Lecompte, Janet

“There are very few days in my whole adult life that

I haven't done some

writing,” Janet Lecompte said several years ago.

“It becomes a habit.”

Janet Lecompte, 86, a former longtime resident Colorado Springs, died Feb. 28, 2010, at the Newton-Wellesley Alzheimer's Center in Wellesley, Mass. Though her disease had long prevented her from practicing her craft, she left behind a legacy of four books and hundreds of articles on the history and culture of the American Southwest.

Born Janet Estelle Shaw in Philadelphia on May 22, 1923, she grew up in Denver, Colo. As an English major at Wellesley College, she studiously avoided taking history courses because she considered them boring, but the summer after her first year of college her mother, Dorothy Price Shaw, enlisted her help in turning raw notes compiled on some of the state's early settlers into historically correct profiles. The notes were part of the collection of the Pioneers Museum in Colorado Springs, an institution founded by Janet's grandmother Maude McFerran Price, one of the city's original citizens. Because of the family connection, Lecompte said, “I, of course, felt obliged to see that it all got out.”

“I'd been raised in Denver, but my parents had just moved to Colorado Springs,” Lecompte recalled. “I had no friends there, and didn't even try to make any. Instead, I spent the summer helping my mother with all these notebooks that needed to be turned into readable history.”

That began a nearly half-century career as a research historian, author and essayist. Her first book, Pueblo, Hardscrabble and Greenhorn, was published in 1978 and won both the 1978 Westerners' International Award for best non-fiction book, and the 1978 Western Writers of America Golden Spur Award for best non-fiction book. Books that followed included Rebellion in Rio Arriba (1985), Emily: The Diary of a Hard-worked Woman (1987) and French Fur Traders and Voyagers in American West, with LeRoy Hafen (1995). She was a longtime member of the Colorado Historical Society and served on its board.

In addition to her research and writing, Lecompte was active in numerous cultural and civic affairs in the city and state. She was instrumental in the 1961 founding of the Colorado Springs School for Girls (now simply the Colorado Springs School), the city's first independent private school for girls (the school is now a coeducational pre-kindergarten through high school college preparatory school). She was active various other civic and cultural organizations.

She moved to Moscow, Idaho, in 1988, where she resided until 2004. In Moscow, she continued her writing and became active in various civic and cultural affairs, including the League of Women Voters, the Palouse Clearwater Environmental Institute, the Latah Community Foundation. She also led the effort to restore the historic 1912 Building, a former school, into a community center.

Survivors include daughters, Jane LeCompte Anderson of Berthoud, Colo. and Ellen LeCompte, of Lawrence, Kan.; sons, Charles LeCompte, of Brookline, Mass., Tom LeCompte of Sharon, Mass. and Peter LeCompte, of Bellingham, Wash.; granddaughters, Louisa and Melissa Hartley and Molly LeCompte; grandsons, Calvin and Christopher LeCompte; and great-grandsons, Colin and Lucas Campbell.

Services will be announced later.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to one of Lecompte's local causes.