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Island Profile: Esther Hunt | Holding onto things that truly matter the most

From the floor-to-ceiling windows, in every room of Esther Hird Hunt’s home, the view of Dering Harbor is breathtaking. But the first thing that catches the eye is a 9-foot-tall avocado tree growing in a large pot.

“My mother planted that avocado from a pit,” Esther said. “I took it over in the late 1960s and kept it going since. It must be more than 70 years old.”

Esther is the 95-year-old matriarch of a family that doesn’t part with things, whether avocados or islands.

Her grandfather was Samuel Hird, a mill owner from Passaic, New Jersey, who bought over an acre of Dering Harbor waterfront property in 1913 and built a home that stands today.

She grew up in Passaic, but every summer of her childhood was spent in the house her grandfather built, and she couldn’t wait to get here. “I loved the smell of the creek at low tide,” she remembered. “I didn’t like it for the perfume, I liked it because I knew I’d arrived.”

After her grandfather died, and the house went to her father and his siblings, the family devised a plan to share it. “My family and my Uncle Henry’s family had it in July and August, because of school,” she said. “My aunts were maidens, so they had it in June and September.”

During World War II, so many people fought overseas, including Esther’s brother and her cousin Robert Hird, that employees for the family’s business were scarce. Esther operated the switchboard at the mill, commuting to work every day with a chauffeur provided by her father. She resolved to go easy on the chauffeur, who needed a break from driving her mother around.

“Her back-seat driving drove him nuts, so I sat there with my knitting in my lap and didn’t look up,” Esther said.

By the end of the war, Esther had graduated from Vassar and longed to see the country. The office manager at the mill had a daughter with a similar inclination, and joined by a classmate, the three young women drove west in August 1947 in a convertible Esther borrowed from her brother.

On the road, they quickly settled into a routine; “We’d drive until we found a place to spend the night, check into a motel, unscrew the motel’s 25-watt light bulbs and screw in our 100-watt bulbs, get out typewriters and write up our adventures for the day. Then we went out to supper.”

In Chicago, they visited the stockyards, “We didn’t eat bacon for a couple of days after,” she said.

They crossed Iowa, drove north through the Canadian Rockies, and west again, through northern California and down through the state. Along the way, they adopted a cat, which was subsequently shipped home to New Jersey.

Just before she went west, she was introduced to Bridgford Hunt. “I had given him an address to write to me,” Esther said. “I remembered he said that he couldn’t spell and that he came from a place in England where there is a bridge and a ford. I thought he was very nice. When I got the letter and saw that the “e” was missing in Bridgford, I thought, he really can’t spell.”

They started dating, were engaged the Christmas of 1949, and were married on Esther’s birthday in May 1950.

Esther and Bridgford continued spending summers on Shelter Island with the family. When their children — Bridgford, Ainsworth and Selina Iris — came along, they rented a house on Spring Garden Avenue, which they later bought.

Then as now, homes in the Heights were close. According to Esther, her son Bridg (who is now General Manager of the North Ferry) made quite a bit of noise, a state of affairs that was tolerated by their elderly neighbor on that quiet street, Celeste Underhill. “On the 4th of July, Celeste came roaring onto her balcony and yelled, ‘Hooray for the Fourth of July!’” Esther said. “She was an extra grandmother for our family.”

In the 1980s, Esther served as Mayor of Dering Harbor, between Stanley Gianelli, whose term she served out, and Robert Weaver, a nine-month term during which a hurricane struck the Island. She declined to run for the office, preferring to serve Shelter Island less visibly, as a supporter of the Public Library and the Shelter Island Historical Society.

Over the years, Esther’s grandfather had acquired more Island property, including the land where Esther and her husband Bridgford Hunt built a house in 1971, and about 30 acres of nearby woods, which became a preserve when Esther gave it to the town in 2015.

After Bridgford’s death in 2012, she ensured the preservation of the undeveloped land that had been in her family for decades. In a series of gifts and sales, she made possible the Mildred Flower Hird Preserve, now owned by the town, which can never be built on. “I named it for my mother,” Esther said. “Not that she was a great naturalist and she certainly wasn’t a hiker. But she did care about nature.”

The Dering Harbor home that Esther and Bridgford built, and that she still lives in, has been the site of two family births — Bridg and his wife P.A.T.’s children, Selina and Martin.

At the time of the first birth, Bridg and P.A.T. were living on a boat in Dering Harbor within sight of the house, and as the day approached, they decided to ask the doctor to attend the birth on the boat. The doctor agreed, with the stipulation that the boat be at a dock, so mother and child could be taken off easily if necessary.

When the time came, it was dead low tide, the boat got stuck, and Bridg had to get in another boat and make a big enough wake to nudge the boat off the bottom, saying, “That kid has a heck of a lot to learn about navigation.”

The laboring parents came up to Esther’s house and sat on the porch for a while, and then decided their child, Selina, would be born indoors. “When Martin came along, I was afraid that having been thwarted they would want to go back to the boat,” said Esther, “but now that they knew what was involved, they said they’d prefer to have the baby in the house.”

The name Selina is another thing Esther’s family doesn’t part with. It was Esther’s grandmother’s name, her aunt’s name, her daughter’s name and the name of more than one family boat. Across the hall from the giant avocado in Esther’s foyer is a more than century-old painting of a little girl named Selina, Esther’s grandmother. It’s destined to be granddaughter Selina’s one day.