Edith Irvine's gravesite
Edith’s father, Thomas, died in 1910 and for the next four decades Edith, Robert, and their mother, Mary Irene, lived together in the family home. Accounts assert that the two women never got along well, although both were long-term members of the Eastern Star, the women’s auxiliary to the Masonic Lodge where Thomas had been a member. Edith was one of two teachers at the two-room Mokelumne Hill Grammar School while Robert was a house carpenter. By the late 1930s it appears that Edith had abandoned both her photography and her vocation. Her health was deteriorating: she was losing her hearing and was in considerable pain from an unidentified joint ailment. Her doctors, unable to accurately diagnose the cause of her pain, provided her with prescriptions for pain killers which she increasingly elected to wash down with an alcoholic beverage. She died in August of 1949 at the age of 65, after consuming a bottle of rubbing alcohol left on her mother’s bedside table in a nursing hospital.
Edith was described by locals as having a strong character – and could either be a roaring lion or a purring kitten. She was a loner and in later years had few friendships. Townsfolk spoke of the three things that captured her heart; her dog, her horse and her Model T. She never married. Edith is buried in the family plot in Mokelumne Hill, alongside her parents and her brother Robert.
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