SWENSON, Elinor (Hill) (1914 - 1999)

SWENSON, HILL, SPECHT, MEYER, MORTENSON, ROHRBAUGH, JURGENSEN

Posted By: County Coordinator (email)
Date: 4/1/2025 at 19:56:29

Elinor Swenson, 85, of Spencer, died Saturday, January 2, 1999, at the Spencer Hospital. Funeral services will be held Wednesday, January 6 at the First English Lutheran Church, Spencer. Burial will be in the Riverside Cemetery in Spencer.

The daughter of Henry Lee and Sophie Agnes Specht Hill, she was born January 2, 1914, in Linn County near Brownsville, Oregon.

At the age of nine months, she moved with her parents to a farm west of Cherokee where she grew up and received her education at a rural school in Sheridan Township in Cherokee County. She was baptized at the Herman Drefke home near Meriden on November 14, 1914, and confirmed in the Lutheran faith at Trinity Lutheran Church in Cherokee on July 21, 1929.

As a young woman she worked as a housekeeper in the Cherokee area.

She married Clifford Andrew Carl Swenson on June 28, 1934, at the Lutheran Parsonage in Afton Township in Cherokee County. To this union were born three children. The Swenson’s farmed near Cleghorn, Sutherland and Spencer until 1966, when they moved into Spencer.

She worked at the Spencer Shopper and then for six and a half years at St. Luke’s Nursing Home, Spencer’s Meals-On-Wheels program and where she received the Lutheran Service Award. In 1994 they moved to Storm Lake and from January 1997 she resided at St. Luke Lutheran Home in Spencer. She was a member of the First English Lutheran Church in Spencer. Her favorite pastimes were cooking, collecting recipes and sewing.

She is survived by two daughters and their husbands, Delores and Vernelle Meyer of broken Arrow, Okla. and Darlene and Larry Mortenson of Storm Lae; one son and his wife, Ronald and Linda Swenson; eight grandchildren; eleven great-grandchildren; one brother, Charles Hill and his wife, Mary of Eldorado, Mo.; many nieces and nephews and other relatives and friends.

She was preceded in death by her parents; her husband; one brother, James Hill and two sisters, Marjorie Rohrbaugh and Arlene Jurgensen.
(Source: Former Cherokee County Historical Society scrapbook, hand dated 1-9-99)