January 31, 2018 • 33 mins
Mary-Russel Ferrell Colton was a painter, author and educator. But she's most famous for co-founding of the Museum of Northern Arizona and related programs and projects intended to preserve and continue the art traditions of the Colorado Plateau.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And today's
episode was actually inspired by our coworker Julie. Uh again, Yes,
(00:23):
Julie and I hang out a lot, so I got
lots of cool stuff from her. But also she just
came back from a trip through the American Southwest. And
when she came back, we had lunch and she was
talking about Mary Russell Coulton with such fascination and delight
that I was like, I'm going to look this person
up and will maybe do a show on her. And
we did. Uh. Mary Russell Ferrell Colton was a painter.
(00:44):
We're not going to talk a lot about her painting, Uh,
we'll mention it. But she was also an author and
an educator. But the thing that makes her the most
famous is the co founding of the Museum of Northern
Arizona and related programs and projects intended to preserve and
continue the art tradition of the Colorado Plateau. So quick
(01:05):
geographical reminder slash overview the Colorado Plateau overlaps the four
corners region of the southwestern United States. That's just where Colorado, Utah,
New Mexico, and Arizona all meet, and it is, per
the National Park Service, quote, one of the world's premier
natural showcases for earth history. There are volcanic mountains, plateaus, buttes,
(01:28):
and canyons, and a lot of National parks in the area. Uh. Yeah,
it's one of those things. I feel like people don't
always think about how much human history is contained in
these areas as well. We sort of associate I've talked
about it before archaeology is something that happens elsewhere, but
it's very Uh, there are a lot of really impressive
digs that have happened in the area. We'll talk a
(01:49):
little bit about some of those. Flagstaff, Arizona, which becomes
a really focal point of Mary Russell Colton's story, is
on the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau and there
are six different ecological zones that can all be experienced
within a hundred miles of Flagstaff and a wealth of
history going back into prehistory. So it's a pretty incredible place.
(02:11):
There are a lot of Native American tribes in the
area as well, including the Zuni, have a Supie, Navajo,
Hopie Ute, Willapie, Southern Piute, and piet Uh. And because
Mary Russell Colton worked with several of those Native American tribes,
that is why we mentioned them in this little intro piece.
(02:33):
But now we're going to transition specifically to Mary Russell's story.
She was born Mary Russell Farrell in Louisville, Kentucky, on
March nine, to parents Joseph Librand Farrell and engineer and
Elase Houston. The Houston side of the family was wealthy
and filled with really prominent members of society. Her grandfather
(02:53):
was Chief Justice of Tennessee Supreme Court, and they were
related to Sam Houston, the seventh Governor of Texas, and
through marriage, they were related to James K. Polk. As
a child, Mary Russell was curious and inquisitive, and she
loved learning, but her education in her younger years was
pretty informal. She was drawn to art from the time
she was small, though, and she had decided that it
(03:15):
would be her career path before she became a teenager.
When Mary was just fifteen, her father, Joseph died suddenly,
and while he had been a really good provider and
had done well for himself. At the time of his passing,
the family was in a tight situation financially. They had
just you know, kind of had one of those little
dips of income, and unfortunately that is when he died.
(03:37):
So at least her mother was forced to sell items
from the household to make ends meet. And it was
only through the patronage of a family friend that Mary
Russell was able to attend art school in nineteen o four.
That family friend was Mrs Annie Walbridge, and thanks to her,
Mary Russell began taking classes at the Philadelphia School of
Design for Women when she was just fifteen. The school
(03:58):
was intended as a place where respectable women who found
themselves needing to be their own bread winners could learn
how to do so through a career in art. Yeah.
This was you know, talking about post industry or part
of the Industrial Revolution, where there were more and more
instances where women were sort of finding themselves needing to
figure out how to make an income, and particularly for
(04:21):
women from wealthier families, art seemed like a good possibility.
And Mary Russell practiced and studied all kinds of art,
but she really gravitated towards oils as her preferred medium.
She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts and then went
on to a year of post graduate work. She wasn't
particularly disposed to socializing, but she was generally well liked
(04:42):
by her peers at school. During this time, her mother
also remarried. This was something of a surprise, but she
remarried a successful publisher named Theodore Presser, and that marriage
provided both Elise and her daughter, Mary Russell financial stability
for the rest of their lives. After her postgraduate work,
Mary Russell and two other students opened their own art
(05:05):
studio in downtown Philadelphia, where they could all work. She
also made money working for museums to restore art, and
she did various work for higher art projects. Mary Russell
at this point was still living with her mother and
her stepfather, but she was not getting along particularly well
with Theodore Presser. They had just tension between them, so
(05:26):
Alice hatched a plan for Mary Russell to take a
trip to ease some of that tension in the household.
This trip was a hiking expedition in British Columbia in
nine and Mary Russell really fell in love with the freedom,
the hiking and the terrain of the West. When another
opportunity to go on another similar expedition came up the
(05:47):
following year. Mary Russell was delighted, and at one of
the planning meetings she met Dr Harold Seller's Coulton, who
was a professor of zoology at the University of Pennsylvania. Colton,
like Mary Russell, had family money and his work as
a professor was more of a passion than an income generator. Yeah,
he really didn't make that much money teaching compared to
(06:09):
what he already had in the bank uh from his family,
and he also made some good investments along the way.
And Colton was interested in this trip, but the organizer
was unsure if he would be suited for it, so
he actually asked for Mary Russell's thoughts on the matter,
since she had been on the previous trip and really
knew what it was going to take in terms of
endurance and stamina, and she was okay with it. But
(06:32):
she and Colton were at best sort of about each other.
They didn't really hit it off, but they got along
well enough and they were in the end both included
in this party. During the trip, Harold Colton and another
member had separated from the party for a planned side
trip to California, and Dctor Charles Shaw, who was the
organizer of this expedition, had taken them in by canoe
(06:54):
to drop them off, but then he died on his
way back to join the main party when the canoe
over turned. So once the group was reunited after Dr
Shaw's death, they did continue their travels, and it seems
that during that time, Mary Russell and Harold grew closer,
and after they returned to Philadelphia, they began a correspondence
with one another. Initially, Harold was really more interested in
(07:18):
a romantic relationship than Mary Russell was. She was just
kind of interested in having a fun, smart friend. But
they eventually fell into a courtship and they were engaged
on May thirteenth, nineteen eleven, and married a year later
on May twenty three, nineteen twelve. The wedding took place
in the home of Alice and Theodore, her parents. Mary
(07:38):
and Harold's honeymoon proved really pivotal. They traveled once again
through the southwestern United States, and Mary fell even more
deeply in love with this area. It was a pretty
comprehensive trip as well. They visited Gloriata, Santa Fe, and
Albuquerque in New Mexico, they traveled through villages all along
the Rio Grand and into Arizona, which had only become
(07:58):
a state a few months leier. On February fourteenth, they
went to the Grand Canyon and all along the Colorado
River valley, and then they made their way to California.
Their journals and notes from this trip identified the American
Southwest as a potential home for the two of them,
and the couple, though did continue to live in Pennsylvania.
They were in Ardmore at that point, but they made
(08:20):
frequent trips west, studying Native American art. In particular, the
year after their honeymoon, they went back, this time with
friends in a much larger party. And for that expedition,
Mary Russell and Harold really made an effort to prepare
ahead of time and study Navajo and Hopie culture and
connect with scholars in the eastern US who had connections
(08:40):
to those people's on the Colorado Plateau. So on that
nineteen thirteen journey, the Coltons visited several Native American villages,
and they happened to be there just as a point
of trivia. At the same time that Theodore Roosevelt was
touring the area. Their curiosity also led them to exploring
so many areas that their vacations over the next several
(09:02):
years actually ended up identifying a number of spots that
wound up being of interest to archaeologists. The Colorado Plateau's
archaeology surveys started based on locations that the Coltons had
recorded as being of interest. And we're going to talk
more about their travels and discoveries and their archaeological connections
in just a moment, but first we're gonna pause for
(09:24):
a little sponsor break. Few years into their marriage, on
auguste the Coltons had their first child, a son named
Joseph Ferrell Colton, and this was the first year that
they didn't make it back west in the summer because
of the baby's birth, and they also skipped nineteen fifteen,
(09:47):
but they did go back to Flagstaff, Arizona for an
extended visit in nineteen sixteen, and one of the Colton's
discoveries that would have a lasting impact on research in
the area happened that summer, and it was actually thanks
to their toddler who found a broken ceramic piece and
handed it to Harold, who identified it as potentially important
and as a result, a decades long archaeological survey of
(10:10):
the area was conducted. Mary Russell and Joseph Farrell stayed
in Flagstaff after the summer due to a polio outbreak
back in Philadelphia. While Harold went back to his teaching duties.
Mary Russell ended up happening upon another site on an
autumn horseback ride that led to new information about the
prehistoric peoples of the area. These discoveries and others these
(10:34):
are not the only two that they were part of,
really got the Colton's excited about the archaeological and anthropological
research potential in the Colorado Plateau area, so much so
that Harold's interests really started to slowly transition away from
zoology and he started writing more archaeological papers, and Mary
Russell was also interested. She co authored a paper with
(10:57):
her husband in nineteen but her interests really remained more
intently on the contemporary cultures of the Native Americans in
the area. Their second son, Saban Woolworth Culton, the Fourth,
was born on September four, nineteen seventeen. That plus the
onset of World War One, in which Harold served in
the military intelligence, disrupted their regular visits out west. Once again.
(11:19):
They returned in nineteen nineteen, and soon they were bringing
family and friends with them as they had before the war.
Mary Russell lost her mother unexpectedly when Alice died while
visiting them out west in nineteen Because Mary Russell was
dealing with a combination of shock and grief at this
sudden loss, Harold made arrangements for the family to stay
(11:41):
in Tucson, Arizona, through the winter and spring instead of
returning to Pennsylvania. So in late spring of nineteen three,
they moved from Tucson to Flagstaff. Their youngest son, Saban,
who was six at the time, got sick during their
time and Flagstaff, and his ailment was eventually diagnosed as
that fever. This is an infection that developed after inhaling
(12:03):
a fungus that's commonly found in dry arid areas. The
family returns Philadelphia, but Saban never recovered, and the next
year he died on May third. They had had these
two tragedies in a row, but unfortunately there was another
one coming At the beginning of nine. The family had
(12:23):
to deal again with another loss when Harold's father, Saban
Woolworth Colton Jr. Who their son had been named after
died on January twenty nine, and that year the Coltons
decided to reclaim happier times, and they purchased land that
they had been camping on almost every year that they
visited Flagstaff, as well as another parcel of land right
next to it that I had a home built on it.
(12:45):
And this was really their first step toward moving to
their beloved American Southwest, although they did spend one more
winter in Philadelphia before leaving permanently. Mary really loved Flagstaff,
but she was underwhelmed at the town's effort to preserve
and promote the Native American art and culture in the area.
The Woman's Club of Flagstaff had assembled a small gallery
(13:07):
of things like pottery, baskets, and blankets, but it wasn't
nearly as robustic collection as Culton thought that it should be.
Mary Russell and Harold envisioned creating a science and art
facility that could accommodate a wider scope of Native culture
and communicate to visitors and residents alike the environmental and
cultural heritage of the Colorado Plateau. Additionally, as Mary Russell
(13:30):
and Harold made their nearly yearly trips to the plateau,
they had also started seeing archaeological finds packed up and
taken away to museums on the East coast, and they
were not the only ones that were noticing that it
was strictly a flow out where all of the culture
was kind of being taken elsewhere. As early as ninety two,
local papers were running articles discussing why antiquities from the
(13:52):
Colorado Plateau weren't being housed in a museum there in
the area. That called a local citizens had been the
catalyst for the Flagstaff Woman Club to set up their
small collection, but the desire and need for a larger
effort to protect the area's local heritage was in the
minds of more people than just the Coltons. The Coltons
were able to step in and offer some financial resources
(14:13):
that had been lacking in this whole project, and as
early as nineteen twenty four, before the couple had made
Flagstaff their permanent home, they had paid for display cases
that the Woman's Club exhibit. They really wanted to back
this whole effort, so uh, as Tracy just said, even
before they were really local residents, they were still they
were already giving money to this effort, and in the
(14:35):
late summer of nine a Museum study committee was appointed
by the flag Staff Chamber of Commerce. Harold Colton was
on that committee and Mary Russell was also added. After
the initial group formed by December of nine, a constitution
and by laws for the museum were written, but then
there was debate about whether it should be part of
(14:55):
a college or a standalone institution, and the Coltons felt
strongly that it should exists outside of the confines of
a college structure, and it should offer something back to
the community whose art and culture it was intending to preserve.
And a letter that appeared in the Coconinot Sun, Mary
Russell wrote, the desirability of the establishment of a museum
for the care of our geological, zoological and archaeological treasures
(15:19):
is acknowledged by all, but has the great educational value
of a continuity between the ancient and modern Native arts
been thoroughly considered. Our opportunity for this dual development is
exceptional here located, as we are close to the Hopie
and Navajo Indians, whose people have instituted the very arts
that you are about to go to much pains to preserve. Today,
(15:41):
those people's will soon have forgotten the secrets of their crafts,
and when they vanish, our country will have lost its
only true Native American art. This is our chance to
lend them a hand, encourage our Indians to produce only
the best using the beautiful old designs available in museum,
where they would bring their finest examples of modern an
Indian craftsmanship for exhibition and sale, side by side with
(16:03):
the work of the ancient people's. So okay, obviously there's
some stuff to talk about here. We should make it
clear that Colton had good intentions. She really did want
to preserve indigenous art and give the Native peoples of
the Southwest the resources to preserve and develop their own
artistic traditions. She tried to get input from those people's
when planning archaeological work and figuring out what to put
(16:26):
in the museum's collection, and then later on when she
worked on educational systems. But at the same time, she
was making a lot of these decisions in a pretty
paternalistic way, assuming that she knew what was best to
preserve another people's heritage. She also wrote about Native American
artists and their culture and ways that were simultaneously complimentary
and dismissive. She considered this work to be cultural handicraft
(16:49):
and not fine art, and this was a pretty common
mindset among wealthy white progressives at the time. Additionally, Mary
Russell had some concerns about the proposed placement of the
museum on college property. She thought that was going to
put it in a less affluent part of town, which
would detract from its mission because no one would want
to go see art in a poor neighborhood. Uh. Yeah.
