BLUE HILL – Well-known educator, author and local historian Esther Wood died over the weekend. She was 97.

A Blue Hill native, Wood was known for her love of her hometown, which she chronicled in a regular newspaper column and in several books, and her dedication to her alma mater, George Stevens Academy, and her church.

Most outside of Blue Hill, however, knew her first as an educator. After graduating from GSA, and then from Colby College in 1926, she began a career as a teacher that would last almost 50 years.

Her first teaching post was at the high school in Stonington, near where her father worked as a stonecutter. She left after two years to attend graduate school at Radcliffe, but it was there that she learned she loved teaching, she told a reporter in 1994.

After teaching at a girls school in Massachusetts, she began teaching Maine and American history at Gorham Normal School, which later became Gorham Teachers College and then part of the University of Maine System.

“She was a great teacher,” said Lucy Ledien, who studied with her at Gorham and later worked with her on GSA affairs. “She was tough. You worked hard. But she made history interesting. She dramatized her lessons. You did a lot of work in her classes, but she was the only teacher I had who made history make sense.”

She was not as successful as an administrator, however.

“I wasn’t happy being dean,” she once told a reporter. “I didn’t like routine office work. I became too upset if there was a crisis, and there was one almost every week.”

After leaving Gorham in 1973, Wood returned to her hometown and quickly became involved in local activities. About that time, she began writing a column, “The Native,” for The Ellsworth American that was filled largely with her remembrances of growing up in a small Maine town.

She spoke occasionally on a variety of historical subjects and wrote four books. “Hannah,” her first, recounted her aunt’s childhood in the 1850s. That was followed by “Country Fare” in 1976 and “Saltwater Seasons” in 1981. “Deep Roots” was written in honor of the Blue Hill bicentennial.

“She didn’t want to be known as the town historian,” Ledien said. “But she knew more about it than most people. She remembered things, and she was sharp.”

Her activities included support for he alma mater, George Stevens Academy, where she supported a variety of activities at the academy and donated freely to improvements at the school, including the expansion of the library, construction of tennis courts and the lecture room named in her honor.

“She was not just interested in English or history, or science, the library or sports,” former headmaster David Hitchings said Monday. “She avidly attended all of those activities she was able to.”

Hitchings recalled that Wood once told him that she hoped she had been able to do some good in her community.

“She said, ‘I’d like to think I’ve helped the students at George Stevens Academy to become better people,”‘ he said.

Hitchings recalled that Wood was one of the first people he met when he arrived at GSA and needed help with the new student handbook.

“She wrote a brief history of George Stevens Academy that, as far as I know, is still a part of the handbook,” he said. “That was the type of person she was. There wasn’t a time in my 24 years there that I turned to her for help and she didn’t come through for me.”

Wood cared about her students, Hitchings said.

“She was the kind of teacher that cared not only during the five or six hours she had them in class; she cared around the clock,” he said.

She remained interested in education throughout her life and was a big help to local students as they applied to colleges, Ledien said, and would often write letters of recommendation for them.

“She was a very generous person,” Ledien said. “She was generous around town, to the academy, her church and the cemetery association. She always wanted it to be anonymous. Of course, after a while, when it was ‘anonymous,’ everyone knew who it was.”

Wood received many honors during her long life. She received an honorary degree from Colby College in 1972, and in 1987 was awarded the Maine School Superintendents Association award “in appreciation for Distinctive Service to education in Maine.” She also was named to the Maine Women’s Hall of Fame by the Maine Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs.