With support from dedicated readers, NCSU, and AIANC, TMH researched NC women architects active before 1970.

Frequently Asked Questions:

Who was the first woman to graduate in architecture from the NCSU School of Design?  Lib Lee.  #2 was Jean Hookanson.  #3 was Dott Abernethy (see profiles below).

Who was the first woman to practice architecture, licensed or unlicensed?  As far as we know, it was Harriet Irwin (see profile below).

Who was the first woman to be licensed as an architect by the State of North Carolina?  Georgina Pope Yeatman (see profile below).

PIONEERING WOMEN
IN NORTH CAROLINA ARCHITECTURE

Today there are many women professionals in North Carolina architecture.  But from the 1940’s through 1970, it was another story.  The design schools and the industry were heavily dominated by men, many of whom did not want women in roles other than wives and secretaries.  It was “Mad Men” -- for real. 

According to Professor Gail McMillan,"In 1870 the United States census listed only one woman among more than 2,000 architects. Only 101 of them were from the South and only five were Virginians, the fewest of the southern states. Potential professionals would have been discouraged in a variety of overt ways but also when they read in the 1876 American Architect and Building News that “The planning of houses … is not architecture at all…"

"In 1888 the American Institute of Architects (AIA) inducted its first female member. The 1890 census was the first to record women in the building trades, but less than two-percent of the architects, designers, and draftsmen counted were women. More than half a century later, in 1950, the AIA reported only that only 1.2 percent of its members were women.   Potential professionals continued to be discouraged by distinguished Fellows of the AIA such as Pietro Bellushi who is often quoted as having said, “I cannot, in whole conscience, recommend architecture as a profession for girls… the obstacles are so great …” Half a century later potential architects continue to be dissuaded from formal practice through the educational systems. The AIA Survey of 2000/02 revealed the growth of female membership to 13 percent, though 37 percent of the architecture students at that time were women. "

In 2007, the New York Times reported: "Women make up roughly half of all students in American graduate schools of architecture. Yet according to the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the professional association for practitioners, women accounted for only 13.3 percent of its members last year, an improvement from 1.2 percent in 1975 but a depressing figure nonetheless. And the number who have entered the ranks of international stars is minuscule." Here’s what the AIA says from their own survey: "Women now account for over a quarter of all architecture staff at firms, and this share has been slowly increasing. However, there has been very little change in the composition of firm principals and partners or in other licensed architects by gender. Rather, most of the change has come in other positions, as the female share of nonlicensed architects increased from 30 percent to 33 percent between 2005 and 2008, while their share of interns increased from 36 percent to 40 percent.”

Additional resources:   International Archive for Women in Architecture * Association for Women in Architecture. 

Attempts to reach Christina Chen Wei (1968) and Alice Edith Herter (1966, photo at left) were unsuccessful.  Virginia Caroline Schoelen Hendricks (1960) is deceased.  Profiles by George Smart unless otherwise indicated.

Elizabeth Bobbitt Lee, known as Lib, was a pioneer in North Carolina architecture.  Born in Lumberton, and exceptionally good at math, she attended Salem College then became the first woman to graduate from Henry Kamphoefner's newly-formed NCSU School of Design in 1952.  She was the second woman to be licensed from the North Carolina Board of Architecture and one of the first women to actively practice architecture in North Carolina.  See her profile here.

We need a photo of Anne Lester. Do you have one?

ANNE JEANNETTE LESTER (1932-)

Lester grew up in a Danish family.  Her father emigrated to New York City in 1924 followed later by her mother and older sister.  She grew a love of design because on weekends, her father would take her to watch the Bronx-Whitestone bridge being built. The family moved to Rome NY and she attended high school in Geneva NY, followed by college at Cornell University.  At Cornell, "they locked us up at night, but if you took an art class you could get out, so we all became devoted to art."  The architecture department was next door, giving easy access to her interests.

While at Cornell, she met a young medical student.  They became engaged, and eventually married.  She followed him to Brooklyn College, New York, and Chicago.  She attended Roosevelt College and Northwestern at night -- while working in the ad agency Foote Cone and Belding during the day.

