Lodowick Farmer (d. by 8 June 1780), member of the Convention of 1776, was the son of Henry Farmer and Sarah Ward Farmer, who at the time of his birth probably resided south of the James River near the fall line in the area that in 1749 became Chesterfield County. Farmer's life is poorly documented, but it is likely that he was born in the mid- or late 1720s and that early in the 1750s he married Sarah Cheatham. They had at least eight sons and at least four daughters. A namesake son served as a militia officer during the American Revolution. British troops captured him at Point of Fork in Fluvanna County and held him until after the Battle of Yorktown. On 17 July 1750 and 12 December 1751, Henry Farmer executed two deeds that transferred 150 acres of land to his son, Lodowick Farmer, for a nominal sum, suggesting that the son may have recently come of age or married.
For about a decade Lodowick Farmer resided in Dale Parish near Osborne's tobacco warehouse in Chesterfield County. He became an assistant to the county sheriff in July 1758, which provided him with some income at tax-collection time, and the following December a lieutenant in the county militia. On 1 May 1761 Farmer was sworn in as a member of the Chesterfield County Court, but in December of that year he purchased 399 acres of land in Lunenburg County, the first of several tracts that he acquired there. He moved to the county by January 1762.
For the next decade and a half Farmer slowly increased his property holdings and raised his family. He evidently never broke into the ranks of the county's leading families, but he won election to the House of Burgesses in September 1769 and became a member of the Lunenburg County Court in November 1770. Farmer's service in the assembly was brief and unremarkable. He arrived a few days late at the November session in 1769 and was added to the Committee of Courts of Justice, but he took a leave of absence before the assembly adjourned. During the session in June 1770 Farmer also sought and received permission to leave before adjournment. He evidently failed to appear at the subsequent session in July 1771 and was not reelected later that year to the assembly that convened in February 1772.
On 11 April 1776 Farmer won election to the fifth and last of the colony's Revolutionary Conventions that met from 6 May through 5 July. The shifting loyalties of the county's occasionally fractious electorate may have worked in his favor. That same month more than 200 Lunenburg men signed a petition denouncing a previous convention's ordinance that permitted the exemption of overseers from military service. The petitioners complained that the exemption worked a hardship on poor famers and had driven some unscrupulous men into overseeing in order to escape military service. Farmer was the first man to sign the petition, and two of his sons also signed. He served on the Committee of Privileges and Elections during the convention and was probably present when the convention unanimously voted on 15 May to instruct Virginia's delegates in the Continental Congress to introduce a resolution for independence and again on 12 June when the convention unanimously adopted the Declaration of Rights. He was definitely present on 29 June when the convention unanimously adopted a written constitution for Virginia, but later that day, a few minutes after the convention elected Patrick Henry governor of the new independent Commonwealth of Virginia, Farmer sought and was granted leave to be absent for the remainder of the convention's sessions. He then picked up £7 17s 6d from the Committee of Safety to compensate men in Lunenburg County who had supplied arms for the county's company of minutemen.
By virtue of his election to the convention in April 1776, Farmer was eligible to attend the first meeting of the House of Delegates in October of that year. He once again served on the Committee of Privileges and Elections. The following spring Farmer either chose not to stand for reelection or was defeated. He was prosperous enough by 1779 to offer a $100 reward for the return of one of his enslaved workers who had escaped bondage, and on 10 February 1780 when, with the honorable title of gentleman, he was elected to the vestry of Cumberland Parish and appointed a church warden, he owned more than 600 acres of land in Lunenburg and Charlotte Counties and more than twenty enslaved workers. Later in the spring of that year he fell ill. Lodowick Farmer, "weak in body" when he made his will on 8 May 1780, died on an unrecorded date between then and 8 June 1780, when the will was proved in the Lunenburg County Court.
Sources Consulted:
Incompletely documented family history in Landon C. Bell, Cumberland Parish, Lunenburg County, Virginia, 1746–1816: Vestry Book, 1746–1816 (1930), 207–209, 443, 444, and Ellery Farmer, comp., Descendants of Thomas Farmer Who Came to Virginia in 1616: A Genealogy (1956), 17–18; Chesterfield Co. Deed Book, 1:428–429, 453–454, 5:373–374; Chesterfield Co. Order Book, 2:436, 481, 3:123; numerous references in Lunenburg Co. Deed Book 7, 9, 11, and 13; Williamsburg Virginia Gazette (Purdie and Dixon), 28 Sept. 1769; Williamsburg Virginia Gazette (Dixon and Nicolson), 9 Oct. 1779; Henry R. McIlwaine, Wilmer L. Hall, and Benjamin J. Hillman, eds., Executive Journals of the Council of Colonial Virginia (1925–1966), 6:378; William J. Van Schreeven, Robert L. Scribner, and Brent Tarter, eds., Revolutionary Virginia, the Road to Independence: A Documentary Record (1973–1983), 6:377, 380, 474–477, 7:23, 61, 655, 662; Lunenburg Co. Will Book, 3:43–46 (quotation).