Jane Hamilton-Merritt

Jane Hamilton-Merritt (born Mary Jane LaRowe, 1937), in Noble County, Indiana is a retired college professor, photojournalist, author, and animal rights and animal husbandry advocate. She resides in Redding, Connecticut. In 1999, she was inducted into the Connecticut Women's Hall of Fame. Some of her work has focused on breeding and raising Llamas and Alpaca.

Jane Hamilton-Merritt was born Mary Jane LaRowe in 1937 in Noble County, Indiana, not far from Fort Wayne. Her parents were Claude LaRowe, a farmer, and Alvada (Brown) LaRowe.

She attended Ball State University in Muncie, where she received both a B.A. and an M.A. degree. She went on to get a Ph.D. in Southeast Asia Studies at Union Institute in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Hamilton-Merritt was a professor at Southern Connecticut State University, where she reportedly taught writing and journalism for nearly two decades (1979–97) on a part-time basis. In 1991–92 she was a visiting faculty fellow at Yale University. In 1997, she claimed to have retired from teaching at Southern Connecticut State University, to work full-time for the resettlement of a group of Hmong living in a compound near Bangkok, Thailand. She also raises llama and alpacas on her Connecticut farm, in her retirement.

Hamilton-Merritt is an active member and officer in the Greater Appalachian Llama and Alpaca Association. She frequently shows her animals in Connecticut and New England events.

Hamilton-Merritt reportedly went to Vietnam as a free-lance war correspondent, reportedly spending six years covering aspects of the Vietnam War, including the North Vietnamese invasion of Laos. She claims to have won the Inland Daily Press Association’s Grand Prize Trophy for her purported front-line war coverage, but there is no independent sources to document her claim. Print articles, and repeated electronic archive research, from this period have not turned up under either of her names, raising questions as to when and how her Vietnam-War-era work was published. To date, no known independent sources exist of her writings during this period.

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