(17:11):
She also one of the other things that becomes tricky
when you're reading her writing is that she uses a
lot of words that we would separate out today kind
of as synonyms. So she would talk about art, craft, handicrafts, um,
you know, other words that we're all really referring for
her to the same thing, but today have more specific meaning.
(17:32):
So that gets a little tricky when you're reading her
writing as well. But we are going to delve into
where all of this museum discussion led in just a moment,
but first we will take a little break and have
a word from a sponsor. So the Colton's continued to
advocate pretty vocally for the museum to be an independent
(17:54):
entity and not part of a college. Uh. And they
eventually got their way and By the end of that year,
a nonprofit corporation was founded to govern the museum, that
year being n and in May of nine, a board
of trustees was elected. Harold was the Museum of Northern
Arizona's Board of Trustees president and Museum Director, which is
(18:14):
a position he was elected to in that May meeting.
Mary was the facility's art curator and eventually also became
the curator of Ethnology. For the next two decades, the
couple steered museum's development and direction, and because they were
running everything themselves, they had a unique level of autonomy.
Researcher William James Burns wrote this and his thesis about
(18:36):
Mary Russell Coulton quote. A potential threat to validity exists
when a researcher or institution receives funding for a study
from an outside agency, whether federal, state, municipal, or private.
The Culton's independent wealth sheltered their research studies from outside influences.
Although they resisted the notion that the museum was theirs,
In point of fact, the Coltons funded the institution in
(18:58):
full for the first thirty years of its existence. From
eight from ninety, Doctor and Mrs Colton enjoyed the luxury
of pursuing studies that they were interested in without having
to be concerned about utilitarian purposes for their work, or
without a funding agency with an agenda encouraging them to
push a certain set of values. That's sort of this
(19:19):
will sound um, sort of like I am a brilliant
student of the blazingly obvious, But that really struck me.
I had not considered how unusual that situation would be.
Where you set up your own museum, and even though
it is a public museum, you could go, no, we're
just going to do what we want. Uh. I imagine
most people that work in museums today would have a
(19:40):
hard time even contemplating what that would be less like uh.
And initially though, the museum was still housed in the
Flagstaff Woman's Club building, but soon it really grew too large,
even after it had expanded from that single room that
was there when they moved to Flagstaff to fill the
entire clubhouse. So at that point the museum was basically
paying to rent the clubhouse as a museum space. The
(20:04):
next additional space was actually annexed in a nearby hotel storefront,
but even that was quickly overrun, there was not enough space,
so a larger, more permanent space just became more and
more of a pressing need. In ninety two people visited
the museum, and this was noteworthy because there were fewer
than people living in Flagstaff at the time. Finally, in
(20:27):
nineteen thirty three, after the nonprofit incorporated, which gave it
legal right to own property, Mary Russell donated twenty nine
acres to the museum, dedicated to her deceased son Sabing,
so that the permanent facility could be built to house
this ever growing collection. The Coulton's financed the construction as well. Yeah,
the way it tended to work out was that Mary's
(20:49):
family money was paying for things like land, and Harold
Colton's family money was paying for things like the construction.
Mary Russell was, as we too earlier, very focused particularly
on Hopie and Navajo arts, and she was concerned that
these cultures were losing their knowledge of the old methods
of creating art, and so she sought to bring education
(21:10):
programs to the museum and its education efforts that was
going to keep them alive. And in her writing about
teaching this information though, she was really careful to instruct
teachers to give children and adults alike the tools and
knowledge to create using methods that were classic or handed
down through Native people's but to let the artists make
(21:30):
their own decisions about using those tools to express whatever
they desired. She also advocated for craftsmen within Hopie and
Navajo villages to be chosen as teachers and paid for
their work. She really looked at these projects from their
absolute base material needs all the way through to their completion.
So she wanted weavers to have the best quality wools,
(21:51):
so she studied breeds of sheep to find the one
that produced the most optimal fibers. She hunted down indigo
pigment that was closer to what had been you in
legacy Hopie textiles, which was more brilliant and richer in
tone than the colors that had come into favor over
the years. And in the realm of pottery. She worked
to recreate the methods that had once been common in
(22:12):
Hopie work, and to achieve this, she not only had
to experiment with trying different paints and firing procedures, but
she also went so far as to test different soils
for the creation of clay to replicate previous methods as
closely as possible. Another idea she promoted was for each
community or school to have its own sort of informal
mini museum where work that had been produced by students
(22:34):
could be exhibited and rotated each year. And we've spoken
before on the show about the federal Indian boarding school system,
which sought to eliminate Native culture from children through a
system that was really designed, as we mentioned, particularly in
our two parter on the Fort Shaw women's basketball team,
to quote kill the Indian and save the man. And
(22:54):
this approach, which was intended to strip Native American students
of their cultural identities, was an utter failure with truly
grim and damaging results. So this idea of education was
turning a little by the time Mary Russell Colton was
implementing her own programs and writing about teaching that Native
American children. A lot of this shift was thanks to
a scathing report on the schools published in nine titled
(23:18):
quote the Problems of Indian Administration, and it was still
an issue of discussion. She believed that quote teaching them
their own crafts when they are young, and thus encouraging
them to feel a pride of race would go far
towards solving some of the most difficult and painful adjustment problems.
Colon really thought that it was possible and beneficial for
(23:38):
Native American students to get an education that was going
to blend both an Anglo and a Native American curriculum.
She wasn't really interested in this idea of assimilation that
had given rise to those horrible boarding schools, and she
also really believed that education needed to be carefully tailored
to each tribal culture where it was being implemented, rather
(23:58):
than developing one curriculum that was trying to serve every
single village. In the same way, she fought aggressively to
ensure that all public schools had art as part of
the curriculum. She wrote and published a passionate letter to
citizens of Northern Arizona as an extra publication of the
museum's newsletter, and which she pleaded quote, do you know
that art education is being deliberately strangled in the public schools?
(24:22):
Your children are being deprived of their rights to a
creative education. Art education is both a practical and liberal
education in life, and as closely inextricably correlated with every
other subject in the school, Our enlightened country should feel
shame indeed at having countenanced for a moment such a
backward step in education. And in nine, just four years
(24:46):
after the Coltons moved permanently to Arizona, Mary held the
Arizona Artists Exhibitions, and in these shows, local artists had
an opportunity to share their work with an audience and
promote what they had to offer. This was, in her mind,
also away for them to generate an income. This exhibition
was very successful and it continued to be an annual
(25:06):
event for the next six years. As an offshoot of
the exhibition success as a teaching tool, Mary Russell Coulton
created a traveling exhibit that she could take around to
schools and to other museums to show collections that featured
art from a variety of Native American cultures and explained
the techniques that were used to create them. Traveling educational
(25:28):
shows were called treasure chests. Yeah, sometimes they would just circulate.
