Mary Colter

Today, meet Mary Colter.  The University of Houston presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them. 

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     The late nineteenth century was not friendly to women professionals.  But women were beginning to emerge in technical fields – physics, astronomy, invention, and more. 

So today, let’s meet architect Mary Colter.  Architects tend to find their special interests.  Julia Morgan, for example, invented a kind of architecture unique to California.  From a unique domestic style in the Berkeley hills to William Randolph Hearst’s San Simeon mansion.

Mary Coulter (right) showing her plans to Mr. Ickes (Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)

Mary Colter’s architecture was likewise shaped around a theme.  Let’s see how that worked.  She was from my own hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota.  She first studied at what’s now called the San Francisco Art Institute.  Then, back to St. Paul to teach high school. 

She established herself as a lecturer and practicing designer while she taught.  Then she happened to meet one F. J. Huckel of the Harvey company.  Harvey operated a string of hotels along southwest rail lines. 

And they hired her to do designs for hotels and for other attractions at their rail stops.  Eight years later, she moved to Harvey’s Kansas city office as their principal designer.  And, by now, an old idea had surfaced in her work.  Her Minnesota (and mine) had an odd love affair with a romanticized vision of Native American culture.  We all read Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha in school.  Cheer leaders chanted Ski-U-Mah, thinking it was a native Lakota cheer.  Land-O-Lakes butter once featured what it fancied to be an Indian Maiden on its box. 

Now Colter shaped Harvey rail stops in Native American motifs.  Her designs soon marked hotels, lounges, tourist attractions, and much more.  All evoked Native American imagery: Hotel interiors formed with Apache designs – or a Hopi House hotel.  The most famous is the stop at the Grand Canyon: Her Lookout Studio there.  And her Desert View Watchtower by the Canyon...

Hopi House (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Desert View Tower (by Vladsinger courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Today, superhighways whizz past those lovely old rail stops.  And some of her work has passed into ruins.  But one can take tours of the many remaining sites.  All the way from Santa Fe to what remains of her designs in Los Angeles’ Union Station.  They summon up a kind of settled beauty.  

History reveals little about Colter, the person.  And author Trisha Cole suggests why.  Anonymity protected a woman working in a male dominated world.  I’m reminded of a Black architect, Cap Wigington – Colter’s contemporary.  For thirty-four years, he was St. Paul’s senior architect.  And his architecture helped shape that city.  Yet we were unaware of him.

So the final irony: Colter spent her life memorializing a people whose reality we’ve commended to anonymity ... those Native peoples of America.

I’m John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we’re interested in the way inventive minds work.

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Trisha Cole, There’s Something about Mary: A pilgrimage across the Southwest Explores the Visionary Influence of Architect Mary Colter. AAA Explorer, April/May/June 2026.

Three Women Architects | The Engines of Our Ingenuity

Julia Morgan | The Engines of Our Ingenuity

Fred Harvey Company - Wikipedia

Mary Colter Architectural Southwest Trip

Mary Colter's Buildings at Grand Canyon - Grand Canyon National Park (U.S. National Park Service)

This Episode first aired on April 27, 2026.