Edith Lee

Funeral services for Edith Lee have been changed to Friday, April 25, 2025 at 2:00 p.m. at Living Faith Free Lutheran Church in Larimore, ND. A visitation will be held from 1:00pm until the time of the service at the church.

Edith Lee, farm wife and hometown journalist, who lived at her family's farm home near Arvilla, N.D., for 56 years, died March 12, 2025, in the Northwood, ND, Deaconess Health Center where she had lived for several years. She was 96. 

Funeral services will be held Friday, April 25, 2025, at 2:00p.m. at Living Faith Free Lutheran Church in Larimore, ND. A visitation will be held from 1:00p.m. until the time of the service at the church. Burial will be held at St. John Cemetery, Hatton, ND.

She was born Edith Evanson in Northwood, March 16, 1928, to Sophus and Lena Bjerke Evanson and grew up on their farm six miles northeast of Northwood, with three brothers. She was baptized in Washington Lutheran Church just a couple three miles across the fields from home. Her first school was nearby, too, one room and within walking distance.

She graduated from Northwood High School in 1945. Edith then majored in English for two years at Mayville State College not far away, where Gilmore Lee from nearby Hatton first noticed her in a play, he said. Edith enrolled at the University of Minnesota to finish her English degree.

It was a big move and her granddaughter Stephanie, of Minneapolis, remembers Grandma Edith tell about arriving alone at the huge Twin Cities campus. "She sat on a curb and started crying, overwhelmed by the city. I felt the same way when I moved to Minneapolis and the same way when I stepped onto the U of M Campus."

Gilmore would drive down from his Hatton farm to the Twin Cities to visit Edith and implore her to quit school and come home to marry him. She eventually agreed, leaving her studies at the University of Minnesota and marry him on Thanksgiving Day in 1949 in her parents' farm home. They began farming and in 1954 bought the place southwest of Arvilla where they raised five children and lived until moving into Grand Forks in 2010.

Edith brought into her marriage her love of books and reading and it wasn't unusual for her family to all be reading something at the dinner table. She filled her house to the gills with some thousands of books, from racy French novelists to paperback Westerns, wildlife stories, Mark Twain, the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, horse stories, American history novels by Kenneth Roberts, and a dozen or so Bibles. Including the worn, leather-bound King James Bible from which she wanted to hear the Christmas story read every year.

From any chair in the spacious farmhouse, upstairs, main floor and basement, Edith made sure books were at hand, crowded unto shelves, stacked on desks or the floor. She made sure there was a big upright parlor piano and taught her kids to play, with varying success. Edith was quiet but serious about her Christian faith, helping her children with Sunday school lessons and bedtime prayers.

Edith was known for her cooking, specializing in pies, often turning out eight or 10 for her big holiday meals, apple, mincemeat, pumpkin, and cherry to top off the roast turkey meal that always included riced potatoes with dark gravy. Her unique chocolate oatmeal cookies were raved about by kids of all ages. Edith spent as much time outdoors as indoors, always with a big vegetable and several flower gardens and planting varieties of the best-tasting apples. She helped care for the horses, many cats and kittens and always a dog, along with the many ‘wild’ animals that were taken in and later released. Her love of animals and nature was passed down to the generations that followed. She and Gilmore planted nine miles of tree rows - shelter belts - aimed at keeping the somewhat sandy soil from blowing. Edith pulled weeds alongside her children who often looked for a way to escape the hard labor. Later, Grandma would enlist her grand kids, too, for work details around the farm."The first time she came over to pick us up in her huge boat," granddaughter Stephanie says. "She was flying down our gravel road . . . a trail of dust. I was in the front seat and I leaned over to look at the speedometer. I looked back at Katie and Josh and mouthed "75!" We all had big eyes and clicked our seat belts and giggled. It was very funny to us that she didn't drive like a grandma." Edith, a newspaper maven, as a reader and a journalist, went to work at age 60 at her hometown Northwood Gleaner, writing columns and news, until she turned 80. The stories might be about neighbors, or a moose she met in a nearby field or swans or woodpeckers. Gilmore died July 3, 2012, in the hospital in Grand Forks. 

Edith is survived by four of her five children: Cathy Snyder, Grand Forks; Stephen Lee, Pierre, SD; Liz Lee, Arvilla, ND; and David (Paige) Lee, Peoria, IL; 18 grandchildren and many more great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren. She was preceded in death by her youngest, daughter Nancy (Kevin) Wittmer, Ferndale, WA; and three brothers, Hayward, Gilby; Carl, Minneapolis; and Ernest, Fargo. "I've never met someone who was so genuinely interested in and knowledgeable about so many subjects: birds, history, literature, the lives of others," granddaughter Stephanie said. "I remember her listening more than talking, but she was always the one I wanted to hear from."