Mary Colter's influence on the National Park Service and southwestern architecture is truly remarkable. She was born in Pittsburgh on April 4, 1869, and later studied at the California School of Design. In 1901, she began working for the Fred Harvey Company, which was founded by Fred Harvey. He understood how crucial the railroad was for tourism across the United States and created the Harvey House, a series of restaurants, shops, and hotels located at train stops in the West. Colter's first project for the company was to decorate the Alvarado Hotel in Albuquerque, New Mexico. This led to her becoming a full-time architect for Fred Harvey, where she designed many iconic buildings at Grand Canyon National Park, such as the Hopi House, Phantom Ranch, Hermits Rest, Bright Angel Lodge, and the Desert View Watchtower. Through her work, Colter established what is now known as National Park Service Rustic design, leaving a lasting impact on the architecture of park lodges throughout the western United States.
What’s the connection between this and Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument? Back in 1908, Herman Schweizer from Albuquerque made a trek to the ruins of the Abó Mission to check out the Abó Painted Rocks site. This rocky area featured amazing Native American pictographs that date back to the Pueblo IV period, starting around 1300. These pictographs are fascinating because they show images from both Puebloan and Plains cultures, and they use a wide range of colors in their designs. Using Schweizer's sketches, Colter had artist Fred Greer paint the ceiling of the Grand Canyon's Desert View Watchtower with pictographs from Abó during its construction in 1932. Interestingly, some of the pictographs that Greer painted are now missing or damaged at the Abó site. When Colter or someone from her team visited the site in 1932 or 1933, they found that some of the pictographs drawn by Schweizer in 1908 were already vandalized, including a Koshare figure, which is a Puebloan trickster or clown painted in black and white stripes. By 1932 or 1933, this figure was missing its upper body, but it appears complete on the ceiling of the Desert View Watchtower. Because of this damage, the pictographs on the Watchtower's ceiling offer a crucial early look at the pictographs from Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument and create a connection between this park and Grand Canyon National Park.
