Township trustee erected churches

5/27/2003

JENERA, Ohio - Marion Bormuth, a former trustee in southern Hancock County's Van Buren Township who was a farmer, truck driver, and volunteer church builder and lived on the farm where he was born, died Friday in St. Vincent Mercy Medical Center.

He was 79 and apparently died of a stroke a week after a blood vessel in his head broke. He had been in good health and was sharpening blades for a large mower when he was stricken, his son Samuel said.

Mr. Bormuth was a trustee from 1988 to 1999 in Van Buren Township. One of the trustees' main duties was personally operating the township's two snow plows on its 28 miles of road. He was a Republican and was unopposed as a trustee candidate.

He lived on a farm southwest of Jenera for all but seven years of his life, during which he lived on another farm about two miles away. He milked Holstein cows for about 30 years, beginning in the late 1950s with only about 10 cows and retiring at age 65 with about 85 cows milking. He worked with his son, Steve, in the dairy for years.

The Bormuths raised corn, soybeans, and wheat on several hundred acres.

“It was a way of life for him,” said Lowell Rossman, the Van Buren Township clerk, who had known Mr. Bormuth for decades.

He still drove a tractor-trailer in northwest Ohio for Findlay Cartage Co., where he had worked about nine years. Earlier, he had driven a truck for a moving and storage company and had been employed at Great Western Sugar Co. as a mechanic and earlier a line worker.

Mr. Bormuth and his wife, the former Luella Smith Yoakum, enjoyed Builders for Christ, a volunteer group building Evangelical Lutheran churches. Mr. Bormuth liked framing the buildings and his wife helped served food to the workers. They slept in their camper on those trips and had planned to work on another such project this month.

The Bormuths married in 1950 and after Mr. Bormuth retired they enjoyed traveling to the Middle East where they rode a camel and toured Biblical sites, Alaska, and the West Coast.

He was a lifelong member of Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jenera and had been a church trustee. He liked to hunt mushrooms in Michigan and make dandelion wine.

Surviving are his wife, Luella; sons, Steven and Samuel; daughter, Stephanie Beach; stepson, Wayne Yoakum; brother, Herbert; sisters, Elizabeth Bower, Elnora Rossman, Ruby Bower, Delores Von Stein, and Ruth Wilson; 11 grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

Funeral services are scheduled for 11 a.m. today in Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church. Crates Funeral Home, Arlington, is handling arrangements.

The family requests tributes to the church.