In Loving Memory
Eleanor Whitfield
April 12, 1946 — September 30, 2024 · Aged 78
“She planted things she knew she'd never see bloom.”
Eleanor Rose Whitfield arrived in the spring of 1946, in her grandmother's farmhouse on Orchard Road — she liked to say she came with the daffodils.
She spent two years teaching abroad with a rural schools program before she ever had a classroom of her own, and then taught third grade at Cedar Hollow Elementary for forty years. Every spring her windowsills filled with paper-cup seedlings, and her students carried them home like diplomas.
Sunday mornings were for the choir, Sunday afternoons for the garden, and any warm evening for the porch and whoever wandered by. She was undone by a stray seedling on a clearance rack, a hymn in the key of G, and any excuse to make peach cobbler for more people than her table could hold.
“Plant it anyway” was her answer to almost every doubt anyone ever brought to her porch.
Obituary
Eleanor Rose Whitfield, 78, of Cedar Hollow, passed peacefully on September 30, 2024, at home, with the windows open to the garden.
Born April 12, 1946, she taught third grade at Cedar Hollow Elementary for forty years, sang twenty-six years in the Bram's Creek Church Choir, and left the town measurably greener than she found it. She was preceded in death by her husband Samuel and her parents, Joseph and Anna Miller, and is survived by her daughter Maria, her son Robert, and her granddaughter Anna.
A service was held at the Cedar Hollow Methodist Church. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you plant something.
- Hometown
- Cedar Hollow
- Occupation
- Schoolteacher & Master Gardener
- Education
- the State Teachers College
- Faith
- Methodist
- Resting place
- Laid to rest at Riverbend Memorial Gardens, Cedar Hollow
Things she loved
- Peonies and heirloom tomatoes
- The first frost
- A well-organized seed drawer
- Letters — actual paper letters
- The radio on low while she cooked
Recognized for bringing school gardens to every third-grade classroom in the county.
📌★Eleanor's Peach Cobbler
Ingredients: ripe peaches, more butter than you'd admit to, flour, sugar, a little nutmeg. Slice more peaches than seems reasonable. Make the batter while the butter melts in the dish. Pour, don't stir, and let the oven sort it out. Serve warm to more people than your table holds.
Second-Frost Apple Butter
She said the apples needed one good scare. Ingredients: orchard apples, cider, brown sugar, cinnamon, clove, patience. 1. Quarter the apples; don't peel them. 2. Simmer in cider until they give up. 3. Mill, then back in the pot on low. 4. Stir whenever you walk past, all afternoon. 5. Give most of it away. That's the recipe.