Her hair tucked neatly beneath a kerchief and her small frame sheathed in an old-fashioned dress, Elizabeth Moreau always looked like a transplant from another century.

But she was right at home working at the Old West-themed shooting gallery on the Hampton Beach boardwalk, surrounded by life-sized mannequins of cowboys and men with slicked hair hunched over a piano. For more than three decades, her booth on the New Hampshire coast rang with the jubilant cries of children as they took aim at the hundreds of targets behind her.

“She always looked exactly the same,’’ said Jessica Moise, 45, who has visited Hampton Beach with her family every summer for 40 years. When she was little, Moise recalled, Moreau would let her sit on the counter to get a better shot. “I never saw her without her kerchief . . . like she was some prairie gal.’’

Moreau, 73, died Monday after suffering a stroke, said Jake Fleming, general manager of the Hampton Beach Casino. For thousands of young and old, her passing marks the end of an era: Beachgoers at the popular boardwalk said that since the 1980s, the soft-spoken, smiling “shooting gallery lady’’ was as much a symbol of summer as ice cream cones and fireworks.

“The only guarantee we had going up there every summer was seeing the shooting gallery lady,’’ said Caitlin Norden, 28, who visited the arcade with her family every year until she was 15. “She was a fixture.’’

Moreau’s death was announced Tuesday in a post on Hampton Beach’s Facebook page. The post has since been shared more than 5,700 times and has collected more than 1,400 comments from people around the country. Many of the commenters wrote they had frequented the arcade as children and revisited the popular summer haunt recently — and had found, to their shock and delight, Moreau still at her perch, sneaking quarters from her pocket to young children who missed their first few shots.

Children were the reason Moreau worked at the gallery 12 hours a day, seven days a week, every summer, Fleming said. He said Moreau and her husband bought the gallery in the early 1980s, but even after they sold it a few years ago, she went in every day, bringing a cooler full of lunch and dinner for herself and her husband.

“You couldn’t keep her home if you wanted to,’’ Fleming said.

She would teach children how to look through the viewfinder and how to point the gun, always ensuring they never walked away disappointed, arcade regulars recalled.

“She lit up whenever there was a young child that she could help out,’’ said Kim Reilly Murphy, 36, of Hudson, N.H., who brings her 5-year-old son every year to relive the experience she had as a child.

From behind the counter of her shooting gallery, Moreau bore witness to hundreds of teenagers fumbling their way through first dates, commenters said. When those dates turned into marriages, and those marriages produced children and grandchildren, they, too, visited the shooting gallery.

Rebecca Gilding said her parents celebrated their honeymoon at Hampton Beach 37 years ago; now she brings her own children there. When she went to college, she discovered that her roommate knew Moreau too — so the two began exchanging photos of her every year they returned to the beach.

Gilding, 36, of Wakefield, Mass., snapped a photo of her father beside Moreau last year, after he realized that Moreau was a real person and not, in fact, another of the lifelike targets.

“The beach changes all the time. New stores come in. There’s a new ice cream store, new pizza place,’’ Gilding said. “But this one space has been the same since I can remember. And this woman has been there since I was little. . . . It’s part of your childhood that’s not there anymore.’’

Vivian Wang can be reached at vivian.wang@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @vwang3.