When the marriage ended, she transferred to the agency's NY office and attended Columbia University which only recently began to admit females.  There were only three at the time.  There she met and married her second husband Bill.  A native of Greensboro, he'd been an English major at UNC and had served in the US Air Force.  They both transferred to the NCSU School of Design where "I was treated very kindly." She interned in Philadelphia for the parks service as well as for a Raleigh firm she doesn't recall. 

She and Bill did the grand tour of Europe, "spending all our money.  We were part of the hippie movement in NYC and we were all very close and formed a lifelong bond.  We were an odd little commune because we suited up in mornings to Madison Avenue then came back to our flat in the evenings."  She worked for Philip Johnson for a few years then moved to Oak Ridge in Tennessee. 

There was a new school of architecture starting at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.  She inquired about doing seminars and ended up being an architectural historian.  That was the beginning of a lifelong teaching career.  She was the first female faculty member to be hired and the first to achieve full professor.  "It was lots of fun, and the only thing I could think of doing is teaching the history course backwards.  I started with Modern and worked back to Mesopotamia."  She taught for 27 years.  "There was always the glass ceiling.  Women were not paid as much as men.  I could get promotions but not the fair increases in salary.  By the time I became a full professor, I got only into the lower range of what full professors were paid."  By the time she left, there were about 20% women in the student body.  She retired in 1996 and moved to Sunset Beach NC in 2000. 

Garey grew up in Easton MD.  Her uncle was an architect and her father had always been interested in design.  She studied music at Woman's College (now UNC-Greensboro) and transferred to the NCSU School of Design in 1963. "I didn't encounter extreme prejudice from the faculty, but there was a feeling among students that if you did well as a woman, someone's giving you special privileges."  She interned between her 4th and 5th year in New York City.  She met her first husband Ken at NCSU in the Product Design class. 

After working for several firms in NYC, Garey got her license and returned to Easton MD to start a one-person architectural office. She was the first female architect to practice in that councy.  By the late 1970's, she did numerous residential and commercial projects in Maryland, including restoration work on several 19th century houses.  She is now semi-retired and works with just a few clients.  

Smith grew up in Latvia.  Her family came to the US at the end of WWII to Bahama NC and eventually moved to Raleigh -- where she graduated from high school at Broughton.  She started at Meredith College in music, changed her major several times, attended UNC, then transferred to architecture at NCSU.  Dean Henry Kamphoeftner was "one of the few men who did not have objections to having women in architecture."  She loved dance and theatre and acted in the Raleigh Little Theatre.  With a love of math and engineering, Smith graduated from the NCSU School of Design in 1962 and worked for Carter Williams and Macon Smith, doing mostly drafting.  But engineering was more her speed.  After a year, she shifted to the NC Department of Transportation in highway interchange design and construction, a career which lasted over 30 years.  She retired in 1999 and lives in Raleigh.

Lauder grew up in Rowan County NC, attended China Grove High School, and graduated from Boyden High School in Salisbury.  By the age of 12, she was determined to become an architect. "You either went to Yale, MIT, Clemson, or NC State, and I chose NC State in 1958 because it was less expensive.  At the time, if your grades were good, you could get in."  Her class was about 130 people.  Former Governor Jim Hunt was Student Body President at the time.

Lauder recalls that "Dean Henry Kamphoefner brought me into his office and said 'What are you doing here? You are supposed to be home making babies.' "  But she persisted.  "I was going to make it or die.  You just have to try a little harder." Lauder interned with John Ramsay in Salisbury during the summers plus internships in Florida and with Dalton/Dalton in LA. "I really wanted to do modern houses, but no one was buying modern and I didn't have enough money to do one myself."

Lauder was featured in National Geographic's profile on the School of Design and in Forbes' profile on Terry Waugh's Harrelson Hall.  She was a founder of NCSU's first sorority, Sigma Kappa, in 1960. 

After graduation in 1964, she married in 1965, and worked for Eugene Baugh in Greensboro, Keine and Bradley in Topeka KS, William O. Fulmer in Columbia SC, and McAlvene and Don Golightly.  By 1975, they moved to Rowan County NC where she worke for the City of Salisbury in historic preservation.  She got her NC, SC, VA, and TX licenses and ran her own architecture firm in Statesville NC for 26 years.  With three employees, the firm focused on shopping centers and developments.   Her favorite project was the G. L. Wilson Office building in Statesville.  She retired in 2002 and still longs to design modernist houses or underground houses. 

