Margery Pepperell Cuyler

Born in Buffalo, N.Y., on June 28, 1912, daughter of the Rev. George Grenville Merrill and Pauline Dresser Merrill, she attended schools in Stockbridge, where her father was rector of St. Paul’s Church from 1914 to 1923. She also had resided in New York City and Princeton, N.J., and spent summers in Stockbridge for many years.

She studied at Princeton Theological Seminary and at the School of Theology at the University of the South, completing its education for ministry program in 1992. She spent the summer of 1989 studying theology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She was an avid reader of classic and modern works and, under the guidance of a tutor, became a scholar of the poet Dante Alighieri.

Mrs. Lewis was a longtime, active parishioner of Trinity Church in Princeton, serving on its vestry and participating in many of its community outreach activities. She also taught Bible classes and Sunday school. She established the parish’s Intercessors Group and was head of the Choir Mothers. In 1982, she was editor of a project to publish the church’s history and wrote several of its chapters.

The mother of an autistic child, she also was active on behalf of the mentally retarded through her membership in the National Association for Retarded Citizens. She was known for her ministries to people in need, under the auspices of Trinity Church, including at the health center at Meadow Lakes. The Princeton classes of 1922 and 1924 designated her an associate by virtue of her two marriages to Princeton graduates. She was a member of the Nassau Club and the Princeton Historical Society and, in her younger years, of the Pretty Brook Tennis and Springdale Golf clubs of Princeton, and the Stockbridge Golf and Mahkeenac Boating clubs.

Her first husband, Lewis B. Cuyler, whom she married July 30, 1932, died in 1988.

Her husband, John B. Lewis, whom she married in 1992, died in 1995.