Mary Louise Hammar

Mary Hammar, age 89, of St. James passed away on Tuesday, October 8, 2019 at Pleasant View Good Samaritan Society in St. James. A memorial visitation will be held on Friday, October 18, 2019 from 5-7pm at Sturm Funeral Home in St. James. Private burial will take place at Ft. Snelling National Cemetery in Minneapolis. Mary Louise Textor was born on May 24, 1930 in Ithaca, New York to parents Gordon and Mary (Ryan) Textor. Her father was a mathematician at West Point, NY and spent a large part of his Army career working for the Army Corps of Engineers. As he was sent to work on various infrastructure projects across the country the family was required to pick up and move regularly. At the outbreak of WWII they were stationed in Panama and then sent to Berlin where she met her later husband Conrad Hammar, Jr. When she returned to the States after the war she attended Cornell University for one year. At the end of her first year of college she accepted a marriage proposal from Conrad and they travelled together back to Germany where their families were still stationed in American-occupied Germany. In June of 1950 they were married at the home of her parents in Frankfurt, Germany. The couple made their home on the campus of the University of Minnesota for a couple years while they both finished their education. They moved to St. James in 1952 where Conrad spent the next 50+ years farming the family farm. In the early 60s they purchased a second home in the Washington, D.C. area where Mary became a real estate agent and broker for nearly twenty years. Throughout her married life she considered herself a Minnesotan spending June through October in St James and every Christmas holiday since the fifties. In the early 1980s they sold the home on the east coast and purchased a winter home in Donna, TX. For the next 30 years she spent winters in Texas with her younger son, Christopher. While living in Texas Mary was the president of several garden clubs and trained to become a Master Floral Judge traveling around the region to participate in and judge competitions. When her husband passed in 2010 she became a year round St James resident living by herself on the farm. And in 2017 she moved into town to Prairie View. She is survived by her children; Conrad Hammar of St. James, Katrina Hammar of St. Peter, Christopher Hammar of Donna, TX, and Sonja Hammar of Port Townsend, WA, and a sister Gretchen (Wallace) Greene of Potomac Falls, Virginia. She is preceded in death by her husband, parents and sister Carla. Visitation 1 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm Friday, October 18, 2019 Sturm Funeral Home, St. James Chapel 906 - 10th Ave. S. St. James, Minnesota, United States 56081 Interment Information Ft. Snelling National Cemetery Address not given Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States 55450