Dora Erway

Dora Ella Wetherbee was born and raised in Fitchburg, Massachusetts,[1] the daughter of Vernon Wetherbee and Iola E. Wetherbee (later Nutting). Her father was a contractor.[2] Her parents divorced in 1894.[3]

She graduated from Massachusetts Normal Art School in 1912,[4] and attended summer programs at the Commonwealth Art Colony in Boothbay Harbor, Maine for several years. She traveled widely[5] and made further studies as possible, ranging freely across disciplines and institutions.[6] Her art teachers included Cyrus Edwin Dallin and Albert Henry Munsell.[7]

Erway taught art at the high school and college level as a young woman. She was a professor of color and design in the College of Home Economics at Cornell from 1921 to 1958.[6][8] She was acting head of the Household Art Department in 1944 and 1945. She served on the advisory board of the Journal of Home Economics, and chaired a national committee of the American Home Economics Association.[7] She lectured on textile history and other subjects to community groups.[9]

She spent much of a sabbatical year in 1955 in South America, studying "Inca civilization and culture."[10] She also made wood carvings,[11] and painted in watercolors and oils,[12][13] and exhibited her paintings and carvings in several gallery shows,[14] including a one-woman show in New York City.[6]

Dora Wetherbee married insurance agent Edgar William Erway[15] in the mid-1920s. Her husband was born in 1906, 16 years her junior.[16] She died in 1976, at the age of 87, in Ithaca, New York.[17] The Dora Erway Doll Collection at Cornell includes 37 dolls made in the 1920s by students in Erway's sewing classes,[18] dressed in historical costumes using fabric scraps and, sometimes, their own hair.[19][20][21]