Caroline Parry Woolley Collection

Caroline Keturah Parry was born in Cedar City, Utah, on October 31, 1885, to John Parry and Mary Ann Haight Parry. Her father was Iron County's representative to Utah's first legislature in 1897 and was largely responsible for getting the Branch Normal School located in Cedar City in 1897. Her mother was a daughter of Isaac C. Haight, early member of the Deseret Iron Company and mayor of Cedar City. Miss Parry graduated from the Branch Normal School in 1906 and taught school for some 23 years. Her career was interspersed with additional educational and art studies. She was an art student under Edwin Evans at the University of Utah and received her B.S. in 1916. She gave up teaching temporarily in 1924 to study art under Mahonri Young at the American School of Sculpture and Lee Lentelli in New York City. She entered the Art Students' League, spent three summers at Columbia University, and during her third year in New York City was awarded a scholarship to the Cooper Union Art School for Women where she studied under George Brewster. Miss Parry returned to Salt Lake City and taught at the University of Utah for three years. During the Depression, she termed herself as being on the "bread line," but she busied herself with teaching University extension and summer art classes and public lecturing. She taught pottery at the Lion House and assisted in making a library survey of Utah to locate historical sources and writings. She was chosen as one of the ten Utah artists to work on the Depression-era Public Works Art Project for which she sculpted studies of the Ute and Paiute Indians in Cedar City. She lived and worked in the Indian village across Coal Creek and produced statues which are now in the Cedar City Public Library and Special Collections, Gerald R. Sherratt Library. Eleven of her sculptured works were exhibited in Cedar City in 1933. There were also 22 paintings of Utah flowers. Her favorite medium was water colors. She was accomplished in leatherwork, weaving, needle work and sewing. During the 1940s she taught at the Utah School for the Deaf and Blind at Ogden. She tried to live in New York City again in 1937-38, but poor heath forced her back to the sunshine and drier climate of Utah. In 1949, an illness took her out of the classroom in Ogden. She spent a summer in Washington County regaining her health, but never returned to teaching. Between 1949 and the time of her last illness, she produced two interesting historical manuscripts on the life of her grandfather, Isaac C. Haight and the founding of the Branch Normal School. At age 77, she married Dr. LeGrande Woolley, a widower. He died three years later in 1965. She was hospitalized with a broken hip at that time. She made donations of furniture to the Cedar City Daughters of the Utah Pioneers and of her papers to the library at the then College of Southern Utah. She died in Salt Lake City on March 13, 1967.