WINDSOR — After years in nursing, Mary Louise Sayles had developed her own vision for care, but finding a place to make that vision a reality seemed a long shot.

Sayles, in her early 50s, was administrator of the Sullivan County Nursing Home in Unity and the superintendent of the complex for about four years in the 1980s when the opportunity she had been preparing for since becoming a nurse finally began to take shape.

A night maintenance worker at Sullivan County, who also worked in real estate, told Sayles of a nursing home in Windsor for sale.

She and her friend and fellow nurse at Sullivan County, Judy Brogren, then 43, made a couple trips to the home and while disappointed in its appearance, Sayles was impressed with the 12 acres not far from the Connecticut River. Sayles envisioned a place that not only provided first rate medical care but also met the social and other needs of nursing home residents and those who needed some level of care but did not qualify for a nursing home.

Quality of life beyond medical care was important to her, said her daughter, Cynthia Grant, of Virginia.

“The idea of large rooms, social areas and great food was not the norm then, but she really believed in that,” Grant said.

In 1988, Sayles and Brogren put together a business plan, bought the 30 bed Cedar Manor on Route 5 with their savings, including an inheritance Sayles received from her parents, and a small business loan. They changed the name to Cedar Hill and went to work.

“My mother used to say they were ‘just two average middle-aged women who founded this business,’ ” Sayles’ daughter Patricia Horn, the Cedar Hill administrator, said. “They were kindred spirits and they really loved working together.”

“They worked dawn to dusk and enjoyed every minute of it,” Grant said. “They did the painting. They did the cleanup. They did the wallpapering. They did it all while taking care of the current residents and making plans to add on.”

It was a work pattern her daughters knew well.

Horn and Grant still marvel at their mother’s energy, whether she was cooking them breakfast when they were young, going to work, making dinner then working into the night so she could spend more time with residents during the day, or visiting them in her 80s and demanding to do laundry or wanting to cook, her passion.

“She always had to be doing something,” Grant said.

Horn and Grant said their mother’s commitment to her vision and her seemingly endless supply of energy were the right ingredients needed to build Cedar Hill into what it is today.

She was still working in her late 80s and last year, she made a three-week pilgrimage to Italy with her two daughters — a third daughter, Maria, died of cancer in 2004 — to see the places where her parents were from.

Earl Knight, the maintenance director at Cedar Hill for eight years before retiring in 2019, remembers Sayles’ energy.

“She could run circles around people half her age,” said Knight, who lives in Florida where Sayles also lived during part of the year when she was older. “It was astonishing to watch her work and always with a smile.”

Cedar Hill was more a labor of love than a business with a profit motive.

“It was never a money-making venture for them,” Grant said “My mother did not want her own business to create wealth. She wanted her own business so she and Judy could run a nursing home to the level they wanted.”

“They sacrificed a lot to build this place,” Horn added. “They lived for several years in a trailer on the property to make this work financially and they took a very low salary. But that is who they were and they did it all with a smile and with heart.”

Born to Italian immigrant parents, Sayles, who died May 16 at age 89, about two weeks after suffering a stroke, was raised in Boston surrounded by a large extended family of aunts and uncles. The youngest of three children with siblings more than a dozen years older, Sayles’ upbringing around elders guided her interest later in life in providing for seniors and others, not dismissing them, Horn said.

Sayles earned her bachelor’s degree in nursing from Boston College and worked in several hospitals in Boston, Virginia and New Hampshire. Her work history included director of nursing at Frisbie Memorial Hospital, Strafford County Nursing Home and Edgewood Manor, a private nursing home.

“I think one of the reasons she fell in love with it was because at that point the field of nursing homes was in the middle of tremendous change and she saw an opportunity to make nursing home level care much, much better than it had been,” Horn said.

From the first day they took ownership of Cedar Hill, Sayles and Brogren, who died in 2013, worked tirelessly to serve the differing needs of seniors. They built a new nursing home, learned how to solve financing and funding questions and obtain HUD mortgages and educated themselves on construction.

With millions invested in the last 35 years, Sayles’ vision has indeed become a reality. The Cedar Hill Continuing Care Community campus today has a nursing home for up to 40 residents, an independent and assisted-living complex — The Village at Cedar Hill — licensed for 72 and a 20-bed secure memory care center, named for Brogren,

Cedar Hill has been recognized nationally and regionally for the quality of its care and has received five star ratings. Among the other awards are Best of Assisted Living Award Winner on SeniorAdvisor.com, American Health Care Association National Quality Award and a Best Nursing Home Designation from U.S. News.

While nursing home care was of prime importance to Sayles, she and Brogren had bigger plans for the property. In the 1980s, assisted living was not nearly what it is today.

When Sayles was in charge in Sullivan County, she created a shared residential facility for those who did not need a nursing home.

Sue Spadaro was working in admissions at Cedar Hill when Sayles asked her to become the first director at The Village.

“She was very influential in my life,” Spadaro said. “She was constantly teaching me. She gave me opportunities I never would have had, and she believed in me.”

Spadaro remembers Sayles as someone with strong convictions about her mission combined with a terrific work ethic.

“She loved what she was doing and I think she was a visionary in her own way,” Spadaro said. “She has a lot of compassion and made sure people and families were comfortable and she passed that on to me.”

Never one to feel she had done enough, Sayles was driven to learn as much as she could about her chosen field and usually went on vacation with a stack of professional nursing publications to read on the beach.

“She was always learning and bringing new things to the table,” Spadaro said.

Horn and Grant said their mother’s philosophy on nursing home and assisted living care was straightforward and simple.

“She had a lot of compassion,” Grant said. “Everything in her life was about creating beautiful places for people. Whether it was her home, our home growing up or creating it for other people. She wanted beautiful places and she wanted to give people really good food.”

In an interview when she was 80, Sayles said she never considered working in another field and after years working in hospitals and in public health, she found her real calling in long term care.

“I enjoyed working with seniors and helping them overcome their disabilities, deal with chronic illnesses and still have a high quality of life,” Sayles said.

Sayles’ work ethic did not make her a taskmaster, though she could be tough if you weren’t doing your job, Spadaro said.

Knight, the maintenance director at Cedar Hill, said Sayles was a take-charge person but knew how to bring others around to her viewpoint without being harsh, whether it was at Cedar Hill or the homeowners association she led in Florida where she took over a project and raised money to repair an outside wall and landscape the area.

“She took charge but she never made you feel like she was running you over,” Knight said.

Those who worked for her often would follow her to a new job, her daughters said.

“If she quit and went somewhere else, they went there,” Horn said.

When Sayles was at Frisbie Memorial Hospital, on the Seacoast, Horn said her mother was going to take a position at a new clinic and that caused an uproar among the nursing staff.

“They wrote a petition and said, ‘She listens to us. She ask our opinion. She is so good. You can’t let her go,’ ” Horn said.

Sayles created many of those same feelings in her friendships and family relationships. When her first marriage ended after 25 years, her husband’s side of the family remained close, Horn said.

“My uncle, my father’s brother, called her and said, ‘We are still one family. You are still family to us,’ ” Horn said.

Cathy Knight, Earl’s wife, said her friend “had youthful enthusiasm and an adventurous spirit,” always wanting to learn and try new things when they went places together in Florida.

“She was one of those people who when you met her, you could never forget her,” Knight said.

“I called her an Earth Angel because it was her mission to make the world a better place. There are not a lot of saints who walk this Earth but she was one of them.”

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Patrick O’Grady can be reached at pogclmt@gmail.com.