M. Meade Palmer Memorial Fund

The following represents the Eligibility Principles that the M. Meade Palmer Memorial Fund creators believe best represent their goals for the grant. These grant guidelines are specific to this grant. Northern Piedmont Community Foundation has a set of grant guidelines for all the grant cycles we run throughout the year.

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The M. Meade Palmer Memorial Fund conducts a broad based grant-making program which provides vital funding for all aspects of community well being. Resources are concentrated geographically to preserve and enhance the quality of life to residents of Culpeper, Fauquier, Madison and Rappahannock.

M. Meade Palmer Biography

Mr. Meade Palmer was born in Washington and raised in Arlington, where he graduated from Washington-Lee High School. After graduating from Cornell University, he worked on a master plan for Arlington County's planning department. He also worked for a landscape architect in Richmond.

He served as a naval intelligence officer in the South Pacific during World War and remained there after the war as a civilian to work on housing reconstruction.

He opened his office in Warrenton in 1948. For a time, he was a part-time county zoning administrator in Fauquier County.

His honors included the 1991 American Society of Landscape Architects Medal, that organization's highest award. He also won honorable mention in the design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and participated in the competition for the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial.

The 17-acre LBJ Memorial Grove, that Mr. Palmer designed, was built in the mid-1960s with funds raised privately across the nation, is in Lady Bird Johnson Park and features a 19-foot-tall granite monolith. The grove's serpentine trails are shaded by hundreds of white pine and dogwood trees and edged with azalea and rhododendron bushes. There are thousands of daffodils in bloom there in the spring.

Mr. Palmer did landscape design at Washington National Cathedral and St. Albans School, Bull Run National Park in Manassas, Mason Neck State Park in Fairfax County and the Organization of American States. Other projects included the U-Va. president's residence, Boars Head Inn in Charlottesville, Carters Grove at Williamsburg and the Colonial Highway between Jamestown and Yorktown, the Fauquier Veterans Memorial and James Madison University.

Mr. Palmer, who practiced for more than 60 years, was a founding member of the Partnership for Warrenton. He did design work in the Old Town section, including the street lamps the partnership installed on Main Street and around the courthouse and jail.

Meade was professor emeritus of landscape architecture at the University of Virginia, where he taught courses in plant identification and planting design for more than 30 years.

When U-Va. honored him for his teaching career by planting a tree in his name, he chose a dove tree, which has white flowers that look like birds. He said in an interview with the ThirdAge Daily News Letter that having a tree named in his honor pleased him because his father, a contractor, hauled memorial trees for planting on the Mall in Washington.

He was chairman of the council of fellows of the American Society of Landscape Architects and first vice president of the society. He was an adviser to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, American Horticultural Society and National Park Service, and a member of St. James Episcopal Church in Warrenton.

Mr. Palmer was married to Isabelle Palmer, with whom he raised one daughter, Sarah. He died July 16, 2001.