Lottchen "Lottie" Shivers

Lottchen V. Shivers died at her Bolton Street home on 22 August 2026, aged 101, according to the Cremation Society of Maryland listing for Baltimore City. The Bolton Hill Bulletin, returning after its summer break, reported that she had died the previous month at home and called her a neighborhood matriarch of more than seventy years' residence. A full obituary by Baltimore Sun writer Jacques Kelly was announced as forthcoming. No cause of death was published. Service details were not listed on the Cremation Society page at the time of writing.

Lottchen Vondersmith was born on 12 May 1925. Public notices list her full name as Lottchen V. Shivers. In 1950 she married Frank Remer Shivers Jr., later a longtime Bolton Hill educator, writer and regional historian. The couple lived briefly in connection with Frank's graduate work at Johns Hopkins University in the early 1950s, then moved from Cincinnati and purchased their house on Bolton Street in Baltimore's Bolton Hill in 1955. She trained and worked as a social worker early in adult life, a vocation her family later said shaped how she met people for the rest of her years.

Though she did not seek a public career, Shivers became a central figure in Bolton Hill civic life. With Frank she opened their Bolton Street home for parties for his students and for neighborhood gatherings. She supported his writing about Baltimore and Bolton Hill and the creation of the Blue Plaque program that marks historic residents. Neighbors also credited the couple with helping to create and name the park at Bolton and Wilson for F. Scott Fitzgerald, who had lived nearby while writing Tender is the Night. After Frank's death in 2021 she remained in the house and continued as a familiar presence on the street. In September 2025 the Blue Plaque Committee honored Frank with a plaque presented as a surprise for her 100th birthday.

She and Frank were married for seventy years. They raised four children: Lottchen, Philip, Maggie (Heyward) and Natalie. By 2021 the Baltimore Sun listed six grandchildren. Her daughter Lottchen described a mother who engaged life with curiosity, intellect, good conversation and laughter, and who treated care for children, in-laws and grandchildren as an extension of her social work impulse. Asked at 100 about longevity, she told the Bolton Hill Bulletin she kept doing the things she had always done, and that without someone mentioning her birthday she might not have noticed.

Shivers's legacy is the everyday fabric of Bolton Hill: a host and neighbor who, with Frank, made one historic Baltimore street feel like a community across generations of students, writers and residents. The Blue Plaque program and Fitzgerald Park stand as public marks of work she shared; neighbors' memories of conversation, hospitality and steadiness mark the private ones. At 101 she was still spoken of as the soul of the neighborhood she had refused to leave.