Volume 9 , Issue 41

Vinnie Ream Hoxie

"I was researching for Robert L. Hoxie in regard to something transpiring in Alva and came across all this rich history. I don't know if you know or have researched this woman or not - a great woman & Artist/Indian from Oklahoma." -- Jan Carver

"Vinnie Ream Hoxie (September 25, 1847 - November 20, 1914), sculptor, daughter of Robert Lee and Lavinia (McDonald) Ream, was born in Madison, Wisconsin, then a frontier town. Part of her childhood was spent in Washington, D. C., where her father had found employment, but the family later returned to the West, and she attended Christian College, Columbia, Missouri. Here she wrote songs which were set to music and published.

"Moving again to Washington with her parents during the Civil War, she obtained a minor clerkship in the Post Office department at the age of fifteen. A friend having taken her to the studio of Clark Mills, she laughingly attempted to model a likeness of Mills; the result delighted her and others. Keeping her government position, she thenceforth gave all her free time to the study of sculpture, chiefly under Mills.

"She was small, slender, bright-eyed, with a wealth of long curls. Her personality was so winning, and the art of sculpture was at that time so little understood in the United States, that within a year, at senatorial solicitation, President Lincoln allowed her to come to the White House, giving her daily half-hour sittings, during five months. She was reverent, impressionable, industrious, gifted, but of course without sufficient training for the commission which, nevertheless, was awarded to her by Congress after a competition, to make a full-length marble statue of Lincoln for the Rotunda of the Capitol. A contract was signed August 30, 1866: $5,000 to be paid on acceptance of the full-size plaster model, and $5,000 on completion of the marble." -- Vinnie Ream Hoxie

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