By all accounts, Mary Colter was a remarkable woman, born in 1869 but meant for the new century. Her architectural partnership with the Fred Harvey Company and Santa Fe Railway set the stage for how people experienced Grand Canyon, as well as how other architects approached designing buildings for national parks, or “parkitecture.”

Colter, who studied architecture in California, had a keen appreciation for North American Indian culture and for the Craftsman aesthetic of designing structures that harmonized with their natural setting. She didn’t just show visitors the Southwest — she made it possible for them to experience it. Her buildings at Grand Canyon include Hopi House (1905), Lookout Studio (1914), Bright Angel Lodge (1935), Phantom Ranch (1922), and the Desert View Watchtower (1932).

When the Fred Harvey Company contacted Colter to decorate retail space in Albuquerque, New Mexico, she was 33 years old and teaching mechanical drafting at a boys’ school in St. Paul, Minnesota. She worked to support her widowed mother and ailing sister, also finding time to lecture on world history and architecture, review books as a newspaper literary editor, and take classes in archaeology to further her interests in native cultures. After the summer job in Albuquerque, she returned to Minnesota.

The public responded enthusiastically to Fred Harvey’s “Indian building,” and two years later, the company called on Mary Colter once more, this time to design an Indian building to complement El Tovar, under construction on the Grand Canyon’s South Rim.

An impeccable researcher, Colter traveled to the Hopi village of Oraibi for inspiration for Hopi House, which opened on January 1, 1905, days before El Tovar. The design was a success, but it was 1910 before the Fred Harvey Company offered Colter a permanent full-time job designing the hotels, restaurants, and rail stations the company managed for the Santa Fe Railway.

When Colter studied architecture in the late 1880s, few universities taught architecture, few women studied architecture, and very few architects were licensed. Like many other would-be architects, Colter learned by apprenticing with a working architect. Because she was never licensed, she developed concepts and drew preliminary designs, floor plans, and elevations. These were sent to the Santa Fe’s engineering department, and the railroad’s architects drew the final plans. The Santa Fe Railway owned the buildings; the Fred Harvey Company operated and furnished them. Both companies contributed to Mary Colter’s salary.

Colter, who frequently traveled the Santa Fe rail lines to design new hotels and refurbish old ones, became an integral player in the railroad’s image-building efforts. As for her own image, well, “eccentric” describes it best. The chain-smoking Colter often dressed in pants and a Stetson, knew how to shoot a pistol, and avidly collected books and Indian silver. Her jewelry collection numbered a thousand pieces, and she wore rings on every finger.

She developed a reputation for bossiness with male construction workers, perhaps thanks to her past as a teacher. While working on the geological fireplace at Bright Angel Lodge, she scolded park naturalist Edwin McKee as though he were one of her schoolboys. Hopi artist Fred Kabotie remembered struggling to mix paint colors exactly as Colter envisioned them, and painters referred to the shade used as trim in Bright Angel Lodge as “Mary Jane Blue.”

Colter, who insisted Harveycar guides be precise when describing her buildings to tourists, wrote her “boys” a 75-page booklet on the Desert View Watchtower, which opened to national publicity in 1932.

Thanks largely to Colter’s efforts at Grand Canyon, architecture at the West’s most scenic areas began to take on a distinct aesthetic. This rustic, hand-crafted style eventually fell out of favor, phased out in 1956 by the park service’s Mission 66, a 10-year program designed to accommodate growing numbers of visitors with streamlined, contemporary, and expansive architecture. Many historic structures viewed as deteriorated and dangerous were razed. Though Mary Colter’s buildings at Grand Canyon were spared, some of her work was lost.

In 1957, one of Colter’s favorite buildings, La Posada Hotel in Winslow, Arizona, closed. A few months later, another of her buildings, Gallup’s El Navajo Hotel, was demolished. She said in an interview, “There’s such a thing as living too long.”

Mary Colter died in 1958, but her Grand Canyon creations continue to fascinate and inspire today. Eleven of her works are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, including La Posada (reopened as a hotel in 1997) and Grand Canyon’s Bright Angel Lodge, Hopi House, Hermits Rest, Lookout Studio, and the Watchtower.