Tuttle, Edith Dunham 1875-1952

TUTTLE, BOYNTON, DUNHAM, INGERSOLL, PARSONS, FISHER

Posted By: Marilyn Holmes (email)
Date: 10/7/2012 at 15:59:24

The Grinnell (IA) Herald-Register; April 1952

MRS. EDITH DUNHAM
TUTTLE DIES APRIL
26 IN LAGRANGE, ILL.

Mrs. Edith Dunham Tuttle, widow of Rev. Henry W. Tuttle and for many years a beloved resident of Grinnell, died at 6 a.m. Saturday, April 26, at Pilgrim Place, LaGrange, Ill., where she had been a resident since July of 1949.

Born May 5, 1875 at Manchester, Ia., to Abner and Sophronia Boynton Dunham, her brother and two sisters have all preceded her in death. She united with the Congregational Church in Manchester, Ia., at the age of 14.

Educated as a kindergarten teacher in the pioneer days of that work, she taught in the Congregational Mission school at Provo, Utah, and in public and private kindergartens in Iowa and South Dakota.

She spent two years caring for her sister Daisy Ingersoll's children, after her sister's death in 1917. On Oct. 9, 1919, she was married to Rev. Henry W. Tuttle, then president of Kingfisher College, Kingfisher, Oklahoma. Following this, in 1922, Dr. Tuttle was for a year extension representative in the state of Iowa for Chicago Theological Seminary, and thereafter went to Payson, Ill., as pastor of the Congregational church. When Dr. Tuttle chose to retire from active ministry, he and Mrs. Tuttle moved to Grinnell, buying the house at 828 Park street, where Mrs. Tuttle lived until 1944. Dr. Tuttle began soon to preach at various points near Grinnell, among them Dinsdale and later Victor, but he and Mrs. Tuttle were active in the Congregational church in Grinnell and for some years Mrs. Tuttle headed the Junior Department of the Church School.

Dr. Tuttle died on Easter Sunday, April 21, 1935, after preaching his Easter sermon at Victor, but Mrs. Tuttle lived on in the home on Park street until the fall of 1944 when the home was sold and she went to Payson, Ill, where she lived for a year with a woman friend. In April of 1946, Mrs. Tuttle returned to Grinnell to live in the home of her sister, and husband, Dr. and Mrs. H.C. Parsons, on north Broad street. When Dr. and Mrs. Parsons were called to California to care for his aunt, Mrs. Tuttle lived with Miss Elizabeth Fisher and later with her nephew, Prof. Thomas M. Parsons, then of the biology department of Grinnell college.

In July, 1949, Mrs. Tuttle came to live at Plymouth Place, LaGrange, Ill., a Christian Home for older people, where she found new friends who appreciated her gentle spirit and renewed acquaintances with old friends who also had come there to live. She became a member of the First Congregational Church of LaGrange and kept in touch with it via the sermons of its pastor as broadcast each Sunday, and from his visits and those of other church members.

In her gradually failing strength and final illness she received compassionate care from the staff at Plymouth Place. Services in her memory were held on Sunday afternoon, April 27, at the Rhenberg Memorial Home, near Plymouth Place, with Rev. Truman A. Morrison of Plymouth Congregational Church, Maywood, Ill., as minister. Final interment will be in the family plot at the cemetery in Manchester, at a later date.