She wouldn't necessarily go with them, but they would like
go to a school with a little curriculum. Uh. Explainer
included for teachers to kind of talk through with kids
what was in the box, and they could have them
for a couple of weeks at a time. It was
kind of an interesting idea. She was not the first
person to come up with that idea. There were other things, uh,
(25:51):
there were other educators that were trying similar concepts um
but Mary Russell Coulton really wanted to ensure that the
children of this areo we're getting both in education, in
local art history as evidenced by these touring teaching exhibitions,
and also she wanted to make sure that future generations
were going to learn and preserve the art techniques and
(26:11):
methods that were part of their cultural history. To that end,
she started a junior art show for grade school children
to share their work in nineteen thirty one. She felt
very passionately that all children should receive art lessons, no
matter what future career or life they might have, and
after several years of working with children and developing a
(26:31):
curriculum for teaching art, in four Colton wrote a book
to teach other educators in the region titled Art for
the Schools of the Southwest, An Outline for the Public
and Indian Schools. This very busy and productive time in
Mary's life was not something that she could sustain though,
she turned back to her own art started painting again,
(26:52):
but at the same time she turned away from most
social activities. She increasingly stayed home. Eventually, she was diagnosed
with Arthur sclerosis of the brain, which is a condition
in which there's a thickening or stiffening of the brain's
arterial walls. This is associated with certain types of dementia,
and it puts patients at a high risk for stroke.
In night, Mary stopped working full time at the museum.
(27:16):
Her husband, Harold, though, continued the programs that she had begun,
and as she planned to leave her job, she worked
on writing down ideals that would guide the museum's art
department after she was gone, and those were to stimulate
Native American arts and crafts, to foster creativity in the community,
and to present the museum's scientific information artfully. Even when
(27:37):
Mary Russell retired, she still had a position of authority
at the museum. As chair of the museum's Art Committee.
She could continue to steer the policies and decisions without
the burden of her full time position. She was chair
of the Art Committee for a decade, stepping down in
that same year. She also had an exhibition of her
own paintings, and Harold retired from his position as director.
(28:00):
The following year, nineteen fifty nine, when the museum celebrated
its twenty fifth anniversary. Mary Russell attended the celebration, but
her health had really started to decline. Uh. Harold Colton
died on December twenty nine of nineteen seventy and Mary
died the following year, on July six, ninety one. She
was eighty two at the time. She was buried outside
(28:22):
of Philadelphia in a cemetery where her family had a plot.
And finally, how he wanted to include a sentiment that
Mary Russell wrote as part of a paper titled Art
as a Personal and Economic Necessity because it really encapsulates
why she was so passionate about art and about sharing
it and teaching it. We travel rough roads in life,
and we all know that there are many joys that
(28:45):
slip away and many disappointments along the road. But if
we have a love of beauty, life will hold many
satisfactions for us which we cannot lose, and we can
feel that it has been worthwhile. I have listener mail.
Have two pieces of listener mail today. Uh. They are
both about um Mary Breckenridge, and they're both very fairly brief,
(29:07):
so I thought we had time to do both of them.
Our first one is from Christine and she said, I
just finished listening to your episode about Mary Breckenridge and
her work, especially in Appalachia. I know that is pronounced
differently by different people. However you liked to pronounce it.
Is great. Reminded me of our own local hero. Dr
Kate Newcomb was a doctor in northern Wisconsin in the
nineteen thirties in our rural area. Like Mary, she came
(29:29):
to a place where there was not an established system
of medical care for residents, and she helped to establish
it during the harsh winters. Instead of traveling by horror,
she gained the nickname Angel on Snowshoes that she would
find a way to her patients however she could. Eventually,
she too wanted to start a hospital, and for funds,
she turned to an unexpected source school children. Kids at
(29:50):
a local school wanted to see what a million some
things would look like, so they collected one million pennies
and they donated the funds to Dr Kate's hospital. I'm
a local teacher and I always make sure we do
some hometown history research so that students can learn about
Dr Kate and other local heroes. Keep up your great work.
I refer my students to the podcast is a way
to learn a little bit more about whatever we're studying.
(30:10):
Thank you Christine for being an educator and also what
a great story. I think. There are so many um
unsung people in the medical industry that have have done
similar things throughout the years, so I'm glad any of
them get a little more attention. Uh. The other one
is from our listener Jenny. She says, Hi, I wanted
to drop a quick line of thanks for the many
hours of listening joy you've given me. I've listened to years,
(30:32):
first when I was living in Egypt, where you'd keep
me company on my walk to and from work, and
now in Iraq as I try to film the many
hours of relative boredom. She works for the u N
and she spends a lot of time on the road,
flying around uh or simply in a car driving around
northern Iraq to work camps for people displaced by conflict.
Over the last few years, I always feel like I
(30:52):
have a couple of friends with me talking about super
interesting things. Which helps keep my mind from stressing about
falling out of this guy she's afraid of flying, or
from endlessly dwelling on the many, many horrible stuff stories
of suffering we hear in the camps. I found your
episode on Mary Breckinridge especially interesting, as many of the
medical issues she was dealing with we are still grappling
with as well. Ensuring that children have access to quality
(31:15):
healthcare in a combat post war setting is tremendously challenging.
I won't go into the gory details here, just mentioned
that the parallels between her work in World War One
and our current work are quite striking. It's amazing how
while the methods of war have changed, the work to
be done in the aftermath has not. UH. She wrote
a really great blog post about the challenges of working
(31:35):
for children's health in in Iraq, and she thinks us
to the many happy hours of listening. Jenny is another
person who should be thanked for her efforts, because that
sounds like a very, very stressful and demanding job, and
I'm glad someone wonderful is doing it. But it is
interesting that Mary Breckenridge brings up all of these these
UH ideas of parallelism because there's still plenty of places
(31:57):
in the world that need help to So I just
wanted to read both of those since one reaches into
the past, one into our current timeline. Uh, and they're
both very interesting. Yeah. I also wanted to mention at
the end of our Mary Russell Colton that there is
a secondary story about her that I want to explore,
I think in a separate podcast. So in case any
of you know about her and you go, why did
(32:18):
you not mention the Philadelphia Ten, which was a group
of women artists that we're all exhibiting together, and she
was part of that, uh, and it evolved, it wasn't
always the same women. But it's an interesting story. And
so if you're wondering why we didn't mention that, because
I'm saving it for the future because I wanted to
focus more on her work uh in the American Southwest.
(32:39):
So that's what's up with that. If you would like
to write to us, you can do so at History
Podcast at how Stuffworks dot com. You can also find
us pretty much anywhere on social media as Missed in History.
