Nathalie Georgia Sato

Highlands, NC - Nathalie Georgia Sato, of Highlands, NC, passed away Tuesday, September 2, 2014, at age 90. Born on December 12, 1923, in Ithaca, New York, she was the daughter of the late Frederick Raymond and Lolita Healey Georgia. Her father was one of the founders of Black Mountain College, a progressive liberal arts school with an international reputation for avant garde art, architecture, literature, music, and dance that thrived from 1933 until 1957. At the time of her birth he was teaching chemistry at his alma mater, Cornell University, where his wife was an instructor in accounting. Nathalie lived in Highlands in 1931 32 when her father bought the Flat Mountain one room schoolhouse and converted it to a summer home for ten years before the U.S. entered the Second World War. The summer home was used again after the war until her father died in the early 1960s.

Ms. Sato received her bachelor's and master's degrees from Cornell University with a major in constitutional law for regional and city planning. She graduated in 1952 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a doctorate in political science, specializing in intergovernmental relations in metropolitan planning. Beginning her career as chief urban planner for the Chicago area transportation studies, she was serving as planning analyst for Pennsylvania's Office of State Planning and Development in Harrisburg when she retired in 1983. She returned to Highlands, having bought her father's Flat Mountain School site, after his second wife died in the mid 1970s, where she built her home and spent the last thirty years of her life gardening, hiking, and weaving on the loom her father had built at Black Mountain College. In 1991 she was recognized for her voluntary contributions to the U.S. Forest Service. Ever since her cycling excursions in Europe, she has been an avid outdoorsman, living and walking in the forests and closely observing the wonders of nature. She expressed her lifelong love of Highlands' history by serving as docent at the Highlands Historical Museum and helping to catalog the archives of the Highlands Historical Society.

She was preceded in death by a brother Dan Georgia and son Bruce Sato.

Bryant Grant Funeral Home is in charge of arrangements.
Online condolences are available by visiting bryantgrantfuneralhome.com or by email.