Edith Hunter, shown here in the spring of 2011 in her Weathersfield Center sugarhouse, died Saturday at age 92.
Photo: Graham Hunter photo
Published May 2, 2012 in the Rutland Herald
Edith Hunter, Weathersfield writer and historian and institution, dead at 92
Hunter, award-winning writer, historian dies at 92
By SUSAN SMALLHEER
Staff Writer
WEATHERSFIELD CENTER — Edith Fisher Hunter was proud of her writing, her asparagus, her family and her maple syrup — and not necessarily in that order.
Hunter, an award-winning reporter, author and historian, died Saturday at age 92 at her home on Weathersfield Center Road, after a short illness.
“She was an institution we thought would never end,” said Willis Wood of Weathersfield Center, a longtime neighbor and family friend.
Hunter, who moved to Weathersfield 42 years ago from New Hampshire with her husband, Armstrong, and four children in tow, quickly became immersed in her husband's ancestral hometown.
Raised in the city of Boston, she embraced country life, raised a big vegetable garden, gathered maple sap and boiled it, and wrote about the first hepaticas of spring. A stickler for excellence and accuracy, she dedicated herself to improving education and journalism in her new hometown.
She and her husband and their second son Will had quickly recognized what having its own newspaper would mean to Weathersfield, then fractured among telephone companies, area codes, and schools, not to mention geography. They founded The Weathersfield Weekly in 1971, a labor of love for Edith, the writer and editor, and Armstrong, the printer, after Will went off to school.
The small, circulation 600, paper would win accolades to both for the quality of its writing and reporting as well as the sense of community the paper brought to the small rural town.
Hunter won a national award for economic understanding for her story about Rosie the Cow, and how the Vermont dairy industry was withering in the age of megafarms.
Together, the Hunters later won the New England Press Association's highest award, the Horace Greeley Award, for their contribution to public service journalism.
Wood said that Hunter “mellowed” after her life as a reporter, as the Weekly had tangled repeatedly with town officials during the 15 years of its existence. The Weekly closed in 1986.
After that she became very involved in the Weathersfield Historical Society, the Audubon Society and other community groups, as well as local politics, Wood said.
Hunter, who was credited with being honest to the point of bluntness, advocated legalization of drugs during her campaign for the House, Wood said, an unpopular, but correct, stand in his view.
“She was refreshingly, absolutely frank, all the time, “ said Wood, and it “made her a lot of enemies and lots of friends. But that doesn't always get you elected.”
Both Wood and her daughter Ibby said Hunter was competitive, whether it was grading the last pot of broccoli soup she made, or needling Wood about whether his peas were up yet.
“She loved having her hands in the earth,” her daughter said.
But along with the competitiveness was kindness and endless curiosity, Wood said.
Hunter had been elected to the Weathersfield School Board shortly after moving to town, determined to improve the schools. She later became a volunteer in the schools, and wrote the Weathersfield history textbook for fourth graders, “A Young Person's History of Weathersfield.”
She was born in Roxbury, Mass., attended Wellesley College on a full scholarship and then, with a dream of being a medical missionary, headed to divinity school in New York City. There she met her future husband, who came from a long line of Presbyterian ministers. After time in the South, the young couple returned to Massachusetts, then New Hampshire, and finally Vermont in 1969, to live next to Armstrong Hunter's elderly aunts, who had purchased their great grandfather's home in Weathersfield Center.
Hunter wrote what would ultimately be her most successful book, “Child of the Silent Night,” a 1963 biography of Laura Bridgman, the first American deaf and blind child to be educated, 50 years before the more celebrated Helen Keller.
Her children, William and Elizabeth, or “Ibby” as she is known to her family, said Monday that the book remained in print until last year, and that the mother delighted in giving away the last copies of her book.
She loved books and reading.
She loved Charles Dickens, but hated fairy tales, Will Hunter said. She loved the poetry of Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson and the more modern Billy Collins. She liked Ralph Waldo Emerson, but didn't like David Henry Thoreau.
Hunter combined a love of the life of the mind (she had dozens of poems on the tip of her tongue and also closely followed this year's presidential primaries via her laptop) with her awe of nature and dedication to teaching and young children.
Her family and friends took comfort this week that Hunter died with dignity on her own terms, with grace and humor. She was a longtime supporter of death with dignity legislation, telling many she hoped she would be treated “as kindly as a golden retriever,” said her son Will.
Her family said her eldest son Graham, who lived next door to his parents with his family, nursed her through a very serious illness in 2010, and convinced her to have surgery to replace a painful hip.
But Graham died in his sleep in March 2011 in the middle of their sugaring season, and her three surviving children said she felt his absence keenly.
“When Graham died, she hated that, she really hated that,” said Charlie, an artist who has made his home in Bellows Falls, who said his mother was ready to “push on” and had urged him last week to go to Virginia to teach a painting class.
But one of the last meals she had was her garden's first four spears of asparagus, he said.
In recent years, she was a commentator and essayist for Vermont Public Radio, her Boston accent readily recognizable to people all over the state as she read essays about her family and her quintessential New England life “on the Center Road.”
Sally Harris, a book designer who moved to Weathersfield about 25 years ago, was working with Hunter on the memoirs of Vera Gould Murray, a lifelong Weathersfield resident who died at age 105 about 10 years ago.
The two women had just finished editing of the handwritten memoir about two weeks ago, Harris said, and just need to add family photographs to complete the book.
One of the last things Hunter told her last week, Harris recalled, as she lay dying was “Get Vera Done!”
A week earlier, she had organized an elaborate presentation for the historical society about all the one-room schools in Weathersfield, convincing former students at the small neighborhood schools, to come to the program and share their memories of the town they all loved.
Hunter, ever the teacher and historian, had taught a Sunday school class the Sunday before she died about Bridgman, and came home convinced that her body was failing and death was near.
“She knew something wasn't working,” Will Hunter said. She didn't want to go to a hospital, and she felt it was time for her to die naturally, he said.
“Hers was a death with great dignity, as was her life in the way she had chosen to live it,” said her son Will.
The family says a memorial service will be held later this spring at the Weathersfield Center Meetinghouse.
What a life well lived.
ReplyDeleteShe will be missed.