Missed in History dot Com is also our website where
you can find every episode that has ever existed, long
before Tracy and I were involved at the show, as
well as show notes for any of the episodes that
(33:00):
Tracy and I have worked on, So come on and
visit us at miss in history dot com. For more
on this and thousands of other topics, visit how staff
works dot com. M
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And today's
episode was actually inspired by our coworker Julie. Uh again, Yes,
(00:23):
Julie and I hang out a lot, so I got
lots of cool stuff from her. But also she just
came back from a trip through the American Southwest. And
when she came back, we had lunch and she was
talking about Mary Russell Coulton with such fascination and delight
that I was like, I'm going to look this person
up and will maybe do a show on her. And
we did. Uh. Mary Russell Ferrell Colton was a painter.
(00:44):
We're not going to talk a lot about her painting, Uh,
we'll mention it. But she was also an author and
an educator. But the thing that makes her the most
famous is the co founding of the Museum of Northern
Arizona and related programs and projects intended to preserve and
continue the art tradition of the Colorado Plateau. So quick
(01:05):
geographical reminder slash overview the Colorado Plateau overlaps the four
corners region of the southwestern United States. That's just where Colorado, Utah,
New Mexico, and Arizona all meet, and it is, per
the National Park Service, quote, one of the world's premier
natural showcases for earth history. There are volcanic mountains, plateaus, buttes,
(01:28):
and canyons, and a lot of National parks in the area. Uh. Yeah,
it's one of those things. I feel like people don't
always think about how much human history is contained in
these areas as well. We sort of associate I've talked
about it before archaeology is something that happens elsewhere, but
it's very Uh, there are a lot of really impressive
digs that have happened in the area. We'll talk a
(01:49):
little bit about some of those. Flagstaff, Arizona, which becomes
a really focal point of Mary Russell Colton's story, is
on the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau and there
are six different ecological zones that can all be experienced
within a hundred miles of Flagstaff and a wealth of
history going back into prehistory. So it's a pretty incredible place.
(02:11):
There are a lot of Native American tribes in the
area as well, including the Zuni, have a Supie, Navajo,
Hopie Ute, Willapie, Southern Piute, and piet Uh. And because
Mary Russell Colton worked with several of those Native American tribes,
that is why we mentioned them in this little intro piece.
(02:33):
But now we're going to transition specifically to Mary Russell's story.
She was born Mary Russell Farrell in Louisville, Kentucky, on
March nine, to parents Joseph Librand Farrell and engineer and
Elase Houston. The Houston side of the family was wealthy
and filled with really prominent members of society. Her grandfather
(02:53):
was Chief Justice of Tennessee Supreme Court, and they were
related to Sam Houston, the seventh Governor of Texas, and
through marriage, they were related to James K. Polk. As
a child, Mary Russell was curious and inquisitive, and she
loved learning, but her education in her younger years was
pretty informal. She was drawn to art from the time
she was small, though, and she had decided that it
(03:15):
would be her career path before she became a teenager.
When Mary was just fifteen, her father, Joseph died suddenly,
and while he had been a really good provider and
had done well for himself. At the time of his passing,
the family was in a tight situation financially. They had
just you know, kind of had one of those little
dips of income, and unfortunately that is when he died.
(03:37):
So at least her mother was forced to sell items
from the household to make ends meet. And it was
only through the patronage of a family friend that Mary
Russell was able to attend art school in nineteen o four.
That family friend was Mrs Annie Walbridge, and thanks to her,
Mary Russell began taking classes at the Philadelphia School of
Design for Women when she was just fifteen. The school
(03:58):
was intended as a place where respectable women who found
themselves needing to be their own bread winners could learn
how to do so through a career in art. Yeah.
This was you know, talking about post industry or part
of the Industrial Revolution, where there were more and more
instances where women were sort of finding themselves needing to
figure out how to make an income, and particularly for
(04:21):
women from wealthier families, art seemed like a good possibility.
And Mary Russell practiced and studied all kinds of art,
but she really gravitated towards oils as her preferred medium.
She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts and then went
on to a year of post graduate work. She wasn't
particularly disposed to socializing, but she was generally well liked
(04:42):
by her peers at school. During this time, her mother
also remarried. This was something of a surprise, but she
remarried a successful publisher named Theodore Presser, and that marriage
provided both Elise and her daughter, Mary Russell financial stability
for the rest of their lives. After her postgraduate work,
Mary Russell and two other students opened their own art
(05:05):
studio in downtown Philadelphia, where they could all work. She
also made money working for museums to restore art, and
she did various work for higher art projects. Mary Russell
at this point was still living with her mother and
her stepfather, but she was not getting along particularly well
with Theodore Presser. They had just tension between them, so
(05:26):
Alice hatched a plan for Mary Russell to take a
trip to ease some of that tension in the household.
This trip was a hiking expedition in British Columbia in
nine and Mary Russell really fell in love with the freedom,
the hiking and the terrain of the West. When another
opportunity to go on another similar expedition came up the
(05:47):
following year. Mary Russell was delighted, and at one of
the planning meetings she met Dr Harold Seller's Coulton, who
was a professor of zoology at the University of Pennsylvania. Colton,
like Mary Russell, had family money and his work as
a professor was more of a passion than an income generator. Yeah,
he really didn't make that much money teaching compared to
(06:09):
what he already had in the bank uh from his family,
and he also made some good investments along the way.
And Colton was interested in this trip, but the organizer
was unsure if he would be suited for it, so
he actually asked for Mary Russell's thoughts on the matter,
since she had been on the previous trip and really
knew what it was going to take in terms of
endurance and stamina, and she was okay with it. But
(06:32):
she and Colton were at best sort of about each other.
They didn't really hit it off, but they got along
well enough and they were in the end both included
in this party. During the trip, Harold Colton and another
member had separated from the party for a planned side
trip to California, and Dctor Charles Shaw, who was the
organizer of this expedition, had taken them in by canoe
(06:54):
to drop them off, but then he died on his
way back to join the main party when the canoe
over turned. So once the group was reunited after Dr
Shaw's death, they did continue their travels, and it seems
that during that time, Mary Russell and Harold grew closer,
and after they returned to Philadelphia, they began a correspondence
with one another. Initially, Harold was really more interested in
(07:18):
a romantic relationship than Mary Russell was. She was just
kind of interested in having a fun, smart friend. But
they eventually fell into a courtship and they were engaged
on May thirteenth, nineteen eleven, and married a year later
on May twenty three, nineteen twelve. The wedding took place
in the home of Alice and Theodore, her parents. Mary
(07:38):
and Harold's honeymoon proved really pivotal. They traveled once again
through the southwestern United States, and Mary fell even more
deeply in love with this area. It was a pretty
comprehensive trip as well. They visited Gloriata, Santa Fe, and
Albuquerque in New Mexico, they traveled through villages all along
the Rio Grand and into Arizona, which had only become
(07:58):
a state a few months leier. On February fourteenth, they
went to the Grand Canyon and all along the Colorado
River valley, and then they made their way to California.
Their journals and notes from this trip identified the American
Southwest as a potential home for the two of them,
and the couple, though did continue to live in Pennsylvania.
