Margaret Fisher Linvill, 88, matriarch of the family that has owned and operated Linvilla Orchards in Media for five generations, has died, writes Bonnie Cook in The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Linvill met her future husband, Paul Linvill, at a Quaker work camp in Mexico. They married in 1957. Paul’s father, Arthur, and grandmother, Lydia, purchased the farmland in 1914.
Mrs. Linvill was a former educator, teaching at Friends’ Central in Wynnewood and the Westtown School. She stopped teaching to raise four children and help at the family farm – a 300-acre fruit, produce, and entertainment business along West Knowlton Road in Middletown Township.
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She started and managed the gift shop, located upstairs in the farm’s octagonal barn, for many years. The 80-foot-tall structure was built in 1889. It was destroyed by fire in 2002 and replaced by a one-story farm market.
Mrs. Linvill also created the farm’s Pumpkinland, a popular attraction with a harvest theme. Families flock to the site on fall weekends to pick pumpkins, take a hayride, and enjoy scary Halloween figures.
Read more about Margaret Linvill in The Philadelphia Inquirer by clicking here.
