Minnesota's oldest resident dies at 114

When Anna Stoehr was born in 1900, her family on a farm near Manning, Iowa had no electricity or phone. William McKinley was president and the Wright brothers' first airplane flight and Henry Ford's introduction of the Model T were still a few years away.

But Minnesota's oldest resident proved an adept user of technology right up until she died in her sleep Sunday at age 114.

After Stoehr had to lie that she was 99 on Facebook because the social networking site wouldn't let her list a three-number age, she fired off a letter to company founder Mark Zuckerberg saying, "I'm still here" and made national headlines. Facebook sent her a basket of 114 flowers for her birthday in October, according to her son, Harlan Stoehr.

Stoehr also used an iPad to keep in touch with her many friends and family while staying at Green Prairie Place, a senior living community in Plainview that she only moved into last year from her longtime farm house in Potsdam.

Friends and family members described Stoehr as remarkably sharp and active up until the end of her life, with a passion for baking bread, knitting, gardening, and playing Scrabble and other games with her visitors. She prided herself on being independent: she lived on her own at Green Prairie Place until a few falls this year led her to an assisted living apartment there.

As she gained more and more attention for being one of the state's few supercentenarians, Stoehr brushed off questions about how she came to live so long.

"She always hated that question. Her take was she didn't have anything to do with it – it was in God's hands," said Harlan Stoehr.

When Stoehr was nearly 11 months old, McKinley was assassinated and Theodore Roosevelt took over the presidency. She lived through other extraordinary events in American history: the sinking of the Titanic, the granting of women's right to vote, two world wars and the Great Depression, the civil rights movement, and massive advances in healthcare, computers, transportation and more. During her lifetime, the U.S. population quadrupled from 76 million, and the farming that her family practiced since emmigrating from Germany in the 1880s greatly receded as a dominant way of life for Americans.

Stoehr was committed to her family's farming operations in southeast Minnesota for most of her life, milking cows, planting vegetables and flowers, and canning peaches. She had a can-do attitude and a tremendous work ethic: one time, a family member saw the light of her farmhouse on at 2 in the morning, stopped to check in on her and found her scrubbing the kitchen floor.

"She said, 'I was awake anyway; I thought I might as well do something useful," said Tom Miller, her former doctor and a family friend.

Miller said that Stoehr became a favorite of the medical staff at Olmsted Medical Center in Rochester and Plainview because of her "consistently delightful humor and positive attitude."

"There was never a moment of crankiness," he said. "She was never a grouchy old lady."