It could only have been a matter of time before Edith Fisher Hunter and the Vermont Community Loan Fund found each other.

Edith Hunter is all about “local,” which in her case means, specifically, Weathersfield Center. She speaks on local history at the Weathersfield Historical Society, and serves the society as its genealogist.

From 1971 to 1986 her late husband, William Armstrong Hunter, published a local newspaper called the Weathersfield Weekly. “Our purpose was to teach people that Weathersfield included Ascutney and Perkinsville – that they lived in the town of Weathersfield,” Edith Hunter says, perhaps oversimplifying the paper’s mission but making the point that civics and its local particulars are basic to informed citizenship.

Hunter, an author and historian now 86 years old, is known not just in Weathersfield but throughout Vermont for her commentaries on Vermont Public Radio. Instantly recognizable is her sign-off, conveying a rich sense of place, which she delivers in an austere New England accent that masks her wide vein of humor: “This is Edith Hunter (‘Huntah’) from the Center (‘Centah’) Road.” In one commentary, a contribution to VPR’s “Great Thoughts of Vermont” series, she saluted Samuel Read Hall, a 19^th-century educator who believed the best way to teach children about geography was not to have them study maps of the world but to march them across the hills of their native Vermont so they experienced education, locally.

With these values, Edith Hunter was ripe to become a VLCF investor, which she became – individually and as a participant in the family-owned CPH Trust – in 2004. The Vermont Community Loan Fund enables people to support small businesses, affordable housing, and high-quality child care facilities, directly strengthening local communities.

“It’s good to invest in child care; I love that idea,” says Hunter, who is the author of six books, including A Child of the Silent Night, published in 1963 by Houghton Mifflin, for children ages 8 to 12. “And people getting started in small business.  All four of my children (Will, Elizabeth, Graham and Charles) work for themselves, and it’s a good thing.”

In her VPR commentaries, and in a nature column for the Windsor Area Observer, Edith Hunter continues to expound on life as she sees it “from the Center Road.” With her investments with VCLF she continues to help improve life for Vermonters on their own roads, all over the state.