January 1977 brought winter at its worst to northern Ohio. In Lima, stubbornly frigid temperatures — the average for the month was about 12 degrees — and a parade of snowstorms topped off by a doozy at the end of the month brought life to a near standstill. Fuel supplies ran low, and persistent winds piled the snow into dune-like drifts across roads.
It even slowed Martha Farmer, Ohio State University-Lima’s ever-energetic one-woman theater department, who was directing Maxwell Anderson’s romantic tragedy “Winterset” at the campus theater.
Late February found Farmer, relentless as the winter, trying to make up for lost January rehearsals as the play’s early March opening loomed. “
’Okay. All in place. Act 1, Scene 1,’” Farmer directed her student and staff actors, according to a Feb. 27, 1977, story in The Lima News. “’Come on, it’s early morning. They got you out of bed, and you’d rather be elsewhere.’’’
With that, The Lima News wrote, the 50-year-old Farmer jumped “three feet onto the OSU-Lima auditorium stage, hard at work …”
Unlike the characters in the scene she was directing, Farmer was exactly where she wanted to be.
Between 1950 and her death in 2011, Farmer was involved in every aspect of local theater as an actor, producer, director and teacher, often working in concert with her husband, Robert Farmer. She even, on occasion, applied the makeup.
In 1970, Farmer established OSU-Lima’s theater department and served as a professor of theater there for 15 years. She established the M.W. Farmer Theater Scholarship Endowment in 1984 and created the Martha W. Farmer Endowed Professorship in Theater in 2010. OSU-Lima’s Reed Hall auditorium, where Farmer toiled to get “Winterset” ready in February 1977, was dedicated as the Martha W. Farmer Theater for the Performing Arts in 2004.
Farmer was also involved with the Lima Art Association (now known as ArtSpace) and Encore Theater, and she served on the boards of the Lima Symphony Orchestra and St. Rita’s Medical Center.
She was born Nov. 26, 1926, in Toledo to Cletus V. and Vera Smith Wolfe. Her father, born in Seneca County, had been a teacher and high school principal at Bloomville, Prospect and Urbana before completing his law degree in 1921. He was a government and law professor at the University of Toledo and also was director of the Morris Plan, a system created to help middle-class clients obtain loans, at a bank in Canton and reorganized the United Savings and Loan Association of Toledo.
In 1944, Wolfe became president of the Gramm Trailer Corp. in Delphos and moved his family, which by then included daughters Helen, Marilyn and Martha, and son Frederic into a home at 104 Rosewood Drive. He later served as president of the Western Ohio Lumber Co. and founded the Lima Lumber Company.
His daughter, meanwhile, was a student at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, pursuing her passion for drama.
“Miss Martha Wolfe, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. C.V. Wolfe, 104 Rosewood Drive, sophomore at Vassar College, is serving as head of the properties crew for Henrik Ibsen’s ‘Peer Gynt,’ which will be presented in the Vassar Experimental theatre Friday and Saturday nights,” The Lima News reported March 10, 1946. During her years at Vassar, she would participate in many productions.
She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in drama in May 1948 and, by the autumn of that year, worked toward her master’s degree at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, where she graduated in June 1949.
A year later, in June 1950, she was engaged to Robert Madison S. Farmer, of Cleveland Heights, with the engagement being announced during a dinner at the Wolfe family home, which by then was at 1624 Shawnee Road.
“Miss Wolfe received her bachelor of arts degree from Vassar college. She received both her master of arts and master of fine arts degrees from Western Reserve university, where she was on the staff as director of the Mather Curtain Players. Mr. Farmer attended Wayne university in Detroit, was graduated from Western Reserve university and received his master of arts degree there,” The Lima News reported.
The couple married in July 1950 and settled into life in Lima, with both working at Lima Lumber and raising their children, Megan and Robert Jr. They also threw themselves into Lima’s cultural life.
Robert, a veteran of World War II, was an accomplished artist and potter and used his skills to become a scenery and lighting designer. Martha, who joined the American Association of University Women and the Junior Service League, talked about, taught, performed, produced and directed theater seemingly everywhere in Lima.
From dramatizing stories by O’Henry and Stephen Laycock for a Christmas meeting of the AAUW in mid-December 1951 to holding a theater makeup workshop in her home at 1555 Crayton Ave. in November 1955, Farmer did what she loved. She also co-wrote and helped produce musical comedies and revues to be performed by members of the Junior Service League.
By the 1960s, Farmer also was acting in Encore Theater productions. In 1961 alone, she appeared in “The Crucible,” Henry Miller’s tale of the Salem witch trials, and Lewis Gilbert’s romantic comedy, “The Admirable Crichton.”
In February 1965, she took over the role of Madame Lyubov Ranevsky in Anton Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” at Ohio Northern when the original actress had to drop out. Farmer, News columnist Hope Strong wrote Feb. 16, 1965, “has found the way to be a successful homemaker and mother, while still pursuing certain ‘hobbies,’ usually construed to be ‘arty’ like acting and art.”
The hobby became something more in 1970 when she was named theater instructor at the OSU-Lima campus. She continued to appear in Encore productions and pursue her other “arty” hobbies.
In late 1984, Farmer announced she would be stepping down.
“For the past 15 years, Martha Farmer has been a one-woman theater department of OSU-Lima,” The Lima News wrote Dec. 30, 1984. “In 1970, she founded the Lima Campus Theater and for the past decade and a half, she has taught every drama class offered by the school. She has produced and directed nearly 50 plays in that time, and she also has acted in a number of productions.”
However, The Lima News added, “when the grand dame ends her 15-year stint as matriarch of the campus theater, she will not depart without leaving her mark.” That mark was a scholarship fund, seeded with $20,000 from the retiring associate professor.
Farmer added to that legacy in March 2000.
“Martha W. Farmer remembers the sparse times for the theater department at OSU-Lima. During the early 1970s, the performance areas had no curtains, no drapes and limited space,” The Lima News wrote in announcing Farmer’s donation to renovate the Reed Hall Auditorium.
“I had a dream of a real theater,” she told The Lima News. “Now this is the place to come see Shakespeare.”
In August 2002, a “wall-breaking” ceremony marked the beginning of $1.3 million in renovations to the auditorium, funded by Farmer.
She died Jan. 12, 2011, at her residence. She was 84 years old. Robert Farmer had died two years earlier, on Jan. 22, 2009, at the age of 88.
“It is not hyperbole to say Martha Farmer was one of the greatest patrons the Lima arts community has ever known,” The Lima News wrote Jan. 13, 2011. “But friends will tell you, it was not the checks she wrote that made the real difference. It was her unflappable belief that Lima was worthy of great art.”
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