Carrie Sweetser

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Carrie Sweetser, born Carolyn Knowles Phinney on September 11, 1863, in Centerville, Massachusetts, was an American watercolorist and amateur botanist who lived and worked in Oregon. She married Albert Raddin Sweetser in 1888; they had no children but raised her nephew, George Phinney. The couple moved to Forest Grove, Oregon in 1897 when Albert joined Pacific University, and to Eugene in 1902 when he joined the University of Oregon’s Botany faculty; he became department head in 1909. Carrie spent many years on botanical explorations with her husband and others, painting watercolors of wildflowers and fungi despite having no formal art training. More than 300 of her paintings are in the University of Oregon Libraries’ special collections. The Eugene Guard praised her art for helping people learn about Oregon’s wildflowers, and biographer Rhoda Love noted that her surviving works and diaries offer a vivid picture of a Northwest botanist’s life in the early 20th century. She died in Eugene on September 9, 1952, just shy of her 89th birthday.