Iowa History Month: Moulton’s Nellie V. Walker’s remarkable life on ladders

Nellie Verne Walker (1874-1973) was born at Pink Oak in southwest Iowa and grew up in Moulton in Appanoose County. Absolutely grown at 4-foot-10 and weighing lower than 100 kilos, Walker spent her life on ladders, creating classically stunning sculptures — some bigger than life.

Walker’s dimension by no means stopped her from working at scale. She is incessantly famous as one of many excellent ladies sculptors in America. In an interview, she commented: “I like all the varied issues we do — portraits, monuments, fountains, reliefs, every thing. However I do like them giant slightly than small.”

Walker, the eldest of six youngsters, noticed her father, Everett Ami Walker, at work as a headstone carver. As a youngster, she wished to make use of a block of limestone for carving a bust of President Abraham Lincoln. Well-liked journalist Luella Riley Spencer wrote: “The thrifty soul of the daddy was loth to have a advantageous pedestal ruined to fulfill a girlish whim. When she requested if she may need it to make right into a bust of Lincoln, he flatly refused.” 

After repeated requests, her father relented and allowed Walker to carve the stone. She spent 24 days sculpting the bust, which was exhibited as “The Work of an Iowa Lady” on the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Following the exposition, Walker’s mother and father displayed the bust at their residence on North Principal Road in Moulton and it’s now on the Garrett Memorial Library there.

Along with her expertise for artwork evident, Walker took a place as a secretary in Ottumwa. For six years, she labored that job whereas saving cash to maneuver to Chicago. Within the early 1900s, it was unusual for a single lady to hunt success as knowledgeable artist. 

As referenced by Spencer:

“And at the same time as late because the closing years of the nineteenth century, it was not the customized of younger ladies to exit from residence to hunt their fortunes. It was solely the distinctive woman whose braveness and ambition have been nice sufficient to push her out from the overwhelmed path. Nellie V. Walker proved to be such a lady. On the primary day of the 20 th century, poor and unknown, she went to Chicago to work out her profession as a sculptor.” 

Walker arrived in Chicago and started working with internationally-known sculptor Lorado Taft. It was seven years after her arrival that she obtained her first fee and located success as a sculptor. Walker’s tenacity, little doubt honed because the oldest youngster in a big household in rural Iowa, helped her work her method to success. For many years, Walker labored with Taft at Halfway Studios and the Artwork Institute of Chicago. She was lively in Chicago’s inventive and literary communities. 

All through her profession, Walker created each private and non-private monuments. The overwhelming majority of her work is concentrated in the course of the nation, save for a number of items in Maryland and the Rocky Mountain West.

No less than six sculptures by Walker, together with her first sculpture at Moulton, stay in Iowa.

Her bronze statue of Sauk Chief Keokuk was put in at Rand Park within the metropolis that bears his identify. Taft particularly talked about this sculpture in his groundbreaking publication, “The Historical past of American Sculpture,” printed in 1903. He cited Walker as a major younger sculptor. All through her life, she created acclaimed work, mastered her craft and continued to justify Taft’s accolades. 

William Fletcher King, who served as Cornell Faculty President for 45 years, is memorialized with a stone bust on campus in Mount Vernon. Walker’s different educational work is 2 bas reduction panels on the Parks Library at Iowa State College in Ames. 

Guests to the state Capitol in Des Moines will see Walker’s “Iowa Suffrage Memorial” on the second flooring close to the Secretary of State’s Workplace. 

And at last, Walker’s heroic-scale statue of U.S. Sen. James Harlan is in Mount Nice. The sculpture was initially put in on the U.S. Capitol as considered one of Iowa’s two contributions to Nationwide Statuary Corridor. In 2014, the Harlan statue was changed by a statue of Norman Borlaug. The Harlan determine was introduced residence to Iowa and put in on the campus of Iowa Wesleyan College, the place Harlan served as president from 1853-1855.

Walker labored within the Beaux Arts model, which fell out of favor as modernism gained in reputation. She sculpted in Chicago till 1948, when Halfway Studios was given to the College of Chicago. At the moment, she reluctantly relocated to Colorado Springs to stay along with her widowed youthful sister. Walker remained lively within the sculpture neighborhood, modeling and dealing at Van Briggle Pottery. Sadly, failing eyesight compelled her into retirement. Walker resided in Colorado Springs till her demise at age 98. She was buried at Moulton.

Walker, who had been a member of the Nationwide Sculpture Society, was inducted into the Iowa Girls’s Corridor of Fame in 1987, and the work of her fingers continues to face the check of time throughout the state and past.

 Jessica Rundlett is the Particular Initiatives & Outreach coordinator for the State Historic Society of Iowa, which offered this essay as a part of a sequence for Iowa Historical past Month. For extra info, go to iowaculture.gov.

March is Iowa Historical past Month

To rejoice Iowa Historical past Month, the Register has printed weekly essays from main state historians.