Martha Louise McFadden

Martha Louise McFadden Quimby passed away Saturday, September 20, 2025, following a short illness. Martha was born January 30, 1944, a daughter of George Glen and Edna Louise Grimes McFadden. The family lived in Cadiz, Ohio for a few years then moved to a farm near Piedmont, Ohio, where she grew up with her older brother, Dale harvesting crops and helping take care of the farm's cows and sheep. Her father operated a sawmill where both Dale and Martha learned about harvesting and marketing timber. She attended Barretts Grade School, where she found a lifelong friend, Sandra June Wallace Hoyte. The Barretts class of four graduated following eighth grade. At that time, the Harrison County two- and three-room country school districts were consolidated with established high school districts. The McFadden family was assigned across township boundaries to Freeport High School, where Martha attended her freshman year but then transferred to Cadiz High, where she joined her Barretts classmates following her father's campaign to restore district boundaries before his untimely death in 1958. Accompanying her father while he campaigned ignited a lifelong interest in politics. She graduated from Cadiz High with the Class of 1961. She earned a BA in History with a minor in Government from Ohio University graduating Cum Laude January 30, 1965. In the fall of 1965, she began a five-year career teaching history and senior government at the newly consolidated Claymont City Schools in Uhrichsville, Ohio. She served as Senior Class Sponsor, advised a delegation of Claymont seniors representing Paraguay to a Mock UN at Capital University in Columbus, oversaw the founding of a student council, and was selected with a small group of fellow government teachers to attend a weeklong internship with the Ohio State Legislature. Martha ever after referred to the graduating classes she taught as "her kids" and was known to have damp eyes as she rode the bus with the graduating classes back to the school, returning their gowns and meeting their parents. She married, left Ohio in 1970, and moved to Pennsylvania to raise two accomplished daughters. She coached their softball teams, circulated petitions, and campaigned to elect an entire new school board at one point. She served on a United Church of Christ workgroup to raise awareness of world hunger and lobbied in Washington on its behalf. She testified before the State Utility Commission for telephone fairness (before cell phones made that crusade unnecessary), and the State House of Representatives on behalf of non-custodial parents as the executive director of the Harrisburg Chapter of Fathers' And Children's Equality, a non-profit representing the interests of non-custodial parents. She did some substitute teaching in the Harrisburg area including a full year at Middletown Area School District only to realize education had changed too much for her comfort in the classroom. She retrained by earning an Accounting Diploma from Elizabethtown College then took a position with the Pennsylvania Department of Labor & Industry, Unemployment Tax as an auditor. She went on to earn a Master of Public Administration Degree from Pennsylvania State University-Harrisburg. She worked for Unemployment Tax in Harrisburg, York, and Washington, Pa. Following retirement in 2013, she began one of the most rewarding periods of her life. She began reading history, real history not the watered down and slanted version of history taught in American schools and colleges, but history researched and written by real historians. She was preceded in death by her father; mother; and older brother, Everett Dale, who lived at the time in Tacoma, Wash. She is survived by her younger brother and fellow red head, Dr. George William McFadden of Portland, Ore.; her daughters, Sarah Elizabeth Quimby (Mark Lazar) residing in Minneapolis and working as a librarian at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, and Christine Carol Quimby (Paul Martz) of Harrisburg (another red head), who works as a research project manager at the Penn State College of Medicine; as well as nieces and grandnieces in Seattle, Wash. There will be a service for family and friends at the Tall Grass Prairie National Reserve in Kansas. Martha will forever see her beloved wide open spaces and hear the wind rustling through the high grasses.