She insists the architectural profession can't stay isolated in the world of plans.  "If architects don't become involved as builders and developers, they have shot themselves in the foot."  She lives in Mount Ulla NC in an 1840 plantation house.

BARBARA RUTH HOYLE (BOBBIE) GUTIERREZ by Erin Sterling

Two of her biggest inspirations are former NCSU professor George Matsumoto as well as Frank Lloyd Wright. She designed her own house as well as number of houses for friends in South Carolina.  Barbara has 4 children and 10 grandchildren. She never lost her admiration for architecture.

LINDA JEWELL

Jewell grew up in Sanford NC and went to Central High School. At the NCSU School of Design, she earned a Bachelor of Architecture with honors in 1970.  "I thoroughly enjoyed myself," says Jewell," and I got as good an education as anywhere I've taught."  Jewell recalls seeing Reyhan Tansal Larimer sitting at a drafting table and feeling great relief. "It was such a comfort to see another woman there."

She worked with Ligon Flynn the first year out of school for projects at the NC and SC coast, Figure Eight Island and Pawley's Island.  Most of the time, she was his only employee. Their office was located in Raleigh at Dick Bell's Water Garden.  Later she moved to Washington DC and worked with The Kling Partnership and Hugh Johnson. 

After earning a Masters in Landscape Architecture with honors in 1975 at the University of Pennsylvania, she came back to NCSU to teach until 1977. "Some of the faculty were difficult.  Harwell Hamilton Harris was very supportive.  Joe Cox was just wonderful.  But it was lonely at times.  And of course, Henry Kamphoefner was notorious for his attitide towards women.  But he could also turn 180 degrees and be a woman's biggest supporter."

She left NCSU to be campus architect at Penn then returned to NCSU to teach for about four years.  That led to nearly five years as Chair of Harvard’s Department of Landscape Architecture. Jewell is now a Professor and Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning at UC Berkeley, joining the faculty in 1991.  Current projects include raising funds for the restoration of Harwell Hamilton Harris' Havens house in Berkeley. 

DORIS STANLEY

Doris Stanley, a native of Farmington ME, and 1948 graduate of the University of Maine in Orono, majored in psychology but took drafting classes for fun. She worked two years in newspaper advertising for the Bangor Daily Commercial.   In 1950, she came to Durham with a southern friend who was attending graduate school.

When the Durham employment office asked about her skills, she mentioned drafting and was told an architect was looking for help, so she took a job with William Sprinkle. “The first day I put paper to pencil, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven,” she told interviewers Lynn Richardson and Frank DePasquale in 2007.  Sprinkle did his initial drawings at 1/8” scale then handed them over to Stanley to recreate at ¼”. She was the only female draftsman practicing in North Carolina until 1952 when Lib Lee graduated from the NCSU School of Design. Stanley retired in 1989.  See her profile here.

Jo Ewing was born and raised in Raleigh. She started designing houses in 1961, working for Bill Poole, Ed Mogelnickie, then for Howard Perry as a designer. She started her own business in 1970.  In 1996, she "retired" for 4 years to live on a boat with husband Arnold.  In 2000, she returned to Raleigh and opened Jo Ewing Residential Design.  She still draws by hand.   See her houses here.

Born in Gastonia NC, her brother introduced her to Raleigh and NCSU where she graduated with a BA in 1970 and a Masters in 1971.  After graduation, she worked for Brad Wiggins, Jim Quinn, and later T. C. Howard at Synergetics.  She moved to the National Bureau of Standards in Washington DC but returned to Raleigh in 1976 to work for the NC Department of Insurance promoting accessible design. In 1996, Rosenberg went back to school, getting a law degree at UNC-Chapel Hill.  She started her own law firm in 2000 and specializes in architecture and construction law.  As a North Carolina Superior Court-certified mediator and an arbitrator, she teaches seminars, authors articles for professional journals, and provides forensic analysis, expert witness service, and research for attorneys and others involved in disputes of construction matters.

