Fowler, Constance Edith

Constance Edith Fowler, born June 2, 1907, in International Falls, Minnesota, was educated in public schools in Aiken, Cayuna, and Crosby, Minnesota, and moved with her family to Pullman, Washington, in 1923. Her parents, George Fowler (from England, a butcher by trade) and Matilda Einfeld Braacher (from Hamburg) settled in a college town so that Constance and her younger sister, Margaret, could earn college educations. Constance Fowler earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in Art at Washington State College in Pullman in 1929, having studied with the painter William McDennitt, among others. She studied Art for an additional year at University of Washington, then moved with her family to California and, shortly later, Salem, Oregon. They bought a farm on Swegle Road in Salem in 1932.

Fowler taught art lessons in Salem for one dollar a session and, in 1935, volunteered as advisor to an art club at Willamette University. That same year, the University's president, Bruce Baxter, hired Fowler to teach art and to establish the school's first art department (art lessons had been taught at Willamette since the nineteenth century, by Marie Craig Le Gall and others, but there had been no department). Fowler taught at Willamette for twelve years, until 1947.

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