Esther (Harding) Dickinson was born in the Mill River section of Deerfield, Massachusetts, the daughter of farmer and chairmaker Abijah Harding (1760-1844) and his wife Lydia (Dickinson). Esther kept house for widower Consider Dickinson (1761-1854) before she married him in 1840, at the age of fifty. When Consider died in his nineties, Esther, then in her sixties, continued to live in the house on the Ministry Lot in the village of Deerfield.

After her death, in keeping with her will that a “high school, library, and reading room shall be located on my homelot on the Deerfield street,” the town moved the 1760 Dickinson house west on the homelot to make room for a new brick building to house a library, a public high school, and Deerfield Academy, a private high school that had opened in Deerfield in 1799. The Dickinson house was rented out to Deerfield Academy and in 1916, it was converted for use as a dormitory. The school building, in use until 1930, was taken down to make way for an administration building for Deerfield Academy.