Mary E. J. Colter in Seattle
Mary E. J. Colter (1869 – 1958) worked as a teacher, artist, interior decorator, and architect over the course of her career. While she started her career in St. Paul, Minnesota and is best known for her design work in the Southwest, she spent several years in Seattle before going to work full-time with the Fred Harvey hospitality company.
Colter later recalled, “1908 and 1909 were spent in Seattle developing the Decoration Department for Frederick and Nelson.” Frederick & Nelson was a popular store that opened in 1890 and evolved into a department store through their founders’ philosophy of selling whatever people wanted to buy. In 1906, store innovations included an in-store tea room and selling ready-made clothing.
Frederick & Nelson, ca. 1910 (Webster & Stevens, UW Libraries Digital Collections)
Colter worked for the department store during a prosperous era when the desire to improve the home was growing, Arnold Berke writes in his monograph on Colter, and railroads made it possible to ship goods from anywhere. Colter didn’t describe what developing the Decoration Department entailed, but it might have included selecting and arranging furnishings—a skill she would later apply in the restaurants and hotels she helped design along the Santa Fe railway line while employed with Fred Harvey.
In the 1910 US Census, Colter’s line of work is listed as “Interior decorating and furnishings,” working on her “own account” rather than as an employee. Both Colter and her sister Harriet were living in the Seattle home a friend and their friend’s husband. This friend, Cornelia Atwood Pratt Comer, was a prolific magazine and newspaper journalist and a popular novelist, but her occupation was listed in the census as “None.”
From 1902 until 1910, overlapping her time in Seattle, Colter’s work included freelance projects for Fred Harvey “by remote control,” as she wrote—an early description of remote work. In 1910, the company hired Colter full-time, and she left Seattle for Kansas City to be near the company’s headquarters and start the next chapter of her career.
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Sources:
Colter, Mary E.J. "Untitled typescript autobiography," p. 2. Heard Museum Digital Library. c. 1948-1958. https://cdm16286.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16286coll4/id/447/rec/2
Frederick & Nelson Records, 1901-1991. http://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:/80444/xv72858
Arnold Berke, Mary Colter: Architect of the Southwest. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002.
Ancestory.com – US Census documents