Tree would have turned 95 years old on November 17. She continued to be vivacious and outgoing until a fall that resulted in her death.

Tree spent her winters in Alabama with her daughter Dianne, but came home every summer to the property her husband brought her to about 75 years ago.

She was born in Clifden, Galway County, Ireland, the daughter of Richard and Bridget Halloran Senier. She was the second youngest of eight children in the family.

At the age of 16 she came to America with a brother and lived in Boston.

When she came to Maine for a visit in 1928 she met George Dewey Richardson.

"Some friends and I were in a boat under what was then the new Carlton Bridge, crossing the Kennebec River, and something happened to the boat. George was there and pulled us to shore," Tree said during an interview in 2000.

"We did not get married for a few years after our first chance meeting," she said.

The Richardsons had three children, Dierdre, who lives on Westport Island, George Jr., the town's first selectman, and Dianne who lives in Alabama.

Her husband died in 1973. "We worked very hard to send all three of our children to college," she said during the interview. She enjoyed talking about the early years on the island before electricity, before the bridge, just a two-car ferry, horse- drawn plows, and mail delivered by horse and buggy.

"When you run out of something you couldn't just run and pick it up. You substituted and made do with what you had," she said. "We didn't waste a peanut in those days."

She was a stay-at-home mom. "But I got bored when the youngest went off to college. I went to work," she said. For nearly 25 years she worked at LeGarage Restaurant on Water Street in Wiscasset as the pie baker, retiring just a couple of years ago.

Tree always spoke about her three children with great pride, along with her nine grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

Besides her love of family and her love of cooking she enjoyed poetry.

"I could recite Longfellow and Shakespeare by the yard," she said.

During the 2000 interview she recited "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" as through she was reading it from a book.

Tree's motto for life was to never give up no matter how rough it gets.

She was a woman of small stature with an overwhelming zeal for life.