They were in Ardmore at that point, but they made
(08:20):
frequent trips west, studying Native American art. In particular, the
year after their honeymoon, they went back, this time with
friends in a much larger party. And for that expedition,
Mary Russell and Harold really made an effort to prepare
ahead of time and study Navajo and Hopie culture and
connect with scholars in the eastern US who had connections
(08:40):
to those people's on the Colorado Plateau. So on that
nineteen thirteen journey, the Coltons visited several Native American villages,
and they happened to be there just as a point
of trivia. At the same time that Theodore Roosevelt was
touring the area. Their curiosity also led them to exploring
so many areas that their vacations over the next several
(09:02):
years actually ended up identifying a number of spots that
wound up being of interest to archaeologists. The Colorado Plateau's
archaeology surveys started based on locations that the Coltons had
recorded as being of interest. And we're going to talk
more about their travels and discoveries and their archaeological connections
in just a moment, but first we're gonna pause for
(09:24):
a little sponsor break. Few years into their marriage, on
auguste the Coltons had their first child, a son named
Joseph Ferrell Colton, and this was the first year that
they didn't make it back west in the summer because
of the baby's birth, and they also skipped nineteen fifteen,
(09:47):
but they did go back to Flagstaff, Arizona for an
extended visit in nineteen sixteen, and one of the Colton's
discoveries that would have a lasting impact on research in
the area happened that summer, and it was actually thanks
to their toddler who found a broken ceramic piece and
handed it to Harold, who identified it as potentially important
and as a result, a decades long archaeological survey of
(10:10):
the area was conducted. Mary Russell and Joseph Farrell stayed
in Flagstaff after the summer due to a polio outbreak
back in Philadelphia. While Harold went back to his teaching duties.
Mary Russell ended up happening upon another site on an
autumn horseback ride that led to new information about the
prehistoric peoples of the area. These discoveries and others these
(10:34):
are not the only two that they were part of,
really got the Colton's excited about the archaeological and anthropological
research potential in the Colorado Plateau area, so much so
that Harold's interests really started to slowly transition away from
zoology and he started writing more archaeological papers, and Mary
Russell was also interested. She co authored a paper with
(10:57):
her husband in nineteen but her interests really remained more
intently on the contemporary cultures of the Native Americans in
the area. Their second son, Saban Woolworth Culton, the Fourth,
was born on September four, nineteen seventeen. That plus the
onset of World War One, in which Harold served in
the military intelligence, disrupted their regular visits out west. Once again.
(11:19):
They returned in nineteen nineteen, and soon they were bringing
family and friends with them as they had before the war.
Mary Russell lost her mother unexpectedly when Alice died while
visiting them out west in nineteen Because Mary Russell was
dealing with a combination of shock and grief at this
sudden loss, Harold made arrangements for the family to stay
(11:41):
in Tucson, Arizona, through the winter and spring instead of
returning to Pennsylvania. So in late spring of nineteen three,
they moved from Tucson to Flagstaff. Their youngest son, Saban,
who was six at the time, got sick during their
time and Flagstaff, and his ailment was eventually diagnosed as
that fever. This is an infection that developed after inhaling
(12:03):
a fungus that's commonly found in dry arid areas. The
family returns Philadelphia, but Saban never recovered, and the next
year he died on May third. They had had these
two tragedies in a row, but unfortunately there was another
one coming At the beginning of nine. The family had
(12:23):
to deal again with another loss when Harold's father, Saban
Woolworth Colton Jr. Who their son had been named after
died on January twenty nine, and that year the Coltons
decided to reclaim happier times, and they purchased land that
they had been camping on almost every year that they
visited Flagstaff, as well as another parcel of land right
next to it that I had a home built on it.
(12:45):
And this was really their first step toward moving to
their beloved American Southwest, although they did spend one more
winter in Philadelphia before leaving permanently. Mary really loved Flagstaff,
but she was underwhelmed at the town's effort to preserve
and promote the Native American art and culture in the area.
The Woman's Club of Flagstaff had assembled a small gallery
(13:07):
of things like pottery, baskets, and blankets, but it wasn't
nearly as robustic collection as Culton thought that it should be.
Mary Russell and Harold envisioned creating a science and art
facility that could accommodate a wider scope of Native culture
and communicate to visitors and residents alike the environmental and
cultural heritage of the Colorado Plateau. Additionally, as Mary Russell
(13:30):
and Harold made their nearly yearly trips to the plateau,
they had also started seeing archaeological finds packed up and
taken away to museums on the East coast, and they
were not the only ones that were noticing that it
was strictly a flow out where all of the culture
was kind of being taken elsewhere. As early as ninety two,
local papers were running articles discussing why antiquities from the
(13:52):
Colorado Plateau weren't being housed in a museum there in
the area. That called a local citizens had been the
catalyst for the Flagstaff Woman Club to set up their
small collection, but the desire and need for a larger
effort to protect the area's local heritage was in the
minds of more people than just the Coltons. The Coltons
were able to step in and offer some financial resources
(14:13):
that had been lacking in this whole project, and as
early as nineteen twenty four, before the couple had made
Flagstaff their permanent home, they had paid for display cases
that the Woman's Club exhibit. They really wanted to back
this whole effort, so uh, as Tracy just said, even
before they were really local residents, they were still they
were already giving money to this effort, and in the
(14:35):
late summer of nine a Museum study committee was appointed
by the flag Staff Chamber of Commerce. Harold Colton was
on that committee and Mary Russell was also added. After
the initial group formed by December of nine, a constitution
and by laws for the museum were written, but then
there was debate about whether it should be part of
(14:55):
a college or a standalone institution, and the Coltons felt
strongly that it should exists outside of the confines of
a college structure, and it should offer something back to
the community whose art and culture it was intending to preserve.
And a letter that appeared in the Coconinot Sun, Mary
Russell wrote, the desirability of the establishment of a museum
for the care of our geological, zoological and archaeological treasures
(15:19):
is acknowledged by all, but has the great educational value
of a continuity between the ancient and modern Native arts
been thoroughly considered. Our opportunity for this dual development is
exceptional here located, as we are close to the Hopie
and Navajo Indians, whose people have instituted the very arts
that you are about to go to much pains to preserve. Today,
(15:41):
those people's will soon have forgotten the secrets of their crafts,
and when they vanish, our country will have lost its
only true Native American art. This is our chance to
lend them a hand, encourage our Indians to produce only
the best using the beautiful old designs available in museum,
where they would bring their finest examples of modern an
Indian craftsmanship for exhibition and sale, side by side with
(16:03):
the work of the ancient people's. So okay, obviously there's
some stuff to talk about here. We should make it
clear that Colton had good intentions. She really did want
to preserve indigenous art and give the Native peoples of
the Southwest the resources to preserve and develop their own
artistic traditions. She tried to get input from those people's
when planning archaeological work and figuring out what to put
(16:26):
in the museum's collection, and then later on when she
worked on educational systems. But at the same time, she
was making a lot of these decisions in a pretty
paternalistic way, assuming that she knew what was best to
preserve another people's heritage. She also wrote about Native American
artists and their culture and ways that were simultaneously complimentary
and dismissive. She considered this work to be cultural handicraft
(16:49):
and not fine art, and this was a pretty common
mindset among wealthy white progressives at the time. Additionally, Mary
Russell had some concerns about the proposed placement of the
museum on college property. She thought that was going to
put it in a less affluent part of town, which
would detract from its mission because no one would want
to go see art in a poor neighborhood. Uh. Yeah.
