance learning program while working full time and raising her two children. She established a scholarship at her alma mater, Cony High School in Augusta, for students interested in education or psychology.
She continued learning throughout her life. Next to her chair, John found a stack of books, including a treatise by the psychologist Carl Jung, which she had densely annotated. John said his mother would call him to discuss new ideas as they came to her.
In the late 1960s, she took a job with Medical Care Development, now MCD, a nonprofit that brought health care services first to rural Maine and then to developing countries around the world. She worked as an administrator for more than a decade, helping to implement an early telehealth service in Maine and later working to extend the organization’s reach to Haiti, Tunisia and other places.
Through that work, she met Manu Chatterjee, a Brunswick doctor whom she eventually married. They moved together to Harpswell and enjoyed sailing to Stonington and other spots along Maine’s coast.
She loved the natural world around her home. High above Long Reach, Chatterjee watched wildlife and cultivated gardens. John said she was constantly transplanting and propagating plants she liked, a skill she learned from her own mother. She passed on that interest to John’s daughter, a farmer in Cumberland who got her start weeding Chatterjee’s garden.
