Cora Estelle Cameron Mosher Floral Drawings
By her grandson, L. Cameron Mosher, Ph.D.
My grandmother, Cora Estelle Cameron Mosher, was an artist and worked as a fabric designer in New York City until she married my grandfather, Loren A. Mosher, in 1902. He was an electrical engineer (Dartmouth, 1897), worked for Western Electric, and was eventually assigned to Chicago where my father was born in 1910. They moved him to a wire factory in Montreal and during the First World War, that factory was recommissioned to make ammunition. He did not want to make ammunition so they moved again, this time to Warrensburg, in the Adirondack region of New York, near where Cora had been born in Athol. He left engineering and bought a grocery store in Warrensburg where my father spent his childhood. All of Cora’s previous art was lost in a misplaced trunk during the move to Warrensburg. They moved to Phoenix from upstate New York in 1925 when my father was 15. Fascinated with the desert, Cora began to draw the wildflowers of Arizona in colored pencil, beginning with the desert cacti around Phoenix. This became a pursuit for the rest of her life.
The Phoenix summer heat did not agree with them so they purchased a cabin in Greer in eastern Arizona (White Mountains near Springerville) while I was gestating, where they went every summer, and she continued with mountain wildflowers and fungi. She later added water colors for images and scenes around the cabin as well as more flowers. I spent many summers with them in Greer during childhood and remember many of the subjects of her Greer scenes including the Indian Serpent Shrine, which stood in Springerville (we occasionally drove in to Springerville to shop for groceries) and scenes of the valley from the mountain behind the cabin.
This website contains samples of the collection. She gave some of her drawings away to relatives and special acquaintances over the years, at least one of whom, George Pyle (a radio personality at KTAR in Phoenix and friend and colleague of my dad [KOY], and later governor of Arizona), spoke at my grandmother’s funeral, a 1951 private affair with just the family, and George received one. The flowers at that funeral event were her drawings.
She died when I was 13, and I remember her doing the drawings. My parents were constantly looking for flowers she had not drawn and my mother said it finally got so they couldn’t find any.
My mother, who took it upon herself to curate her mother-in-law’s drawings, and who had moved to Utah in 1984, took the suitcase containing them to the Monte Bean Museum at BYU to see if they could put scientific names on any of the flowers. They were quite excited to see the drawings and told mom that Cora had such an eye for detail, they could not only put names and authors on the flowers but they wanted to do an exhibit at the museum. So several of the drawings were selected and hung in the museum for a month back in February of 1989. I gave a speech at the opening ceremony of the exhibit. In my opinion, her flower drawings of Arizona flora stand equal to Audubon’s drawings of birds. It has been my dream to get them out so the world can enjoy them.
The original drawings of the cacti and flowers reside in eight of Cora’s original books. Most drawings have multiple stems and the index indicates by book, page and stem number the common name Cora gave them as well as the scientific name and author given by the horticulturists at the Monte Bean Museum.