New Scholarship Established to Benefit Deserving Students from Brooks, Maine
Contact: Amos E. Orcutt, President/CEO, University of Maine Foundation, (207) 581-5100
ORONO — The Louise Pilley Scholarship Fund has been established at the University of Maine Foundation with a bequest from Louise Pilley, long-time resident of Brooks. The income from the fund will be used to provide scholarships to needy and deserving scholars residing in the town of Brooks, Maine, who are graduates of Mount View High School, and plan to attend the University of Maine.
Louise Pilley was born in 1905, graduated from the Brooks High School, Mount Ida College and the Boston School of Fine Arts. A talented artist who was employed in Boston following college, Pilley returned to Brooks to care for her father, a druggist and prominent citizen of the town, after her mother died. She continued her art as a hobby, was well-read and well traveled.
Following her father’s death she divided her time between Brooks and St. Petersburg, Florida where she was living at the time of her death one month short of her 100th birthday. The family homestead, circa 1818, was presumed to be one of the oldest homesteads in Brooks where classes in rhetoric, arithmetic, and writing were taught. In 2005, the home was given to the Brooks Historical Society by her second cousin, Bob Elliott of the 1950s radio duo Bob and Ray, and is now being restored as the Society’s headquarters and museum.
“It is thanks to donors like Louise Pilley, who had the foresight and generosity to leave a bequest that Maine’s young men and women will have the opportunity to realize the dream of a college education,” says Robert Kennedy, president of the University of Maine.
The University of Maine Foundation is an independent, non-profit 501 (c) (3) organization that manages over $185 million in private gifts and bequests, of which $150 million comprises over 1,000 individual endowments primarily for scholarships. Established in 1934, the Foundation exists to encourage gifts and bequests that nurture academic achievement, foster research and elevate intellectual pursuit at the University of Maine.