(17:11):
She also one of the other things that becomes tricky
when you're reading her writing is that she uses a
lot of words that we would separate out today kind
of as synonyms. So she would talk about art, craft, handicrafts, um,
you know, other words that we're all really referring for
her to the same thing, but today have more specific meaning.
(17:32):
So that gets a little tricky when you're reading her
writing as well. But we are going to delve into
where all of this museum discussion led in just a moment,
but first we will take a little break and have
a word from a sponsor. So the Colton's continued to
advocate pretty vocally for the museum to be an independent
(17:54):
entity and not part of a college. Uh. And they
eventually got their way and By the end of that year,
a nonprofit corporation was founded to govern the museum, that
year being n and in May of nine, a board
of trustees was elected. Harold was the Museum of Northern
Arizona's Board of Trustees president and Museum Director, which is
(18:14):
a position he was elected to in that May meeting.
Mary was the facility's art curator and eventually also became
the curator of Ethnology. For the next two decades, the
couple steered museum's development and direction, and because they were
running everything themselves, they had a unique level of autonomy.
Researcher William James Burns wrote this and his thesis about
(18:36):
Mary Russell Coulton quote. A potential threat to validity exists
when a researcher or institution receives funding for a study
from an outside agency, whether federal, state, municipal, or private.
The Culton's independent wealth sheltered their research studies from outside influences.
Although they resisted the notion that the museum was theirs,
In point of fact, the Coltons funded the institution in
(18:58):
full for the first thirty years of its existence. From
eight from ninety, Doctor and Mrs Colton enjoyed the luxury
of pursuing studies that they were interested in without having
to be concerned about utilitarian purposes for their work, or
without a funding agency with an agenda encouraging them to
push a certain set of values. That's sort of this
(19:19):
will sound um, sort of like I am a brilliant
student of the blazingly obvious, But that really struck me.
I had not considered how unusual that situation would be.
Where you set up your own museum, and even though
it is a public museum, you could go, no, we're
just going to do what we want. Uh. I imagine
most people that work in museums today would have a
(19:40):
hard time even contemplating what that would be less like uh.
And initially though, the museum was still housed in the
Flagstaff Woman's Club building, but soon it really grew too large,
even after it had expanded from that single room that
was there when they moved to Flagstaff to fill the
entire clubhouse. So at that point the museum was basically
paying to rent the clubhouse as a museum space. The
(20:04):
next additional space was actually annexed in a nearby hotel storefront,
but even that was quickly overrun, there was not enough space,
so a larger, more permanent space just became more and
more of a pressing need. In ninety two people visited
the museum, and this was noteworthy because there were fewer
than people living in Flagstaff at the time. Finally, in
(20:27):
nineteen thirty three, after the nonprofit incorporated, which gave it
legal right to own property, Mary Russell donated twenty nine
acres to the museum, dedicated to her deceased son Sabing,
so that the permanent facility could be built to house
this ever growing collection. The Coulton's financed the construction as well. Yeah,
the way it tended to work out was that Mary's
(20:49):
family money was paying for things like land, and Harold
Colton's family money was paying for things like the construction.
Mary Russell was, as we too earlier, very focused particularly
on Hopie and Navajo arts, and she was concerned that
these cultures were losing their knowledge of the old methods
of creating art, and so she sought to bring education
(21:10):
programs to the museum and its education efforts that was
going to keep them alive. And in her writing about
teaching this information though, she was really careful to instruct
teachers to give children and adults alike the tools and
knowledge to create using methods that were classic or handed
down through Native people's but to let the artists make
(21:30):
their own decisions about using those tools to express whatever
they desired. She also advocated for craftsmen within Hopie and
Navajo villages to be chosen as teachers and paid for
their work. She really looked at these projects from their
absolute base material needs all the way through to their completion.
So she wanted weavers to have the best quality wools,
(21:51):
so she studied breeds of sheep to find the one
that produced the most optimal fibers. She hunted down indigo
pigment that was closer to what had been you in
legacy Hopie textiles, which was more brilliant and richer in
tone than the colors that had come into favor over
the years. And in the realm of pottery. She worked
to recreate the methods that had once been common in
(22:12):
Hopie work, and to achieve this, she not only had
to experiment with trying different paints and firing procedures, but
she also went so far as to test different soils
for the creation of clay to replicate previous methods as
closely as possible. Another idea she promoted was for each
community or school to have its own sort of informal
mini museum where work that had been produced by students
(22:34):
could be exhibited and rotated each year. And we've spoken
before on the show about the federal Indian boarding school system,
which sought to eliminate Native culture from children through a
system that was really designed, as we mentioned, particularly in
our two parter on the Fort Shaw women's basketball team,
to quote kill the Indian and save the man. And
(22:54):
this approach, which was intended to strip Native American students
of their cultural identities, was an utter failure with truly
grim and damaging results. So this idea of education was
turning a little by the time Mary Russell Colton was
implementing her own programs and writing about teaching that Native
American children. A lot of this shift was thanks to
a scathing report on the schools published in nine titled
(23:18):
quote the Problems of Indian Administration, and it was still
an issue of discussion. She believed that quote teaching them
their own crafts when they are young, and thus encouraging
them to feel a pride of race would go far
towards solving some of the most difficult and painful adjustment problems.
Colon really thought that it was possible and beneficial for
(23:38):
Native American students to get an education that was going
to blend both an Anglo and a Native American curriculum.
She wasn't really interested in this idea of assimilation that
had given rise to those horrible boarding schools, and she
also really believed that education needed to be carefully tailored
to each tribal culture where it was being implemented, rather
(23:58):
than developing one curriculum that was trying to serve every
single village. In the same way, she fought aggressively to
ensure that all public schools had art as part of
the curriculum. She wrote and published a passionate letter to
citizens of Northern Arizona as an extra publication of the
museum's newsletter, and which she pleaded quote, do you know
that art education is being deliberately strangled in the public schools?
(24:22):
Your children are being deprived of their rights to a
creative education. Art education is both a practical and liberal
education in life, and as closely inextricably correlated with every
other subject in the school, Our enlightened country should feel
shame indeed at having countenanced for a moment such a
backward step in education. And in nine, just four years
(24:46):
after the Coltons moved permanently to Arizona, Mary held the
Arizona Artists Exhibitions, and in these shows, local artists had
an opportunity to share their work with an audience and
promote what they had to offer. This was, in her mind,
also away for them to generate an income. This exhibition
was very successful and it continued to be an annual
(25:06):
event for the next six years. As an offshoot of
the exhibition success as a teaching tool, Mary Russell Coulton
created a traveling exhibit that she could take around to
schools and to other museums to show collections that featured
art from a variety of Native American cultures and explained
the techniques that were used to create them. Traveling educational
(25:28):
shows were called treasure chests. Yeah, sometimes they would just circulate.
