Bertha Gurine (Barke) Olson (1865-1904)

BARKE, OLSON

Posted By: Dorian Myhre (email)
Date: 10/12/2015 at 21:10:30

From Nevada Representative January 27, 1904

The death of Mrs. A. A. Olson of Roland, comes as a sad surprise and occasion for sincere regret to many people outside the circle of relatives and intimate acquaintances. To the appreciative tribute to her womanly worth, recorded in our Roland department, we desire to add our own testimony as to her intelligence, native refinement, kindly spirit and genuine christian character. The passing of such a woman is a great loss, not only to the home she adorned and the community in which she lived, but to the wider circle of the general public whose life in one way and another she touched with suggestions of higher and better things.

In the same issue on another page:

The sad an unexpected death of Mrs. A. A. Olson occurred Friday morning at 2:30 resulting from a severe cold that developed into pneumonia. The funeral was held at Bergens church Sunday afternoon, conducted by her pastor, Rev. Simedal. Mrs. Olson was the daughter of Ove Barke of this place and before her marriage was one the very successful school teachers of the county. Her literary taste was quite marked she having contributed to various periodicals. She was noted for her conversational and social qualities, always enjoying the company of her many friends. Her influence exerted itself the strongest in her home were to her a pleasure and gratification and to administer to the wants of her husband and children was to her a source of satisfaction. Her life was the kind that makes the world brighter and better. In her was the spirit of forgiving and forgetting, a quality admired by the good of the world. She passes from us young in years, but old in deeds of kindness and generosity. Her husband mourns the loss of a wife devoted, the five children weep for a dear mother gone but never to be forgotten. To them time can not erase her memory, her advice will be to them a foundation stone on which they shall build and build rightly. The passing of each life leaves some lessons are many, so with hers. The star shines brightest as it recedes behind the horizon. Even so with the life of Mrs. A. A. Olson. We pause to think, and are quick to recall her many christian graces. Life's battle over, the race is run the victory won--eternal life. That life a burden may bear lightly on the husband and motherless children as they pass down the stream of time, is the wish, and hope of the writer.