Annie Ford Wheeler was blessed with a peaceful and natural death at home on December 7, 2019, a week short of two years after the death of her husband of almost 75 years, Glynn Pearce Wheeler. A woman of rare compassion, wisdom, humility, fortitude, and intellect, she will be remembered with fondness and gratitude by the many who knew and loved her in this life.
Annie Ford was born May 13, 1920, to Herbert Ford Lester and Annie Pool Lester in Hamburg, a small farming community in Perry County, Alabama. She married Glynn Pearce Wheeler of Milan, Tennessee, on January 20, 1943, in Akron, Ohio.
She was predeceased by her parents, her husband, and a beloved brother, Lt. William M. Lester, U.S. Army Air Force. She is survived by her son, William Hollis Wheeler, and his wife, Patricia Hall Wheeler, of Bloomington, Indiana, and by her daughter, Anne Pearce Wheeler, and her husband, Richard A. Berliner, of Birmingham. She is also survived by two grandsons, Andrew Pearce Wheeler-Berliner of Birmingham and Nathan Lee Wheeler-Berliner, married to Tanya Fletcher Wheeler-Berliner, and their precious and precocious daughters, Emersyn Ann Wheeler and Ellington Ford Wheeler, all of Edgewater, Colorado.
After graduating from Perry County High School in 1937, Annie Ford received a B.A. degree from Athens College, now Athens State University, in 1941 with a major in Chemistry and a minor in Library Science. She worked for a few months as an analytical chemist with Kraft Cheese Co. and later with Alabama Ordinance Works in Childersburg, Alabama, where she met her future spouse. When war-time needs took him to work as a chemist in Akron, Ohio, he proposed that she join him there as his wife, a proposal she never regretted accepting. After marrying and moving to Ohio, she changed careers and accepted a job as librarian in the Tire Division of B.F. Goodrich Company, where Glynn was employed as a research chemist. Their son was born in Akron in February 1946.
With the end of World War II, the couple moved to Birmingham, where Glynn joined the newly organized Southern Research Institute and where their second child was soon born. During their children’s early years, Annie Ford was a fulltime mother and homemaker, with a brief stint as assistant librarian at Southern Research Institute.
In 1958 she joined the library staff of Howard College (now Samford University) where she worked on a part-time basis until both children had finished high school. She then dedicated herself as a full-time librarian, moving up the ranks from Special Collections cataloger to Associate Librarian for Collection Development, and a final two-year appointment as Acting University Librarian while a search was made for a replacement for the University’s longtime head librarian, F. Wilbur Helmbold. Throughout these years she served as mentor to generations of students who began coming to the library as work-study students and who, with her encouragement and inspiration, went on to become librarians themselves, serving in university and public libraries in Alabama and around the country. After she retired a number of her former students joined to endow a scholarship in her honor at the University of Alabama’s School of Library and Information Studies.
During her time at Samford Annie Ford developed a deep interest in genealogy and helped to spearhead the organization and development of Samford’s highly acclaimed Institute of Genealogy and Historical Research. She went on to serve as a lecturer in the Institute for a number of years and as Director her last two years at Samford.
Her years at Samford were a source of great joy for her. In retirement she continued her connection through the Retired Faculty Group, serving a term as its President. She was also a member of Delta Kappa Gamma (honorary society for women in education), the Birmingham chapter of the National League of American Pen Women, and the BIBS literary club.
In October of 1950, shortly after moving to Birmingham, Annie Ford and Glynn joined Trinity Methodist Church in Homewood, where they remained faithful members until their deaths. At Trinity she served as librarian, archivist and church historian, and vice-chair of the Administrative Board. She was a Sunday School teacher, youth leader, and sometime member of the UMW, and was a charter member of the Senior Adult Choir, later “The Trinity Singers.”
At the request of the senior minister, and with research help from a committee of four, she researched and authored the centennial history of Trinity United Methodist Church, published in 1989. The book received recognition from the General Commission on Archives and History of The United Methodist Church as being “what a church history should be like,” and it continues to serve as a model of its genre and a rich resource for persons interested in Homewood’s history.
Annie Ford was a long-time member of the United Methodist North Alabama Conference Commission on Archives and History, serving eight years as its chairperson, and was a charter member of the North Alabama Conference Historical Society, serving on its Board of Directors for many years. In recognition of her and Glynn’s service, the Conference in 2011 established the Glynn and Annie Ford Wheeler Award for Outstanding Contributions in the field of Methodist history and archives. For eight years she was a member of the Southeastern Jurisdiction Commission on Archives and History, and she served two terms as secretary of the Southeastern Jurisdiction Historical Society. She and Glynn were made Honorary Members of the Society in 2008.
With unlimited patience and determination, she ensured that her love of music and books, both inherited from her own mother, were passed on and nurtured in her children. She loved reading and had stored up in memory many of her favorite poems to feast on in solitude. She loved history – family history, local history, Alabama and Tennessee history. Together with her husband she published a history of Hamburg, Alabama, the Perry County Precinct in which she had grown up, covering the period from 1818 to the end of World War II. In recognition of their work she and Glynn received the History Preservation Award from the Perry County Historical and Preservation Society. She published a photography-filled family history entitled “Days of Our Lives” as an anniversary gift for her husband. Several papers she presented at meetings were later published in The Alabama Librarian and The Alabama Review. She was one of a committee of three that oversaw the publication of the history of Homewood, written by Sheryl Spradley Summe in 2001.
She loved country living and gardening, and after retiring she and Glynn pursued both at Breezy Knoll, the small farm in Chilton County she inherited from her parents. At the age of 95 she could still be seen on hands and knees weeding the blueberry bushes and vegetable gardens from which she harvested and prepared delicious meals for her family and friends. In their mid-90s they were still working as a team to peel, prepare, and freeze fresh peaches for scrumptious mid-winter desserts.
Annie Ford was buried beside her husband in the Oakwood Cemetery in Milan, Tennessee on December 10. A memorial service will be held on Sunday, December 29, at 2:00, p.m., in the Ireland Room of the Birmingham Botanical Gardens, with visitation beginning at 1:00 p.m. Friends are invited to remember her through donations to the Annie Ford Wheeler Endowed Scholarship at the University of Alabama’s School of Library and Information Studies, the Wheeler Scholarship for the Fine and Performing Arts at Birmingham-Southern College, Trinity United Methodist Church, or the Birmingham Botanical Gardens. And by memorizing your own favorite poem and reading a new and wonderful book.
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