Active in Yearly Meeting and Quaker education

Barbara Saul Sprogell Jacobson, 96, a former board member at George School and Haverford College, died of colon cancer Tuesday, Aug. 9, at Foulkeways at Gwynedd, the retirement community where she had lived since 2002.

Besides helping to guide those two Quaker-related schools, Mrs. Jacobson was clerk of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Quakers from 1976 through 1978.

"She was the first female clerk following the reunification of the Yearly Meeting in 1955," said Arthur Larrabee, general secretary of the local Quaker organization, in a phone interview. Before that, "there were two yearly meetings, Hicksite and Orthodox, from 1827 through 1955."

Mrs. Jacobson presided at the annual meetings of what are now 103 Quaker meetings from parts of four states that last "four or five days," Larrabee said.

Appointed annually, she had duties "all year round."

Born in Rose Valley, Mrs. Jacobson studied piano with Nadia Boulanger in Paris in 1931-32, graduated from the Baldwin School in Bryn Mawr in 1933, and earned a bachelor's degree in set design at Bennington (Vt.) College in 1937.

Mrs. Jacobson's first encounter with school administration was in 1943, when she joined Gwynedd Friends Meeting and helped to establish its preschool program, said a daughter-in-law, Kathryn Taylor.

At William Penn Charter School, Taylor said, Mrs. Jacobson was an overseer in 1963 and clerk of the overseers from 1964 to 1975.

At Haverford College, she was a member of the corporation from 1968 to 1991 and a board member from 1974 to 1980.

At George School, in Middletown Township, Bucks County, she was a board member from 1983 to 1987.

Mrs. Jacobson was "distributing trustee" for the Thomas H. and Mary Williams Shoemaker Fund from 1967 to 2002 and its secretary from 1987 to 1992. The website for the fund states that it supports Quaker organizations in the Philadelphia region.

In the 1980s, she worked with the Quaker United Nations Office in Manhattan, Taylor said.

Mrs. Jacobson was also politically active.

In 1967, as a Republican candidate from Upper Gwynedd, she won a seat at the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention.

Mrs. Jacobson, with her first husband, Harry Sprogell, helped establish Foulkeways and was a board member there from 1972 to 1985, Taylor said.

She was also a board member at Pennswood Village, a retirement community in Middletown Township, Taylor said.

In 1992, Mrs. Jacobson became a board member of Friends of the Key West (Fla.) Library, and she was its president from 1993 to 1996.

She and Norma Adams Price wrote Thomas and Eliza Foulke of Gwynedd Friends Meeting - What Love Can Do, which Price published in 1988, Taylor said.

Besides Taylor, Mrs. Jacobson is survived by sons Robert and Jonathan Sprogell, daughters Prudence Churchill and Carolyn Sprogell, stepdaughters Judith Magee and Barbara Zimmerman, four grandchildren, three great-grandchildren, five step-grandchildren, and three step-great-grandchildren.

Harry Sprogell died in 1972. Mrs. Jacobson's second husband, Solomon Jacobson, died in February 2010.

An autumn memorial is being planned.