Kathryn L. Foster Meeker
1879
- 1967
Kathryn Foster Meeker was
born in Normal, Illinois, the daughter of Maria Emily Fifield
and Charles H. Foster, a minister, and died in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. She
studied voice and piano at the Wesleyan Conservatory of Music in Illinois
before transferring to the Illinois State School at Normal, now Illinois State
University, where she graduated from the music program.
Foster was one of the first
music teachers at Southern Training College, now Southern Adventist University,
teaching there for one year, 1907-08, before going to College Place,
Washington, where she lived with her mother while teaching at Walla Walla
College until 1912. Following her marriage to Byron Meeker, a ministerial
student at WWC, they traveled as missionaries to China, where she was principal
of the Bethel Girls' School in Canton. She then taught at Laurelwood
Academy, where she also continued her study in music at Monmouth State Normal
in Oregon.
The Meekers
returned to Walla Walla College in 1922, where she taught for the next five
years. During this time she received a Teacher's Diploma from the Fischer
Conservatory of Music in Walla Walla. She and her husband later returned to
mission service, serving in the Bahamas and Jamaica for over twenty years.
ds/2009
Sources:
1920s Mountain Ash, Walla Walla College yearbook; 1922 The Laurel,
Laurelwood Academy yearbook; E-mail exchanges with
Judy Clapp, December 2005 that reference the Illinois Statewide Marriage
Index, the Fifield family website, memoirs of
Floyd Otto Rathbun, and ancestory.com.