The Bolton Hill resident who spent 7 decades making her neighborhood a community

As Lottchen “Lottie” Shivers was growing weaker in recent months, she told a doctor she knew exactly how she wanted to spend her remaining time: “I want to enjoy my family, and I want to enjoy my house.”

After Shivers spent more than seven decades with the same husband in the same place, that came as no surprise to her four children. Shivers spent most of her life making her house a home, her Bolton Hill neighborhood a community.

Shivers, one of the minds behind Festival on the Hill, Bolton Swim and Tennis Ltd. and a host of other community and historical preservation initiatives in the neighborhood, died Aug. 22 of heart failure. She was 101.

The centenarian’s past two birthday parties were filled with dancing, badminton and cornhole. Her Saturday celebration of life will be her final community event: an over-the-top memorial service-slash-party that her kids have dubbed “Lottie-fest.”

“Not only was she a devoted mother, but she also was a model, and she taught us a lot,” her daughter Natalie Shivers said. “But she also was a model of how one is a member of a community and contributes to it.”

She was born May 12, 1925, to Margaret and Philip Vondersmith in Cincinnati. She was the second of their four daughters. Megan, Katherine and Emily were her sisters. As a young child, she attended an “open-air” school that held classes outdoors, even in the winter. Warmth came in the summer, when the family vacationed at Point Pleasant Beach in New Jersey.

Lottie was a dutiful student, her daughter Lottchen Shivers said. After graduation, she attended Wellesley College in Massachusetts, earning a sociology degree in 1947.

She moved back home to become a social worker and met her eventual husband, Frank Remer Shivers Jr., while he was teaching English at the University of Cincinnati. They married in 1950.

Frank’s career aspirations brought them to Baltimore the following year when he enrolled in a doctoral program at the Johns Hopkins University. The couple briefly lived in Mount Vernon before moving to Bolton Hill. In 1955, they purchased their home at 1404 Bolton St. They never left.

While Frank earned his degree and worked as a teaching assistant, Lottie also got a job at Hopkins as an assistant to professor Owen Lattimore, who studied China and Mongolia. When Lattimore was accused of espionage for the Soviet Union, Lottie and Frank traveled to D.C. to hear his testimony and support him during the infamous McCarthy hearings. Authorities never found evidence to substantiate the accusation.

“To see these iconic historical things that we now look at and go, ‘Wow! How did that ever happen? Or what was that like?’ — it was pretty amazing to think that she was actually there in that moment,” Lottchen Shivers said.

It wasn’t long after settling in Bolton Hill that the couple started their family. They had four children, Maggie, Natalie, Lottchen and Phil, each about two years apart. Lottie was “the ultimate mom,” Lottchen said.

“She was very committed to making sure that we were equipped to handle the life ahead of us,” Lottchen said, remembering days of chore charts and reminders to make her bed. “But also she was so loving, so loving. Lots of kisses and hugs.”

Lottie made sure the family always ate dinner together, even when Frank was working a second job in the evening. Lottie would sometimes send the children to a store down the block to buy milk and a little candy for themselves, her daughter Maggie Heyward said.

Meanwhile, urban development was rapidly changing Baltimore. Federal funds were used to demolish houses on the western side of Bolton Hill, according to the neighborhood community association, and residents pushed to preserve the rest of the neighborhood.

Lottie watched neighbors come and go, but she and her husband stayed. They saw opportunities for community engagement and neighborly activities. They believed they could make the neighborhood a place where people wanted to stay all their lives, Heyward said.

“She really just saw that it was a community, and she and my dad really fostered it,” Heyward said. “They encouraged people to move there. They helped people find their houses. They introduced them to friends. They joined organizations. They formed organizations.”

Valerie Olson was one of the friends Lottie convinced to move to the neighborhood. She still remembers her first impression of Lottie: a beautiful woman with a big smile who asked tons of questions. She helped Olson meet neighbors and find activities.

“She was a staunch helper, and she anticipated people’s needs from what she knew about them, and she jumped right in,” Olson said. “She didn’t think it was intrusive, and because she didn’t think it was intrusive, it didn’t feel intrusive. It’s just a gift.”

Among her most enduring accomplishments was the creation of Festival on the Hill, Bolton Hill’s annual autumn block party. A few years ago, Natalie Shivers found one of her mother’s old notebooks from an early festival. There were pages filled with to-do lists, contacts, organizational charts and timelines.

“In another era, she would have run a corporation or a small city because her administrative skills and her ability to get people to work as a team were really extraordinary,” Natalie said.

She also served as president of the Parish Club at Memorial Episcopal Church. Through the years, she helped lead neighborhood tours and advocate for Bolton Hill’s inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places.

As her children grew older, Lottie went back to work. She went door to door taking surveys for the Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1970s. Afterward, she spent about two decades as head of her own media escort service.

She accompanied talents, including artist Andy Warhol and writer Nora Roberts, to interviews across the Baltimore-D.C. metro area. She brought some clients to WJZ-TV, where they were interviewed by a young Oprah Winfrey.

In retirement, Lottie stayed committed to neighbors and family, especially her grandchildren. She taught them to cook and sew. She enjoyed going to museums, dancing, throwing huge parties and watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies.

After Frank died in 2021, neighbor Laura McNabney regularly brought Lottie soup. It was no big deal to her but Lottie always made a fuss, she said. Lottie was “meticulous” about returning her disposable containers with a sweet thank you note inside.

“She made me want to be a better person because she was such a good person,” McNabney said.

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