North Stonington - Being 100-plus years old and having all your faculties is atypical, and Anna Coit knew that.

So the centenarian decided a couple of years before her death that she would leave her body for research.

But like everything else Coit did, she studied the subject first and learned that if researchers at the Yale School of Medicine were to get her body, which is what she wanted, she would have to die in Connecticut.

That is why Coit, who passed away at age 106 on Oct. 15, spent the final year of her life at Apple Rehab in Mystic, rather than at a Westerly convalescent center where she had spent time after a prior surgery.

An editor, author, environmentalist, historian, poet, farmer and teacher, among a long list of other accomplishments, Coit was generous right up to the end of her life, and after.

Her body did go to Yale. And about 25 acres of the Christmas tree farm on Denison Hill Road that she and her late husband, Harlan "Pete" Coit, started in 1956, will go to the Avalonia Land Conservancy, of which she was a founder.

According to Coit's will, which was recently filed with the Southeastern Connecticut Regional Probate District, some of her favorite causes, like the Westerly Monthly Meeting of Friends (she was a Quaker) and the North Stonington Historical Society (she was a founder, historian, former president and trustee), will get $1,000 each.

The historical society also will receive "the Luther Palmer Weathervane, made in 1829 and which prior to the 1938 hurricane was attached to the belfry of the First Baptist Church at Pendleton Hill, North Stonington," according to the will dated Feb. 17, 2012, and with a codicil dated Oct. 21, 2013.

Co-executor and friend Frank Eppinger said Coit's last will and testament is a genuine reflection of the much-loved Coit, a Vassar College graduate and the first woman writer at Time magazine.

"She was very detailed in her wishes," he said. "Anna was an editor, and when she did something, she did it right."

The will, which is a public record, shows Coit's dedication to things she considered to be important.

"To the very end, she was faithful to those things that she believed in, and they were all good causes," Eppinger said.

A longtime friend is gifted $2,000 "for the purchase of a hearing aid," and another devoted friend gets Coit's diamond engagement ring.

Coit's cousin, Margaret McDonald Murtha of Dummerston Center, Vt., also a co-executor, said friends and community were always integral to Coit's life.

While Coit left the circa-1829 weather vane to the historical society, she also gifted $1,000 to the First Baptist Church at Pendleton Hill to replicate it.

"I request, but do not require, this gift be used to have a reproduction of the Luther Palmer Weathervane (which could be made by Jeff Pearson) to be placed on the belfry of the church," states the will.

She also asked that any personal property, photographs, books or papers pertaining to her family's Pauchunganuc Farm on Pendleton Hill Road be returned to the farm for safekeeping. The 19th-century farm complex sits on land in the Palmer family since 1711, and ownership is shared by a large number of relatives. Coit left the bulk of her estate to a relative and asked that some of the funds be used to maintain Pauchunganuc Farm.

She also left most of her Denison Hill Road tree farm, where Coit grew spruces and firs right up to the time of her death, to Avalonia Land Conservancy. Eppinger said Coit's home and a 2-acre lot at the Denison Hill Road property will be sold, but the balance of the farmland will be given to the conservancy as open space.

"We are just so pleased to get it," said Pat Turner, another Coit friend and active member of Avalonia.

Even a year ago, when Coit was at Apple Rehab, Turner said the farm was operating and regular customers got their Christmas trees there.

"Many of us don't know where we will get our trees now," Turner said. "We not only miss Anna, we will miss the tree farm if it doesn't continue."

Michele Fitzpatrick, the Avalonia president, said Coit was a founder and longtime and valuable member of the conservancy, making the tree farm donation "more emotional."

Coit prided herself on being an environmentalist long before others even coined the phrase, and another property that she owned, described in the will as a "17½-acre woodlot," will be sold with a deed restriction limiting construction to just one house, and "prohibiting the further subdivision of said parcel."

Murtha, whose mother was Anna Coit's first cousin, said giving was always part of Coit's nature.

"She was just such an inspiration and so cause-oriented and concerned, and heritage and history were so important to her," she said.

Friendships were important, too.

"She took joy in people of all ages, and it's a tribute, the lives she touched and the number of people who visited her," Murtha said. "Anna had this gift of making each one feel that he or she was the gift of her life. And she had a marvelous sense of humor."

The evening before she died, friends gathered with Coit at Apple Rehab and chatted over glasses of sherry.

"She was lucid and telling stories right up until the day before she passed," Eppinger said.

"Anna always said she had the mind of an 18- or 20-year-old locked in a 100-year-old body."

Murtha said those full faculties are what prompted Coit to arrange for Yale to get her body.

"You have to be within the state you die in, and she wanted to go to Yale," Murtha said. "That's one reason she ended up in the nursing home in Connecticut."

a.baldelli@theday.com

Twitter: @annbaldelli

Remembering Anna Coit

What: Memorial service for Anna Coit conducted by the Westerly Monthly Meeting of Friends

When: 2 p.m. Saturday

Where: Wheeler Library, 101 Main St., North Stonington

Reception: Hewitt Hall at North Stonington Congregational Church, 89 Main St.