Her hexagonal house, left, stood at 912 West Fifth Street in Charlotte, now destroyed.  Irwin designed two more houses in Charlotte, also destroyed.

BETTY CUSHING SURBECK

In the early 1960's, there were no public universities offering architecture in Connecticut, so Betty Cushing inquired about the NCSU School of Design.  Her uncle, a science professor at the campus, lived in Raleigh.  Both he and her parents discouraged a career in architecture -- it was a man's field, after all -- yet that did not deter her passion for design.  After a year of general studies at the University of Connecticut, she enrolled at the NCSU School of Design in 1963.  When she arrived, there were no dorms available, so she rented a room off-campus with a friend of her aunt.  The next year Watauga Dorm opened and she lived with another female student from the School of Design.  Surbeck does not recall her name.

"The first year I had the Werners, husband-and-wife professors from the Philadelphia area.  I had Joe Boaz for standards, he was pretty good, and Harwell Harris who was wonderful.  He had us all over to his house.  Brian Shawcroft, who was British, told me he didn't like to teach women because they would just get married and have babies.  He did take me for a ride in his sports car, however." 

"I was good at math, but the engineering courses were discouraging for some women and that was difficult. We would march in civil rights demonstrations and go to the Players Retreat (a legendary bar still on Oberlin Road).  I remember the 'love-ins' and one of the psychology professors recruiting students to try LSD to promote creativity.  It was a crazy time."

Cushing interned with Applebee in Hartford CT and after graduation she married architect David Surbeck, who she met in school at NCSU.  They had two children and she only worked occasionally in architecture over the next ten years.  Chuckling, she notes, "Maybe Shawcroft was right."

From 1979 through today, Surbeck pursued the field of social work.  She earned a Ph.D  in Social Work from Rutgers University in 2000 and now teaches social work at Westchester University.  She lives in Wayne PA.

Braswell was born in Sanford NC and attended Greenwood School in Lemon Springs NC.  Her first day at NCSU in 1955 was traumatic,  "I almost left," said Braswell, "when I went to Reynolds Colisaem for class registration and didn't see a single woman."  During studies at the NCSU School of Design, her father died and Braswell was broke.  She recalls with fondness how Henry Kamphoefner helped her get both student loans and a weekend job drafting for Raleigh engineer Ezra Meir.  By that time, Meir was the proud new owner of the Catalano House, and Braswell recalls babysitting there for Meir's children.  She also met her future husband, Paul Braswell, at NCSU.  "He sold me an architectural magazine subscription. He later asked me to a homecoming football game." 

She graduated in 1961.  During one summer, she worked for J. N. Pease as an intern, a position that turned fulltime after graduation.  About 1964, she moved to Odell and in 1966 joined her husband at Paul Braswell Architect PA.  Today she is Vice President of the firm.

From 1982 to 2008, she was also Professor of Architectural Technology at Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte.  Her firm received two AIANC Awards for which she was the designer:  The White Oaks Condominiums, (Historic Duke Mansion Renovation) in Charlotte and the Outdoor Learning Center for Myers Park Baptist Church in Charlotte.  She is author of AutoCAD 2009 for Architects and Interior Designers published by Pearson / Prentice Hall. 

We need a photo of Norma Bonniwell King. Do you have one?

NORMA N. BONNIWELL KING (1877-1961)

King is among the very few NC women in 19th century to be identified as an architect. She was the daughter of George C. Bonniwell, a manufacturer, builder, and architect who trained three of his children in his business--Norma, Josephine, and James Gaither.  Norma liked design from a remarkably young age. Although she evidently worked with her father in Bonniwell and Daughter, Norma had her own identity as an "architect" and had clients in several towns in the western Piedmont and foothills. The first such reference appears in the March 19, 1892, Manufacturer's Record, which reported that "Miss Norma Bonniwell has prepared plans for the erection of $25,000 building at Lenoir College" in Hickory. In 1893 she designed an elaborate Queen Anne style residence in North Wilkesboro, the Thomas B. Finley House, for which the client's family recalls signed plans.

