“If you’re digging down at the end of the garden and you find an urn, that’s Reverend Foulkes,” she said. “Just put him a little deeper.”

It was 1973, and the Hansons were living in this hamlet on the North Shore of Long Island and working at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Like many residents, the couple bridged the two most distinctive — some would say clashing — features of the Suffolk County community: historic homes concentrated near a quaint retail area on Main Street, and a big, Brutalist campus 1 mile east.

Their shingled colonial on Christian Avenue has wide-board floors that are not quite even, and it sits on almost 1 acre of land. At some point in the 20th century, the home was enlarged and used as a summer retreat for Presbyterian ministers, which accounts for the urn’s occupant. “It’s a wonderful house,” said Colleen Hanson, 76, adding delicately that the price when they bought it was “less than six figures.”

Another charm is that it is within walking distance of the Reboli Center for Art and History, which Colleen Hanson, a former art gallery director, launched in 2016 when she helped acquire a 1911 bank building near the Stony Brook Creek to serve as an art space honoring painter Joseph Reboli, who died in 2004. A local hero, he grew up across the street. Lois Reboli, his widow, is the center’s president.

Now the neighborhood is down one Capital One branch and up a cultural institution. When it arrived, the Reboli Center joined a working 18th-century gristmill; a performance space and museum called the Jazz Loft; the Nora Bredes Reserve, a park named after a progressive Suffolk County legislator; and the Avalon Park and Preserve, 140 acres with a pond, boardwalk, trails, five habitats and a labyrinth.

There is a lot to love about Stony Brook. Residents bless the harbor, the beaches, the fine public schools. They ask: How many people, particularly on the North Shore of Long Island, get to live near protected wetlands and rest their eyes on houses in which generations have lived and died without a single en suite bathroom?

For those who prefer modern conveniences, Stony Brook also has 20th- and 21st-century homes. Many date to the early 1960s, when William Levitt acquired 650 acres of woodland 1 mile south of the village center for his Strathmore development — 1,300 properties that were aimed at a more affluent market than the Cape Cods and ranches he built in Levittown, New York. Other houses have sprung up more recently on the sites of teardowns.

The downsides of life in Stony Brook, residents say, are the twin Long Island devils of sludgy traffic and high property taxes. But you get more for your money than you will in neighboring Nassau County.

“The taxes are as high in Nassau County as in Suffolk,” said Linda Hickey, owner of Hickey and Smith Realtors in Stony Brook. “But you’re on a quarter of an acre in parts of Nassau, whereas you’re on an acre here.”

— What You’ll Find

Stony Brook and its neighbors, Setauket and Old Field, form an entity known as the Three Village area within the town of Brookhaven.

Although Stony Brook was settled in the late 1600s, the historic hamlet that presents itself today is largely the invention of Ward Melville, a shoe magnate who created Stony Brook Village Center, one of the country’s first planned retail developments, in 1941. Working with Richard Haviland Smythe, an architect, Melville rearranged vintage buildings, razing some and adding others, to produce a crescent of shops with shingles, parking spaces, a village green and views to the harbor. At the center of the development is a federal-style post office emblazoned with a mechanical eagle that still flaps its 20-foot wings every hour, on the hour.

Melville also bought the shoreline acreage that became the West Meadow Wetlands Reserve and donated 478 acres for a college campus he imagined would be Old World and pastoral. Instead, it evolved into the behemoth now known as Stony Brook University. The largest campus in the SUNY system, SBU has 213 buildings on 1,454 acres, including a 2 million-square-foot university hospital complex designed in the 1970s by Bertrand Goldberg. This celebrated building has three towers connected by skybridges and poised on skinny legs over a seven-story base. Town and gown would seem to be on different planets.

Residents say that those planets have grown more aligned. The bald campus landscape was greatly improved under Shirley Strum Kenny, the university’s president from 1994 to 2009. And outsiders come for the sporting events, art exhibitions and live performances.

For their part, “many of the extraordinary people who make up that university have found their way to old Stony Brook and the Stony Brook community,” said Steve Englebright, the member for the 4th district of the New York Assembly, which includes part of the town of Brookhaven. James Harris Simons left his job as chairman of SBU’s math department in 1968 to start the Renaissance Technologies hedge-fund firm, and established Avalon Park. Thomas Manuel, the founder of the Jazz Loft, received his doctorate in musical arts from SBU. Englebright, an SBU-educated geologist, was instrumental in making a mile-long spit of parkland at West Meadow Beach available for public use.

Accommodating students within the community remains a thorny topic with mixed results. Although campus dorms have multiplied, the perpetual overflow of students has led opportunistic landlords to buy off-campus houses and rent the rooms, sending neighbors into fits of despair. Today, homeowners in Brookhaven who wish to rent need permits that limit the number of unrelated occupants and require the buildings to be updated for fire protection.

