Elvira Anderson Egeland
Many are familiar with Miss Lizzie, Miss Munda and Adolph Anderson, children of Greta and Aslag Anderson. The Andersons built the Anderson Store and Dock in the late 1800s. Less people are familiar with the couple’s other children. Lydia Elvira Anderson, known to family and friends as Elvira, was born February 25, 1879, the tenth of Aslag and Greta Anderson’s thirteen children. She was very close with her sister Agnes, who was only eighteen months older than Elvira, and the two often wore the same clothes and hairstyles.
On April 18, 1906, Elvira married Dr. Gustof Richard Egeland, known as Gussie or Gus. Gus was a Norwegian immigrant who had come to Ephraim to practice medicine after serving a few years in the Coast Guard. Gus and Elvira first lived in Ephraim, just south of the Anderson family home. They moved to Sturgeon Bay in the early 1910s to establish Egeland Hospital.
The couple’s marriage was a series of ups and downs. Egeland was treated for alcoholism in 1910 and struggled with the disease all his life.
The Loss of a Child
In 1914, the couple began the process of adopting a three-year-old girl named Rita. Her mother had died earlier that year and her father was unable to care for Rita and her seven siblings. EHF Archives include letters about Rita, written by several of Anderson siblings which reveal that the little girl was very much loved by family. In 1916, during a visit to finalize her adoption, Rita became ill and was taken to Egeland Hospital in Sturgeon Bay for treatment, but on July 23, 1916, she passed away from tubercular meningitis.
On July 26, 1916, Rita’s death made front page news. “The Angel of Death took away their beloved daughter,” reported the Door County Advocate. “Little Rita was the sunshine of that home.” Following a service in the Egeland home, the funeral cortege traveled to Ephraim for burial at the Moravian Cemetery.
Eight years later her mother, Elvira, succombed to the disease. She had been for it in 1915 but suffered a relapse, dying on July 11, 1924 at age forty-five. She is buried near her daughter Rita Egeland (spelled Reta on the gravestone).
Elvira and Gus divorced in 1919 after nearly thirteen years of marriage. He remarried nurse Jeanette W. Johnson that same year. Eventually, Dr. Egeland and Jeanette moved to San Marino California where he continued to practice medicine after serving as an officer in the medical corps in WWI. They had three sons. Egeland died from a heart attack in 1936 at age fifty-nine. His body was shipped from California for burial in at Bayside Cemetery in Sturgeon Bay. His nephew was Dr. Dan Dorchester, who also had a hospital named for him in Sturgeon Bay.
Visit the Anderson Store to seephotographs and several artifacts related to Elvira Anderson’s story.
Submitted by Emily Irwin, EHF Curator and Marketing Coordinator in 2019. Updated with additional information by EHF Educator Kathleen Harris in 2024.