A few years later, The Landmark in Statesville noted on February 23, 1897, "Miss Norma Bonniwell, an architect of Hickory, was in town last week looking after the matter of drawing plans for residences for Messrs. R. L. Poston, C. W. Boshamer and W. A. Thomas. She is now preparing plans for Mr. Poston's house, which is to be built on Mulberry street, next Mr. Geo. H. Brown's." A few of these houses have been identified. The W. A. Thomas House, located at 302 West End Avenue in Statesville, is one of the most distinctive Queen Anne-style houses in that city. A Poston house (no longer standing) of Gothic Revival style was located at 123 S. Mulberry Street in Statesville. She may also have done other work in the Hickory area.  Norma Bonniwell and her sister Josephine evidently moved to Raleigh about 1899, as did their father, George. They were both listed in 1900 as boarders living at the White residence in Raleigh, both working in an "architect office."

The architecture firm of Pearson and Ashe hired Norma as a draftsman in 1899, and it is likely that Josephine worked at the firm with her sister. On November 20, 1901, Norma Bonniwell married William Peele King, and they settled in Windsor, North Carolina. She evidently did not return to her architectural practice.

Sources:  Authors: William B. Bushong and Angela Clifton. Contributor: Laura A. W. Phillips. Updated by Catherine W. Bishir as found at NC Architects and Builders.

Mitchell grew up in Mount Vernon NY and attended Catholic University in 1956 as an art major.  After two years, she transferred into the all-male architecture program, graduating in 1963.  She spent a year in Europe then came back to work in Washington DC for Cornelius Milstead and then George Murray.  She married in 1966.  In 1968, with a small daughter, she moved to Asheville to work with architect Ned Whitmire for a year.  She worked with Larry Traber for a year, then stopped to study for licensure exams.  She took a bus to take those exams in Raleigh in 1971.  After working solo for a few years, she joined Deltec Homes, a manufacturer of pre-fab round, pedestal, and log houses.  In 1980, she went back solo designing houses for a few years and joined the AIA.  Later she signed on with Bill Moore at Moore Associates which became END6A (now Calloway Johnson Moore and West) until her retirement in 2005.  There she did a good deal of historic preservation, including the Municipal Building in Asheville and the main building of the NC School for the Deaf in Morganton.  An accomplished potter, she sells her ceramic works in Asheville, where she still lives. 

Hookanson grew up in Norfolk VA. She went to Harvard for an undergraduate degree and took her senior year in their design school.  Fascinated with architecture, she enrolled at the NCSU School of Design and graduated in 1954, the second woman after Lib Lee to do so.  As part of a vacation with her cousin to St. Thomas, she visited neighboring St. Croix. There she found work with an engineering firm and married Richard Hookanson, another employee. Later, she worked for St. Croix architects Glen Church and Fred Oldman.  It was in the late 1960's when she broke off to start her own firm, designing primary homes and vacation residences on the island.  She retired in the 1990's. 

Graduating in architecture at Canterbury College (now Kent College), Anne  married a classmate architect, Douglas Tennant (their photo below left).  Her twin sister, also an architect, also trained at Canterbury College, and also married a classmate architect.  That sister went to Australia.  With five children under five years old in tow, Anne and Douglas Tennant came to Salisbury NC in 1958 as part of a sister cities exchange program with Salisbury, England.  Douglas went to work for John Ramsay and Anne joined the firm at some point later.  In 1964, they left Ramsay to form Tennent and Tennent Architects.  In 1968, they were joined by a new partner Jim Kluttz until 1970 when Kluttz left. 

Some of their major projects include new and renovation work on Rowan Memorial Hospital (now Novant), Rowan County Offices, Salisbury City Offices, and the Rowan Sheriff's Department. She designed a contemporary house for Tom Smith, CEO of Food Lion.  He was a big game hunter and the house included a trophy room.  She also designed the Richard Wright House at the Salisbury Country Club, later sold to the Clements.  Tennant semi-retired in 1996, fully retired in 2005, and now lives in Winston-Salem. 