But such retrofits are expensive and result in increased taxes, diminishing the availability of multifamily properties for everyone.

Stony Brook businesses also reflect a generational divide. The shops and services at the Stony Brook Village Center are more likely to appeal to the parents of college students, as well as a diverse group of locals and outsiders, said Gloria Roccio, president of the Ward Melville Heritage Organization, which owns and operates it. (Among its many activities, the organization also runs an 8,800-square-foot educational and cultural center in the village, sponsors charitable events and conducts wetlands boat tours.)

By contrast, Stony Brook Square, a 24,000-square-foot retail development underway near the university, will cater more directly to students, Roccio said. And residents of all ages drive a few miles south to the Smith Haven Mall in Lake Grove, New York, which has 130 stores.

— What You’ll Pay

Route 25A is considered the dividing line between the affluent, historic part of Stony Brook to the north and newer, more affordable developments to the south. But that is changing, said Barbara Gray, a broker with Corcoran’s Southampton office, who lives in Old Field. Houses can be found below 25A selling for upward of $600,000. They may be newer homes with features like high ceilings “that a lot of younger people are looking for,” she said.

When properties approach $1 million, however, they languish on the market, casualties of a tax code that now limits write-offs to $10,000, said Linda Hickey. “For the past couple of years, I’ve had a couple of big houses on the market. They’re agonizing to sell, whereas small ones are flying off the shelves.”

According to Trulia, the median sales price of Stony Brook homes from Oct. 10, 2018, to Jan. 9, 2019, was $445,000, based on 13 transactions, a year-over-year increase of 9 percent. The median monthly rental price in that same period was $2,980.

The least-expensive property on the Multiple Listing Service of Long Island website, as of Jan. 21, was a two-bedroom unit with a garage in the Strathmore Gate development, a community for people 55 and older. It was listed for $319,999, with a $200 monthly common charge (and taxes of $8,254). The most expensive property was a five-bedroom, 1920 colonial on 0.6 acres of waterfront property, listed for $1.425 million (with taxes of $27,036).

— The Vibe

“Cute!” was the verdict of a group of tourists between the ages of 13 and 66, who recently brunched at the Tuscan-themed Pentimento restaurant in Stony Brook Village Center (having been talked out of Country House, where there was a 40-minute wait).

“Cute!” they echoed in Avalon Park, as they admired dogs trotting on leashes and ducks bobbing in the pond. The word was also a natural fit for the Stanford White-designed All Souls Episcopal Church across the street, which is tiny and shingled.

When the group drove around Stony Brook University’s campus, however, with its bulky buildings and air of desolation (it was winter break), everyone fell silent. Then one member noted that the in-state tuition for this respected school was less than $10,000 a year.

— The Schools

The Three Village Central School District comprises five elementary schools (kindergarten through sixth grade), two junior high schools (seventh through ninth grade) and one high school (10th through 12th grade). The district also includes the Three Village Academy, an alternative high school in Stony Brook founded in 2013 for students with social phobias or anxiety that make learning in large settings difficult (ninth through 12th grade).

Total district enrollment is about 6,300 students — 82 percent white, 10 percent Asian, 5 percent Hispanic or Latino and 1 percent black or African-American.

On 2016-17 state tests, 66 percent of elementary school students met standards in English, versus 38 percent statewide; 76 percent met standards in math, versus 44 percent statewide.

Among middle school students, 68 percent met standards in English, versus 44 percent statewide; 45 percent met standards in math (this number excluded students who took the Regents Examination in Algebra), versus 30 percent statewide.

Average 2017 SAT scores for students attending the Ward Melville High School in East Setauket were 594 for critical reading and 592 for math, versus 530 and 528 statewide.

— The Commute

Many in the hamlet conveniently work at Stony Brook University or the Brookhaven National Laboratory, less than 20 miles east in Upton, New York. For those with jobs in New York City, Long Island Railroad’s weekday morning service to Pennsylvania Station takes about an hour and a half, with a transfer in Jamaica, Queens, and costs $19. Some commuters drive to Ronkonkoma, up to 10 miles south, to catch a direct train with travel time as speedy as 69 minutes.

— The History

Much of Stony Brook’s past, real and reinvented, is embedded in the Long Island Museum of American Art, History and Carriages, on Route 25A. Founded in 1939 by Ward Melville and his wife, Dorothy, it grew from a collection of animal trophies assembled by a hunter and taxidermist into a 9-acre complex with seven buildings, including a relocated blacksmith shop and one-room schoolhouse. Among its holdings are Melville’s stash of carriages (about 80) and the largest collection of artworks by 19th-century painter William Sidney Mount.