Elisabeth Fedde was a Norwegian Lutheran Deaconess who established the Norwegian Relief Society to better serve the Norwegian-American immigrant community.
Background
Elisabeth Fedde was born in Feda, near Flekkefjord, in Vest-Agder county in southern Norway. Her father was a seaman who retired when his wife became ill and become a farmer. After her father died in 1873, Elisabeth trained as a deaconess at the Lovisenberg Deaconess House in Kristiania under the supervision of Mother Katinka Guldberg, who had herself been trained at the Fliedner Motherhouse in Kaiserswerth, Germany.
Career
She had six siblings. Fedde spent much of her early ministerial career Norway"s newest and northernmost diocese. She and another young deaconess established a medical house in Tromsø, the largest city in Troms county, in 1878, where they lived and worked under harsh and primitive conditions.
She sailed for the United States three months later and arrived on April 9, 1883.
Nine days later, Sister Elisabeth helped found the Norwegian Relief Society, thus establishing her American ministry. Pastor Andreas Mortensen, whom Gabriel Fedde had served as secretary (after marrying the sister of the Swedish/Norwegian consul in New York), presided over the service establishing the society.
Sister Elizabeth established a boarding house at 109 Williams Street, near the Seaman’s Church (where Rev Mortensen served), and rented out three small rooms at $9 per month. Sister Elisabeth also often visited the sick and distressed poor.
Her diary about those experiences was later published.
In 1885, Fedde opened a deaconess house to train other women, as well as a nine-bed hospital that expanded to 30 beds and ultimately became Lutheran Medical Center of Brooklyn. After several years in New York (during which she corresponded with William Passavant who urged her to take charge of his new hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), Fedde accepted the invitation of midwestern Lutherans and moved to Minnesota. Shortly after she arrived in Minneapolis in 1888, Fedde established the Lutheran Deaconess Home.
The next year she helped found the Hospital of the Lutheran Free Church.
Fedde also helped Mortensen plan for a third hospital in Chicago (which opened in 1897), and another in Grand Forks, North Dakota. Eventually, exhausted by her thirteen years working in America, Sister Elisabeth returned to Norway in November 1895.
After nearly a decade on his farm near the southern port city of Egersund, Rogaland, Fedde sailed back to Brooklyn in 1904 to celebrate an anniversary.