Dorothy (Dott) Morton Abernethy grew up in Raleigh and went to Hugh Morson High School, after which she enrolled in Architecture at the NCSU School of Design.  In 1957, she was the third woman after Lib Lee and Jean Hookanson to graduate from NCSU in Architecture. She interned in the gardens at Colonial Williamsburg and worked extensively with the National Park Service in Washington and San Francisco.  She returned to NCSU, got a second degree in horticulture, got married, and moved to Georgia.  In the early 1960's, she moved to Asheville to work for landscape architect Wayne Colter.  For most of her career, she worked for husband Chuck Abernethy, a civil engineer.  After his passing, she returned to the National Park Service and currently works in Engineering for the Blue Ridge Parkway in Asheville.  

Mary Olive Johnson grew up in Fuquay-Varina.  Inspired by Lib Lee, she attended the NCSU School of Design from 1964-1969.  Upon graduation, she worked for Odell in Charlotte until 1972. "I loved it. They gave me every opportunity imaginable - except that women were not allowed to go out on the job sites."  Johnson left Odell for Peterson Clary and rose to become Vice President and Treasurer.  In 1985, she left architecture, got an MBA from Queens College, and worked in the nonprofit sector for the YWCA and Habitat for Humanity. She relocated to Eagle Butte SD in 1994 to assist with a Jimmy Carter work project and is retired there now. 

Peg Hunter received a BA in Botany at Wheaton College and was a member of the first class of female architects at the Harvard School of Design in 1942. She is the author of Your Own Kitchen and Garden Survival Book with Virginia W. Williams and The Indoor Garden with her husband, architect Edgar Hunter.

The Hunters practiced in Hanover NH from 1945-1966, both teaching at Dartmouth and designing several buildings on the campus.  They designed about a dozen Modernist houses on Pill Hill, named because so many doctors lived there.

The Hunters were featured in the 1950, 1953, and 1956 Architectural Record.  In 1966 they relocated to Raleigh as EH and MK Hunter AIA, selling their firm in NH to Roy Banwell.  She was the third woman to be registered as an architect in North Carolina.  Their Raleigh house, no longer standing, was one of their best works.  See their profiles here. 

Jean Middleton was born in Goldsboro then moved to Richmond VA.  After two years at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, she moved to New York City for art school and a career in modeling.  "It was right on Broadway, two doors down from the jazz club Birdland, which I loved.  I lived there for two years. And it was very safe in those days.  I used to babysit for people way up by Columbia University and come home late at night on the subway with no worries.  Isn't that amazing?"  When she later got married, she "forgot about her art career and her modeling career.  Back then, when people got married, you became a wife.  That was your job." 

Middleton and her husband moved to Richmond VA, Hampton VA, then Durham when he became production manager for WTVD.  When they divorced in the early 1960's, Middleton wanted to make a living with a pencil in her hand, so she enrolled at Durham Tech in drafting.  Just short of a degree, she was hired by City Planning (CPAA) under Don Stewart and Bob Anderson in Chapel Hill until about 1973. "The male architects who brought guests into the office frequently would ask me to make them coffee -- while I was at my drafting desk.  Out on the jobsite, the men treated me badly at first.  They would go out of their way to curse, urinate in my general vicinity, and argue when I pointed out their mistakes, probably trying to prove that women had no business on the job site.  But we both learned to respect each other-- and I learned a new,  very colorful vocabulary."  One of the reasons Middleton left CPAA was when she learned a man who barely worked was being paid more and bonused more than she "because he had a family to support."  Middleton had five children.

She interviewed with John Latimer and Max Isley and several other firms, one of which told her "he couldn't allow a woman in the office."  Isley offered her a job and there she did the drawings for several significant houses, staying until 1979. 

The next stage of Middleton's career was as in-house architect and construction manager for Eastowne Office Park in Chapel Hill, which grew from one building to many in the early 1980's.  When the project was sold, she found similar work in 1983 overseeing new stores for The Record Bar, a well known North Carolina music store which went national.  "I had to lie about my age because everyone there was so young!  It was a wild time." While there, she was part of the infamous corporate firewalk retreat in September 1985.  A young Tony Robbins had 300 Record Bar employees walk across coals to prove their focus and commitment.  Not surprisingly, 25% received burns.

