Noyes, Ida Elizabeth Smith, 1853-1912.

Ida Elizabeth Smith Noyes was born on April 16, 1853 in Croton, Delaware County, New York to Joel W. and Susan M. Wheat Smith. The family of seven moved to Iowa in 1857. In 1870 Noyes began attending Iowa State College, then spent a term at the State University of Iowa City, finally completing college at the State University at Ames in 1874.

Noyes returned home and became a teacher in the Charles City High School. She married La Verne Noyes, an inventor and manufacturer whom she had met in college, on May 24, 1877. The couple moved to Chicago in 1879, where Noyes followed her ambition to become an artist by enrolling at the Art Institute. This interest in art led her to make a two-year trip to Europe in 1886. In a volume of the University Record from 1919, Thomas W. Goodspeed writes that driven by her artistic instinct, Noyes was “a devotee of the camera” during her years in Europe.

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