(Host)
Last month, Vermont historian Esther Munroe Swift died peacefully in
her sleep. Commentator Stephanie Greene, who lives with her family on
their Windham County farm, considers Esther’s personal – as well as
public – impact.
(Greene) Esther Munroe Swift loved to track down
and organize facts. This made her a natural to write the classic book,
Vermont Place Names, published by my parents’ Stephen Greene Press and
edited by my mother, Janet Greene. The research took nearly twenty
years. During that time, Esther visited every single one of our 251
towns, and she had a keen appreciation of history as a living part of
Vermont life.
One of my earliest memories of Esther was when I
was about eight and she visited our house with her sons, who were about
ten years older than I was. I took them to our pool for a swim, where
her son Alex announced that he had to take out his contact lenses in
order to go in.
Back then, contacts were pretty new and I
thought he had one, or worse, two, glass eyes, which he was proposing to
remove. It was too much for this little hostess, and I ran down to the
house in terror. Esther explained the mechanics of the lenses, but only
hit on the perfectly pacifying information when she remarked that Vice
President Lyndon Johnson also wore contacts.
Later, when Esther and
her friend Irene Corotneff bought the General Stevens house in South
Royalton, it had been abandoned for many years. If they found a door
open, it wouldn’t close; if it was closed, it wouldn’t open. The back
part of the foundation was gone, and one side of the house sagged 27
inches lower than the other. It was as if, her son, Brian, says, the
house was near death, breathing shallowly, waiting for Esther to come
along. Reenie wanted to put up new wallpaper right away, but Esther had
other plans. She got the house jacked up, the foundations reinforced,
the rotten sills replaced, the floor leveled out. Step by step, over two
summers, the house was saved.
It’s said that some librarians
are eager to share books with the public while the chief passion of
others is guarding them from the public. Somehow Esther did both. She
used to say that the way you showed love was to help the people you
cared about do what they wanted to do, so she showered people with books
from her collection.
When she found out that I, at 17, was
becoming interested in anthropology, she showed up at our house with a
copy of History Begins at Sumer, a wonderful description of all the
firsts the Sumerians accomplished as a society. Friends who developed
interests in spinning or cooking or geology could likewise expect to be
presented – out of the blue – with some tome or other on their subject.
And
Esther continues to share: Her outstanding collection of Vermontiana,
put together with love over a professional lifetime will be housed
intact in the State Archives and Records Administration. It will be
named for her – and open to the public.