This 1923 street honors Edith Butterfield Sheldon (1884-1945), wife of developer Benjamin Cushing Sheldon (1876-1959; see Cushdon Avenue). She was born Mary Edith Butterfield in Chicago. When she was a child, her father John Spencer Butterfield took the family to Mississippi, where he and partner Fred W. Norwood had set up a lumber mill. Located outside of Brookhaven, Norwood and Butterfield named their company town “Norfield”, a portmanteau of their surnames. Norwood later dropped out and Butterfield ran the company with his three sons (see Bradbury Road), but it appears that he, his wife Emma, and Edith split their time between Mississippi and Chicago. Edith married Ben C. Sheldon in 1918 – she may have met the Minneapolis native through a mutual friend in that city – and they had three kids: Barbara, David, and little Abbott, who died of appendicitis in 1936 at the age of 12. (One block of Cheviot Drive was originally called Abbottson Road.) After years of shuttling back and forth between Los Angeles and Medford, OR, the Sheldons lived in this neighborhood full-time from 1932 onward.
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