Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter (April 4, 1869 – January 8, 1958) was an American architect and designer. She was one of the very few female American architects in her day. She 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. Her 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. Colter was a perfectionist, who spent a lifetime advocating and defending her aesthetic vision in a largely male-dominated field.
Mary Colter was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Irish immigrants William and Rebecca Crozier Colter. Her 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.
In 1880, the town of St. Paul was boasting a population of 40,000 people and a large minority population of Sioux Indians. As a child, a family friend, John Graham, presented the Colter family with Sioux drawings, made by prisoners at Fort Keogh. This is the point where her fascination with the Native American cultures began. When the Indian community was ravaged by a smallpox outbreak, Colter's mother tried to burn all of the Native American things they had for fear that it would get her family sick. Mary, however, hid those drawings from her mother and so prevented them from being burned. Mary also kept these same Sioux drawings for much of her life, bequeathing them to the Custer Battlefield National Monument in 1956.
Colter graduated high school in 1883 at the age of 14. After her father died in 1886, Colter attended the California School of Design (now the San Francisco Art Institute) until 1890, where she studied art and design. She promised that, when she graduated, she would return to St. Paul to financially support her mother and older sister, who was chronically ill. While in San Francisco, she apprenticed in an architect's office to gain experience and support herself. She was taught by teachers including Arthur Frank Mathews, who painted the earliest known portrait of Colter.
After teaching at the Stout Manual Training School in Menomonie, Wisconsin for a year, Colter moved back to St. Paul and taught art, drafting, and architecture for some years. Colter taught at the Mechanic Arts High School for fifteen years and lectured at the University Extension School. At this time, she was involved in the Arts and Crafts movement. She was also a clubwoman, and gave several lectures and classes related to art.
By one account, in 1902, Minnie Harvey Huckel helped Colter obtain a summer job with her family's Fred Harvey Company (operator of the famous railstop Harvey House restaurants), decorating the Indian Building at the Alvarado Hotel in Albuquerque (since demolished). The Indian Buildings, one of Minnie's ideas executed by her husband, were meant to entertain passengers as trains made stops to replenish water and fuel. Colter was given the challenge of arranging salesrooms so tourists could imagine displaying goods in their homes. She also worked with Charles Whittlesey on the El Tovar Hotel and began designing a curio shop. Upon returning to St. Paul to teach in the fall, Colter continued her work on the curio shop, which became the Hopi House.
For the next seven years, Colter continued working for Harvey from St. Paul. She continued teaching and her involvement in art and clubs in the city. In 1908, 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. Colter left the position in 1909, when her mother became ill and died. The Colter sisters returned to St. Paul to bury their mother in the family plot.
Colter began working full-time for the company in 1910, moving from interior designer to architect in a position based in Kansas City. For the next 38 years, Colter served as chief architect and decorator for the Fred Harvey Company. As one of the country's few female architects – and arguably the most outstanding – Colter worked in often rugged conditions to complete 21 landmark hotels, commercial lodges, and public spaces for the Fred Harvey Company, by then being run by the founder's sons.
Fred Harvey developed the West along the Santa Fe's main route through strategic use of restaurant efficiency, clean-cut young women, high-end tourism, and souvenirs. Anthropologists on his staff located appealing Native American art and artifacts like pottery, jewelry, and leatherwork. His merchandisers designed goods based on those artifacts. And in strategic locations, Colter produced commercial architecture, based on some concern for authenticity, floorplans calculated for user experience and commercial function, and a playful sense of the dramatic inside and out.
The Santa Fe railroad bought the La Fonda hotel on the plaza of the old city of Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1925 and leased it to the Harvey Company to operate. For a major expansion, Colter was assigned to do the interior design and decorating. She hired artists and artisans from the nearby pueblos to make the furniture. Native American styles were employed in hand-crafted chandeliers, copper and tin lighting fixtures, tiles and textiles, and other ornamentation. La Fonda became the most successful of the Harvey House hotels. Its striking blend of Pueblo people and Spanish artistic influences, today known locally as the Santa Fe Style, became very popular across the region.
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 (21 m) 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. Colter also decorated, but did not design, the park's El Tovar Hotel. In 1987, the Mary Jane Colter Buildings, as a group, were listed as a National Historic Landmark. (She also designed the 1936 Victor Hall for men, and the 1937 Colter Hall, a dormitory for Fred Harvey's women employees.)
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. Colter's work is credited with inspiring the Pueblo Deco style.
The Harvey Company got the concession in 1922 to operate a camp at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Considering the Phantom Ranch's location, Colter's use of on-site fieldstone and rough-hewn wood was deemed the only practical thing for the permanent buildings that replaced tents. In the following years this innovative work became a de facto model for subsequent National Park Service and Civilian Conservation Corps structures, influencing the look and feel of an entire genre of parkitecture, often called National Park Service Rustic. Her structures at the Grand Canyon set the precedent for using on-site materials and bold, large-scale design elements.
For her Bright Angel Lodge on the South Rim, she used a 6-foot (1.8 m) scale model to ensure that the lodge and cabins fit into the landscape. The lodge features a remarkable "geological fireplace" in the History Room, with rocks arranged ceiling to floor in the same order as the geologic strata along the Bright Angel Trail down the canyon wall.
A chain-smoking perfectionist, Colter cared about backstory and attractive features. She conceived Hermit's Rest as a sort of folly, as if it had been wired together by a reclusive mountain man. The Hopi House was a market for Native American crafts, made by Hopi artisans on the site, and designed in sandstone to resemble a Hopi pueblo. (Unfortunately, a recent cleaning eliminated the artificial age-effects.) The Watchtower was the product of travel and research, and she cared enough to herself prepare a Manual for Drivers and Guides Descriptive of the Indian Watchtower at Desert View and its Relation, Architecturally, to the Prehistoric Ruins of the Southwest. The original paintings inside the tower were by Hopi artist Fred Kabotie. She also insisted on her proposed name "Phantom Ranch" (over "Roosevelt Ranch") to capitalize on better mental images.