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.

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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.