Robin Limpus Ulmer

Robin Jeanne Limpus Ulmer passed away peacefully in Middlebury, Vermont, on the morning of December 29, 2025. She was born on March 4, 1941, the daughter of Katherine and Robert Limpus of Kalamazoo, Michigan. She attended Western Michigan University as an undergraduate and studied abroad in Mexico City and Madrid (where she learned to play flamenco guitar). She was selected as the first WMU alumnus to serve in the Peace Corps in Ibadan, Nigeria, in 1961. After two years teaching high school history in Ibadan, she returned to Michigan, completing her graduate work in History at Michigan State University in 1964. In 1965, she married Albert C. Ulmer (who also served in the Peace Corps in Nigeria) and moved with him to Atlanta, GA, where they worked together in the Civil Rights Movement. In the late 1960s, she and Al moved to North Carolina to help set up co-ops and credit unions in the Appalachian mountain region.
They built a log and stone home in Boone, North Carolina, and farmed. In 1972, after the sudden death of their first child Laurel, they left the mountains, eventually settling in Williston, Vermont, with their second child Spring. While Al began honing his stone masonry craft, Robin worked at the University of Vermont's center for science, math, and computer technology, and went back to school for environmental studies at UVM. She worked for a time at the Association in Rural Development at the UVM School of Natural Resources, prototyping early solar energy systems, and then took a job as Special Projects Director at Vermont Rural Education Center (where her 20 hitch-hiking purples plywood cows that boasted pre-addressed postcards to document their travels, made to raise awareness of migrant dairy farmers, drew the attention of The New York Times), and, after she and Al moved to Essex, New York, she served as Executive Director for the Boquet River Association (BRASS) for fourteen years, earning many accolades, including the 1998 Adirondack Park Stewardship Award. During her tenure at BRASS, she traveled to Lake Biwa in Japan and Lake Ohrid in Macedonia to share her knowledge as a water protector.
Robin enjoyed playing tennis, gardening (she grew a pick-your-own strawberry patch for some years and was a master gardener), tapestry weaving (and all manner of crafts), and tap dancing. She was known for her artistic abilities, her intellectual prowess, her kindness, and her environmental stewardship. She lived on little, loved her local library and bakery, was fiercely independent (shoveling her entire driveway well into her eighties), and was politically involved in solidarity work and anti-war organizing. She was a loving mother and grandmother to her surviving daughter Spring and grandson André Obediah.