Foote Room

Room Specifications

Floor	Square Feet	Overall Room Dimensions	Ceiling Height
2	319	14'-6" x 22'	12'
Banquet Buffet Style	Classroom Style	Conference Style	Theater Style
-	-	14	-

Features

• Data connections
• Built-in Flip Chart
• Meeting Room
• Phone line access
• Built-in Projection Screen
• Fixed conference table
• VIP Preferred Facility
• Built-in White Board
• Windows

Mary Hallock Foote -- 1847-1938

Mary Hallock Foote was a nationally recognized illustrator and writer. Though she had achieved prominence prior to moving west, her most significant fiction was written during her twelve years in Boise, Idaho from 1884 to 1896. Her illustrated series with accompanying text, "Pictures of the Far West," help us envision a unique western perspective.

Mary Hallock was born in Milton, New York on November 19, 1847, and was raised on the Quaker family farm in the Hudson River Valley. She received a good education and quickly gained national prestige with her illustrations. She published her first drawings in 1867 in A.D. Richardson's Beyond the Mississipp i. Later, in the 1870's, she acquired professional recognition as an illustrator for national magazines. By the 1890's she gained the title "dean of women illustrators" and was elected to the National Academy of Women Painters and Sculptors.

She married Arthur DeWint Foote, a mining engineer, in 1867. He was part of a select group who helped shape the West and made the development of mining a reality. His career took the couple to California, Colorado, and Idaho. While in Idaho, she wrote two novels, The Chosen Valley (1892), that told of the building of a dam in the Snake River Valley and Coeur d'Alene (1894) which described a struggle between miners and mine owners in northern Idaho. Income from her novels enabled the Footes to build their home on the Boise River in 1885. Known as the "Stone House in the Canyon", it was located just below Lucky Peak Dam.

Though she moved to California, she remained intrigued with the children and working-class culture of Idaho. She published The Cup of Trembling (1895), The Little Fig-Tree Stories (1899), The Desert and Other Sown (1902), A Touch of Sun and Other Stories (1903), and Edith Bonham (1917), all of which were set in Idaho. She ceased writing novels after she published The Ground Swell in 1919.

In 1888 and 1889, Foote was hired by Richard Watson Gilder to do a series known as the "Pictures of the Far West" for Century Magazine . She illustrated eleven drawings and wrote a brief story about each. According to William Allen Rogers, a leading western illustrator of the time, "there is a charm about her black-and-white drawings which cannot be described, but it may be accounted for by the fact that, more than any other American illustrator, she lived in pictures from day to day which she drew so sympathetically." Mary Hallock Foote died June 25, 1938 in Hingham, Massachusetts.

Her memoirs were published posthumously in 1971 by the Huntington Library under the title A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West . Wallace Stegner based Angle of Repose partially on her life, and the Idaho State University Press published The Idaho Stories and Far West Illustrations of Mary Foote in 1988.