32 Facts About Mary Colter

Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter was an American architect and designer.

Mary Colter was one of the very few female American architects in her day.

Mary Colter was the designer of many landmark buildings and spaces for the Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railroad, notably in Grand Canyon National Park.

Mary Colter's work had enormous influence as she helped to create a style, blending Spanish Colonial Revival and Mission Revival architecture with Native American motifs and Rustic elements, that became popular throughout the Southwest.

Mary Colter was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Irish immigrants William and Rebecca Crozier Colter.

Mary Colter's family moved to Colorado and Texas before settling down in St Paul, Minnesota, the town she considered to be her home, when Mary was eleven.

Mary Colter hid those drawings from her mother and so prevented them from being burned.

Mary Colter kept these same Sioux drawings for much of her life, bequeathing them to the Custer Battlefield National Monument in 1956.

Mary Colter graduated high school in 1883 at the age of 14.

Mary Colter promised that, when she graduated, she would return to St Paul to financially support her mother and older sister, who was chronically ill.

Mary Colter was taught by teachers including Arthur Frank Mathews, who painted the earliest known portrait of Colter.

Mary Colter taught at the Mechanic Arts High School for fifteen years and lectured at the University Extension School.

Mary Colter was a clubwoman, and gave several lectures and classes related to art.

Mary Colter was given the challenge of arranging salesrooms so tourists could imagine displaying goods in their homes.

Mary Colter worked with Charles Whittlesey on the El Tovar Hotel and began designing a curio shop.

Mary Colter continued teaching and her involvement in art and clubs in the city.

In 1908, Mary Colter moved with her mother and sister to Seattle to take a position developing the Decoration Department for the Frederick and Nelson department store in Seattle.

Mary Colter left the position in 1909, when her mother became ill and died.

The Mary Colter sisters returned to St Paul to bury their mother in the family plot.

Mary Colter began working full-time for the company in 1910, moving from interior designer to architect in a position based in Kansas City.

Mary Colter hired artists and artisans from the nearby pueblos to make the furniture.

Mary Colter created a series of remarkable works in the Grand Canyon National Park, mostly on the South Rim: the 1905 Hopi House, the 1914 Hermit's Rest and observatory Lookout Studio, and the 1932 Desert View Watchtower, a 70-foot-tall rock tower with a hidden steel structure, as well as the 1935 Bright Angel Lodge complex, and the 1922 Phantom Ranch buildings at the bottom of the canyon.

Mary Colter decorated, but did not design, the park's El Tovar Hotel.

Mary Colter worked with Pueblo Revival architecture, Spanish Colonial Revival architecture, Mission Revival architecture, Streamline Moderne, American Craftsman, and Arts and Crafts Movement styles, often synthesizing several together evocatively.

Mary Colter's work is credited with inspiring the Pueblo Deco style.

Mary Colter conceived Hermit's Rest as a sort of folly, as if it had been wired together by a reclusive mountain man.

Mary Colter insisted on her proposed name "Phantom Ranch" to capitalize on better mental images.

Mary Colter herself declared the 1930 La Posada Hotel to be her masterpiece.

Late in her career, Mary Colter designed the exuberant Harvey House restaurant at the 1939 Los Angeles Union Station.

Not long before her retirement, Mary Colter took on the 1947 renovation of the Painted Desert Inn in Arizona's Petrified Forest National Park.

Mary Colter donated her collection of Native American pottery and Indian relics to Mesa Verde National Park.

Mary Colter had to watch as many of her famous works were destroyed during her lifetime as automobile travel replaced train travel.