He tended to cows and community

C. Edward Zimmerman, 97, a retired dairy farmer formerly of Whitpain Township, died March 26 at Foulkeways, the retirement community in Gwynedd he helped found.

For more than 30 years, Mr. Zimmerman and his younger brother, Merrill, operated Silver Lake Farm in Whitpain. Their ancestor Christopher Zimmerman had purchased the land from a deputy of William Penn's in the late 1600s.

For years, schoolchildren toured the 100-acre farm and saw its herd of more than 50 dairy cows. The brothers were honored in 1960 as master farmers of the year by Pennsylvania Farmer magazine.

In 1965, Mr. Zimmerman was one of 12 farmers from the United States and Canada selected to join the International Farmer Advisory Board. He traveled to Sicily, Venezuela and Denmark for the board, exchanging ideas with other farmers. He and his brother continued to work the land on the farm for several years after selling the dairy herd in 1969.

Mr. Zimmerman grew up on Silver Lake Farm and attended a one-room schoolhouse. He graduated from Whitpain High School and studied electrical engineering at what is now Drexel University and became an electrician. In 1931, he gave up his business and returned to farming. It was the Depression, his daughter Mary Ott said, and his father, Clarence, needed his help.

The next year, Mr. Zimmerman married Blanche Perkins. Eventually they joined his brother and his brother's wife, Louise, to run the farm. "We pulled together like a good team of horses," Mr. Zimmerman wrote in his 1997 memoir,

Down on the Farm

.

"He was an innovator with a lifelong passion for inventing, tinkering, building and working with all things mechanical," his daughter said. He was responsible for the farm's evolution from a manually operated system to a fully mechanized one, she said.

Mr. Zimmerman was a 4-H leader and a past president of the Centre Square Fire Company in Whitpain. He served on the Whitpain school board and in the 1960s he was involved in the establishment of vocational schools in Montgomery County and Montgomery County Community College.

He was a member of the Gwynedd Friends Meeting and served on the committee that proposed the establishment of an innovative life-care community on 67 acres that had been donated to the meeting. Foulkeways, the first Quaker-run life-care community in the country, opened in 1967.

Mr. Zimmerman and his wife moved from Silver Lake Farm to Foulkeways in 1988.

Though most of the land was sold, the Zimmerman family still owns the farmhouse and barn on five acres.

Blanche Zimmerman died in 1999, and Merrill Zimmerman in 2006. Mr. Zimmerman's son Mark died in 1968.

In addition to his daughter, he is survived by his wife of nine years, Bernadette; son Paul; five grandchildren; seven great-grandchildren; and a great-great-granddaughter.

A memorial service will begin at 2 p.m. Saturday at Gwynedd Friends Meeting, DeKalb and Sumneytown Pikes, Gwynedd.

Memorial donations may be made to Gwynedd Friends Meeting, Box 142, Gwynedd, Pa. 19436.