Edith, Missouri

Edith is an unincorporated community in Russell Township in southern Camden County, Missouri, United States, and is also known as Green Gables.

Edith
Unincorporated community
Edith Location of Edith in Missouri
Coordinates: 37°59′38″N 92°50′11″W
Country	United States
State	Missouri
County	Camden
Named for	Edyth King Roach family

There was a post office by the name of Edith from 1895 to 1915. It was a summer resort area in 1943. The Pleasant Grove School was located here between 1938 and 1946, and was rebuilt in 2006.

Edith, Missouri, site of the Pleasant Grove Church and Green Gables Lodge

The Pleasant Grove Cemetery and the Pleasant Grove Missionary Baptist Church, founded in 1868, remain here.

History

Pleasant Grove School at Edith, Missouri

Edith was likely named for Edyth King Roach (1878-1955), the wife of U.S. Representative and Lawyer Sidney Crane Roach (1876-1934) for whose father nearby Roach, Missouri, was named.

Edith was known also as Green Gables, "a village in southeastern Russell Township, Camden County," on the Big Niangua River. "The summer resort there, however, has recently assumed the more glamorous name of Green Gables, probably inspired by Lucy Maud Montgomery's popular romance, Anne of Green Gables, first published in 1908. The summer homes there are said all to have painted their gables green."

Green Gables Lodge

In 1926, the year an illustrated edition of the novel Anne of Green Gables was released, the Green Gables Lodge was erected at Edith, with a 3,192-square-foot dormitory building that can house 12 people, a 2,500-square-foot lodge building, a 4-acre lake, basketball courts, a climbing wall and 375 feet of frontage on the Niangua River.

Between about 1988 and 2016, Green Gables Lodge was a residential treatment facility, oftentimes with an adventure-based counseling model. It consisted of "160 acres of woods, pasture, and a spring fed lake situated along the Niangua River. The campus itself is centered on the property and is made up of the Lodge which houses the classroom, library, 3 separate restrooms and administrative offices; the Dorm which houses the sleeping area, dining room, kitchen, pantries, dayroom, 2 separate restrooms, showers and laundry; the Maintenance Building; and 5 storage buildings containing surplus supplies, camping equipment and yard tools."

In 2015, treatment here included "individualized, group, educational, medical, and psychosocial, and other needs and topics specialized and individualized to meet the needs of each resident in the care of the facility. Green Gables Lodge tailors treatment and educational approaches to the use of Adventure Based Counseling events such as fishing, running, canoeing, backpacking, basecamping, and Ropes Courses."

Geography

Edith is about 1.6 linear miles northwest of White City, a former community built on the rocky ridge to house the workers who erected the Tunnel Dam in about 1922.

Edith is 2.3 linear miles north of Chapel Bluff, a notable cliff of limestone rock formations located along the Big Niangua River, south of the confluence of Jacks Creek with Mire Hollow Creek. It is the site of the Chapel Bluff School (extinct), where, in the 1926-27 school year, Roy Tipton was the teacher, W. A. Vance was president and the clerk was John Varner. Chapel Bluff is about 2.4 linear miles east of Only, Missouri, on Chapel Bluff Road as it emerges from the Niangua Hills, and was the name of a populated place and post office between 1915 and 1918.

Edith is 4.4 linear miles northeast from the historical village known as Dry Ridge, also in Russell Township, Camden County, Missouri. There was a post office here between 1876 and 1877, and a school that remained into the late 1920s.