Her last position before retirement was again as designer and construction manager for Alston Technical Park, home of Organon Teknika, American Social Health Association, and other R&D corporations.  She retired in 1996 and volunteered with North Carolina Rail Trails for many years, culminating in a special award in late 2009. 

Born in 1902 in New York, Georgina Yeatman came from an English family who  immigrated to America.  Her father Pope Yeatman, a successful geologist for the Guggenheims, was unusually supportive of her independence and professional goals.  For example, Yeatman wanted to be an airplane pilot.   She learned to fly in Philadelphia and by 1921, her parents built her a landing strip at their farm in Jaffrey NH. 

Yeatman attended the University of Pennsylvania, obtaining an AB degree in 1922 at just 20 years old. There she played field hockey and basketball and founded the Women's Athletic Association.  She continued on to pursue a BA degree and by 1924, she was the first woman to complete coursework in architecture.  She did not graduate, however.  The University of Pennsylvania refused to issue an architecture degree to a woman.  Undaunted, Yeatman enrolled at MIT, which had no problem with gender.  There she earned a BS in Architecture in 1925. 

In 1928, she worked for Bissell and Sinkler and was the the first woman to practice architecture in Philadelphia.  When that firm struggled financially, they asked her to take over as President.  She joined the AIA in 1930.  From 1936-1940 she was the City of Philadelphia's first woman Director of Architecture.  In 1937, feeling guilty, the University of Pennsylvania finally awarded her the degree she richly deserved. 

Nothing held her back.  She travelled widely.  According to her daughters Barbara and Mel, she also travelled to Panama, India, Egypt, and Africa.  While flying over North Carolina, she admired the land north of Beaufort and starting in 1936  began accumulating property.  She began with an old estate purchased from the  University of Chicago.  Yeatman made the former Metcalf hunting club house into her home and added two wings that she personally designed.  It was originally located by the South River and Eastman's Creek.  She built a dirt airstrip and hangar on two hay fields near the house.  During WWII, to protect her planes from possible German takeover, she stored them inland at Mount Olive NC. She stopped flying in the 1940's.

By 1954, she sold the family farm in Jaffrey NH and moved their entire Guernsey dairy operations to Beaufort, eventually controlling over 45000 acres she called Open Grounds Farm. 

To avoid hurricanes and flooding, she moved the house five miles inland in the early 1960s to Yeatman Lane near Merrimon Road.  According to her daughter Mel, the house was still there in 2009 but was long ago abandoned.  According to Ward King, who grew up in Open Grounds, it is in poor condition. 

Because of the intense heat in eastern NC, Yeatman also owned a house in Asheville at 353 Midland Drive.  She owned a house in Beaufort in Hancock Park  on Live Oak Street as well, from which she had a phone.  The farm had its own water and electricity but no phone or permanent utilities until the mid 1950's.

She was the very first woman to be registered as an architect in North Carolina.  Beyond what was on her farm, she did not designa any buildings in North Carolina. 

By 1974, she was CEO of one of NC's largest farm operations.  That year she sold Open Grounds, except for a few hundred acres including her house, to the Ferruzzi Group of Italy.  The Italians grew the property to be the largest farm east of the Mississippi.  The Italians built a second airstrip near the house in the late 1970's.  This shows up on Google Maps just south of Yeatman Road.

Yeatman was a major donor to NCSU and East Carolina University.  According to her niece, Georgene Yeatman Taylor, she never married but in her 40's she adopted two girls, Grace (now known by her birth name as Barbara) and Mildred (who later changed her name to Mel).  They called her Nini.  Their nanny was Mary Brimmer. 

Her business partner was Mildred Mulford (who died around 1980), whom she met in an architect's office in Philadelphia.  Her close friend was Tom Wright, NC Episcopal Bishop.  Grace Wilson, Mulford's sister, lkived with them for a time.   According to Ward King, Yeatman could do anything.  "She was an excellent surgeon, cutting a fish hook out of my finger.  It hurt but she fixed it.  She hunted and fished and shot ducks with us all the time."

Sources include:  Open Grounds Then and Now by Ruth P. Barbour, daughter Barbara Jean Yeatman, daughter Mel Yeatman, Ward King, nanny Mary Brimmer.