Eleanor Hammond (formerly Eleanor Merriam) was born in Long Beach California 1924 to Walter and Grace Merriam. She moved to Brooklyn New York before she was two years old for a brief time before moving back to west to Arizona with her paternal grandparents. During this time her parents ended up separating, and Eleanor and her mother, Grace, moved back to Brooklyn when she was four. Once moving back to Brooklyn they lived with her maternal grandmother; it is during this time that her mother Grace Merriam would begin to work as a babysitter for the family of one Walter Atwood. At some point the Atwoods had gone through a divorce and after this, Grace was hired as a housekeeper for the Mr. Atwood and his son, Grace and Eleanor moved into thier home in Palisade Park New Jersey in 1931. Walter Atwood purchased a summer cottage in Monument Beach Massachussets right off the cape where the families would spend their summers. She and her mother lived with the Atwoods until she graduated from Leonia High School in 1942. During her summer leading up to attending Wheaton in the Fall of 1942, she worked at the Long Trail Lodge in Vermont, and during the summers between school years she also worked at the Northfield Inn in Northfiled MA. She attended Wheaton College, under a major in Latin and then proceeded with a Masters Degree in Classical Languages at Mt. Holyoke which she completed in one year. After a summer working as a waitress on Cape Cod she was hired as a schoolteacher and began working in September 1947. In 1949, two years following this, her mother remarried, this time to her previous employer Walter Atwood. Eleanor continued to work as a tecaher in Northfield up to 1952 where she met her husband John Hammond. She had two daughters by John Hammond, Beth in 1956 and Laura in 1958. However, Mr. Hammond was a veteran of the seocnd world war and had debilitating psychological aftereffects from his service and it gretaly affected the Hammond Family; so in June 1964 Eleanor left her husband, taking her children with her and they three lived in Sandwich MA, before Eleanor got a job teaching Latin in Middleboro MA. Eleanor would later be hospitalized in 1965 with colitis and pneumonia which affected her for the rest of her life. Hammond later recieved a degree in library sciende at Bridgewater State to become a school librarian and move away from teaching. In 1976 she moved back to the cottage on Monument Beach that she had inherited from her step-father Walter Atwood; there she lived with her 'friend' Margaret Michael 'Mike' Gale. Hammond would commute between Monument Beach and Middleboro until she retired in 1986; not working permanently until Mike had found her a job as a curator at the Aptucxet Trading Post in 1989. Mike would pass away in 1996, where after this she largely lived alone besides her daughters living with her on and off for a few months so that she was not alone. Hammond would not offically retire until 2012; and in 2013, when she was 89 she recieved a aortic heart valve replacement. She would pass away on February 2nd 2021, but 'her spirit will live on at the marsh'.