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A life built around helping others.
About Richard and Frances Rumley
Richard and Frances Rumley spent their lives opening their door. Family, neighbors, friends, and strangers all found a place at their table. Their way of helping was never formal or planned. It was personal, immediate, and grounded in kindness.
The Rumley Foundation exists to continue exactly that.
How they lived
Their home outside Charleston was the clearest picture of who they were.
It was full of life and full of people, a place where help was always close at hand.
Richard Rumley
Richard spent his career as a social worker for the state, a role that fit his nature exactly. He was happiest when he was useful. He grew vegetables and flowers in remarkable abundance, starting tomatoes from seed each winter and sharing the harvest with neighbors, shut‑ins, and people he had never met. He taught Bible study for more than sixty years and lived its lessons in plain, daily acts of kindness.
Frances "Fanny" Rumley
Frances was the steady heart of her community. Trinity United Methodist Church was her family's church, and she carried that legacy forward as its organist for more than forty years, alongside leading crafts for vacation Bible school and giving her time wherever it was needed. She also built a career that was rare for a woman of her generation, starting at the telephone company at sixteen, earning her degree at night while working full time, and rising to become the highest‑ranking woman supervisor of engineers in her region. She was endlessly creative with her hands. She rarely made just one of anything, sewing and crocheting and quilting by the hundreds so that anyone who visited could be sent home with something to keep.
Together they welcomed people from many places into their home over the years. That openness shaped how naturally they gave, and it stayed with them their whole lives.
How they helped others
The Rumleys did not wait to be asked. Most Sunday afternoons they gathered what was ripe in the garden and made the rounds to the elderly and the homebound, sometimes staying only ten minutes, because they understood what steady, continuous contact meant to someone who was alone. If they heard that anyone was unwell or struggling, they showed up with food, a flower, a card, or a quiet hand. They believed, as Richard often said, that a small act of kindness has the power to change someone's day, and that those days add up to a changed life.
They helped everyone the same way, without judgment and without expectation. They built relationships, not transactions.
Why the Foundation was created
Richard and Frances left their earthly assets to create the Rumley Foundation so that their way of helping would outlast them. What they once did personally, one neighbor at a time, the foundation now does at a larger scale, supporting the organizations that care for this community every day.
Their legacy, continued
The Rumleys are no longer here to knock on a neighbor's door. But the care they gave is still moving through this community, now carried by the people and programs they would have helped themselves.
