In 1912, New Mexico and Arizona became the 47th and 48th states, the Titanic sank off Newfoundland, Fenway Park opened and Massachusetts passed the nation’s first minimum wage law. On Feb. 20, 1912 Ellen Stillman was born to Lituanian immigrants in Brookline. At age 7, she would walk with her family from the Hanson train station to their new home at 482 Elm St. in 1919 — where she has lived ever since.

“It reminded him of home,” she said of her father’s purchase of the land. Family is still important as she has provided land near her home for relatives to build their homes.

In the meantime, she found a career in cranberries and advertising, traveled the world, including a round-the-world tour with a friend in 1961, and watched a century of change.

She has kept active, taking daily walks in the bogs until age 85 and working in her garden until her health would no longer permit it.

“If you use your body, it stays active,” she said. “God took care of me, I think. But I never smoked, I like wine — not liquor — so I think that had something to do with my health.”

On Saturday, her family will host an open house in celebration of her milestone birthday. She celebrated with family members Monday on her birthday and recalled some of the highlights of her life.

One of them was a 1956 presentation of a basket of Ocean Spray cranberries to President Eisenhower during the annual pre-Thanksgiving turkey-pardoning ceremony at the White House. She still has a photo of the event, autographed by Eisenhower, who followed up with a letter about how much his wife Mamie enjoyed the cranberries.

The event was remembered by U.S. Rep. Bill Keating, D-Mass., who honored Stillman on Feb. 15 in The Congressional Record.

“One year later, she was named the only female member of the 24-person Ocean Spray Board of Directors,” Keating also noted. “When not busy with her bogs, Ellen took time out for philanthropy, serving on the women’s committee of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and donating generously to the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She also used her expertise to write a number of cookbooks.”

One of those cookbooks, “Ski Country Cookbook,” is available in 62 libraries worldwide. But her business success is not a source or pride, she says.

“I just did whatever seemed right at the time,” she said. “But I don’t feel any great pride in any of it.”

But there were a lot of  pioneering achievements in her professional life on which to look back, including her work at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where she headed international trips for the women’s committee as well as her first professional work at Ocean Spray. She installed a test kitchen and wrote the script for a cranberry news radio program which company founder Marcus Urann broadcast for growers.

“I began my lifelong career in cranberries when I started working for the cranberry cooperative in my hometown during the summer when I was 15,” she told reporter Roberta Roesch of King Features Syndicate in a 1968 column on summer jobs. “From that time on, I dreamed of owning cranberry bogs like other women dream of owning penthouses, diamonds and furs.”

She added that “work offers so much to women. I have four of them working for me in my cranberry bogs.”

She began at the company, then called Cranberry Canners, in the mailroom in 1932. One day, Urann asked her what she liked about the job.

“I said, ‘nothing,’” she recalled with a laugh. When he asked her what she wanted to do she told him she’d rather write. That led to her work in advertising — first with Ocean Spray where she launched a campaign to link chicken with cranberry sauce, and later with the Herman W. Stevens advertising agency. 

“I thought it was natural — chicken tastes like turkey,” she said. “We had International Silver make the dishes to hold one slice of cranberry sauce.”

She also bought cranberry bogs in 1937, which she owned until three years ago when Massachusetts Fish and Wildlife bought the land now called Burrage Wildlife Management Area.

“When I left, I was vice president of advertising,” she said of her tenure at Ocean Spray. But she remained on the Ocean Spray Board of Directors for several years. After Stillman left Ocean Spray’s board in 1969, the company went without a woman on its board of directors until Barbara Thomas was appointed in 2000.