She wouldn't necessarily go with them, but they would like
go to a school with a little curriculum. Uh. Explainer
included for teachers to kind of talk through with kids
what was in the box, and they could have them
for a couple of weeks at a time. It was
kind of an interesting idea. She was not the first
person to come up with that idea. There were other things, uh,
(25:51):
there were other educators that were trying similar concepts um
but Mary Russell Coulton really wanted to ensure that the
children of this areo we're getting both in education, in
local art history as evidenced by these touring teaching exhibitions,
and also she wanted to make sure that future generations
were going to learn and preserve the art techniques and
(26:11):
methods that were part of their cultural history. To that end,
she started a junior art show for grade school children
to share their work in nineteen thirty one. She felt
very passionately that all children should receive art lessons, no
matter what future career or life they might have, and
after several years of working with children and developing a
(26:31):
curriculum for teaching art, in four Colton wrote a book
to teach other educators in the region titled Art for
the Schools of the Southwest, An Outline for the Public
and Indian Schools. This very busy and productive time in
Mary's life was not something that she could sustain though,
she turned back to her own art started painting again,
(26:52):
but at the same time she turned away from most
social activities. She increasingly stayed home. Eventually, she was diagnosed
with Arthur sclerosis of the brain, which is a condition
in which there's a thickening or stiffening of the brain's
arterial walls. This is associated with certain types of dementia,
and it puts patients at a high risk for stroke.
In night, Mary stopped working full time at the museum.
(27:16):
Her husband, Harold, though, continued the programs that she had begun,
and as she planned to leave her job, she worked
on writing down ideals that would guide the museum's art
department after she was gone, and those were to stimulate
Native American arts and crafts, to foster creativity in the community,
and to present the museum's scientific information artfully. Even when
(27:37):
Mary Russell retired, she still had a position of authority
at the museum. As chair of the museum's Art Committee.
She could continue to steer the policies and decisions without
the burden of her full time position. She was chair
of the Art Committee for a decade, stepping down in
that same year. She also had an exhibition of her
own paintings, and Harold retired from his position as director.
(28:00):
The following year, nineteen fifty nine, when the museum celebrated
its twenty fifth anniversary. Mary Russell attended the celebration, but
her health had really started to decline. Uh. Harold Colton
died on December twenty nine of nineteen seventy and Mary
died the following year, on July six, ninety one. She
was eighty two at the time. She was buried outside
(28:22):
of Philadelphia in a cemetery where her family had a plot.
And finally, how he wanted to include a sentiment that
Mary Russell wrote as part of a paper titled Art
as a Personal and Economic Necessity because it really encapsulates
why she was so passionate about art and about sharing
it and teaching it. We travel rough roads in life,
and we all know that there are many joys that
(28:45):
slip away and many disappointments along the road. But if
we have a love of beauty, life will hold many
satisfactions for us which we cannot lose, and we can
feel that it has been worthwhile. I have listener mail.
Have two pieces of listener mail today. Uh. They are
both about um Mary Breckenridge, and they're both very fairly brief,
(29:07):
so I thought we had time to do both of them.
Our first one is from Christine and she said, I
just finished listening to your episode about Mary Breckenridge and
her work, especially in Appalachia. I know that is pronounced
differently by different people. However you liked to pronounce it.
Is great. Reminded me of our own local hero. Dr
Kate Newcomb was a doctor in northern Wisconsin in the
nineteen thirties in our rural area. Like Mary, she came
(29:29):
to a place where there was not an established system
of medical care for residents, and she helped to establish
it during the harsh winters. Instead of traveling by horror,
she gained the nickname Angel on Snowshoes that she would
find a way to her patients however she could. Eventually,
she too wanted to start a hospital, and for funds,
she turned to an unexpected source school children. Kids at
(29:50):
a local school wanted to see what a million some
things would look like, so they collected one million pennies
and they donated the funds to Dr Kate's hospital. I'm
a local teacher and I always make sure we do
some hometown history research so that students can learn about
Dr Kate and other local heroes. Keep up your great work.
I refer my students to the podcast is a way
to learn a little bit more about whatever we're studying.
(30:10):
Thank you Christine for being an educator and also what
a great story. I think. There are so many um
unsung people in the medical industry that have have done
similar things throughout the years, so I'm glad any of
them get a little more attention. Uh. The other one
is from our listener Jenny. She says, Hi, I wanted
to drop a quick line of thanks for the many
hours of listening joy you've given me. I've listened to years,
(30:32):
first when I was living in Egypt, where you'd keep
me company on my walk to and from work, and
now in Iraq as I try to film the many
hours of relative boredom. She works for the u N
and she spends a lot of time on the road,
flying around uh or simply in a car driving around
northern Iraq to work camps for people displaced by conflict.
Over the last few years, I always feel like I
(30:52):
have a couple of friends with me talking about super
interesting things. Which helps keep my mind from stressing about
falling out of this guy she's afraid of flying, or
from endlessly dwelling on the many, many horrible stuff stories
of suffering we hear in the camps. I found your
episode on Mary Breckinridge especially interesting, as many of the
medical issues she was dealing with we are still grappling
with as well. Ensuring that children have access to quality
(31:15):
healthcare in a combat post war setting is tremendously challenging.
I won't go into the gory details here, just mentioned
that the parallels between her work in World War One
and our current work are quite striking. It's amazing how
while the methods of war have changed, the work to
be done in the aftermath has not. UH. She wrote
a really great blog post about the challenges of working
(31:35):
for children's health in in Iraq, and she thinks us
to the many happy hours of listening. Jenny is another
person who should be thanked for her efforts, because that
sounds like a very, very stressful and demanding job, and
I'm glad someone wonderful is doing it. But it is
interesting that Mary Breckenridge brings up all of these these
UH ideas of parallelism because there's still plenty of places
(31:57):
in the world that need help to So I just
wanted to read both of those since one reaches into
the past, one into our current timeline. Uh, and they're
both very interesting. Yeah. I also wanted to mention at
the end of our Mary Russell Colton that there is
a secondary story about her that I want to explore,
I think in a separate podcast. So in case any
of you know about her and you go, why did
(32:18):
you not mention the Philadelphia Ten, which was a group
of women artists that we're all exhibiting together, and she
was part of that, uh, and it evolved, it wasn't
always the same women. But it's an interesting story. And
so if you're wondering why we didn't mention that, because
I'm saving it for the future because I wanted to
focus more on her work uh in the American Southwest.
(32:39):
So that's what's up with that. If you would like
to write to us, you can do so at History
Podcast at how Stuffworks dot com. You can also find
us pretty much anywhere on social media as Missed in History.
Missed in History dot Com is also our website where
you can find every episode that has ever existed, long
before Tracy and I were involved at the show, as
well as show notes for any of the episodes that
(33:00):
Tracy and I have worked on, So come on and
visit us at miss in history dot com. For more
on this and thousands of other topics, visit how staff
works dot com. M
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com