Donated Properties for Affordable Housing

Ralph Burr, a lifelong summer resident of Norfolk, died at his home in Hamden, Conn., on April 2, 2022, five days after his 100th birthday. Although he lived most of his adult life in the New Haven area, he spent every summer in Norfolk, where his family went back several generations, to the earliest years of the town’s settlement.

In 2014, Burr donated three houses, divided into six rental units, on Greenwoods East to the Foundation for Norfolk Living to be turned into affordable housing. He did most of the work on the grounds himself and, with the help of George, Tom and Dan Green and a host of his close friends and family, maintained the three buildings for several decades, reflecting his love of the town. He devoted countless hours to the houses and always tried to keep the rents low, reflecting his love of the town. The gift of these properties, which had been in the Burr family since 1913, provided a major impetus to the effort to provide more affordable housing in town. 

Ralph Burr was born in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., in 1922 to Charles Munson and Mabel (Case) Burr. The family moved to West Hartford, where Ralph attended William H. Hall High School. He got his B.A. degree from Yale University in 1943 (class of ’44). After serving in the U.S. Navy in the Pacific from 1943 to 1946, he returned to Yale for his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees and went on to spend most of his career at Yale. Among other roles, he was the director the Financial Aid Office and executive director of the Yale Law School Fund.

At the Financial Aid Office he met Violet Fairbairn Field, and the two were married in 1959. They were married for 40 years, until her death in 2000, and had three sons.

In Norfolk, he enjoyed swimming in Tobey Pond after a long day of working outside, and skating across its surface in winter wearing hockey skates from his college days. Rarely idle and always athletically inclined, he took endless walks in the surrounding woods and adjacent Great Mountain Forest. And to the admiration of his neighbors, even into his early 90s he would annually hand scythe the goldenrod in a 10-acre field on his property on Westside Road. His love of nature and of music allowed him some hours of repose: stargazing at night in the lakeside cabin he helped build as a teenager in 1938, and attending the Chamber Music Festival each summer. As an undergrad Burr attended the first year of the Yale Summer School of Music.

Ralph is survived by two of his sons, Ralph C. Burr Jr. (and his husband Andrew Cushing), of San Francisco and Norfolk, and Thomas F. Burr (and his husband William Dobbins), of New York city and Norfolk, and four nieces and nephews. In addition to his wife, he was predeceased by his youngest son, Edward F. Burr, and by his brother, Charles M. Burr Jr.