Helen Johnson

Helen Mae Crutchfield Johnson passed away peacefully on May 1, 2018, in Durham, NC.

The daughter of Thomas S. Crutchfield and Lillie Mae Bagley Crutchfield, Helen was born on January 31, 1921, in Roanoke Rapids, NC, and grew up in Albemarle.

She attended Mars Hill and Meredith Colleges and received her B. A. from Wake Forest University. One of the first women to be admitted, she met her husband, William Gaston Johnson (“Bill”), there. The couple married in 1945. From 1959 until Bill’s death in 1986, they lived in Huntsville, AL, where they attended First Presbyterian Church and Helen was active in the Symphony Guild. In 1987, Helen returned to North Carolina, living at Fearrington Village, near Chapel Hill, and at Croasdaile Village in Durham.

Helen was an accomplished poet and short story author whose work appeared in a number of small magazines and anthologies in the 1980s.

She is survived by her only child, Charlotte Johnson Jones, and her son-in-law, Herman H. Jones, of Fredericksburg, VA.

Funeral services will be held at 1:00 pm on May 4, 2018, in the chapel at Hartsell Funeral Home in Albemarle, North Carolina, with interment to follow at Fairview Memorial Park.  The family will receive visitors beginning at 11:00 am. In lieu of flowers, memorial gifts may be made to the Baptist Children’s Homes of North Carolina in Thomasville, or to the Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill, NC.