MS 24 Gwyneth Harrington Papers, 1934-1962

Materials from MS 24 Gwyneth Harrington Papers grouped by cultural affiliation. To access the full collection guide on Arizona Archives Online, click here.

To access archival materials, contact larc@arizona.edu.

Biographical Note

Gwyneth Browne was born in Boston on February 1, 1894. Her father was the head of the New York Life Insurance Company in New England and eastern Canada. She had two brothers, Alan and Gordon. Gordon Browne went to live in Morocco after he graduated from Harvard in 1923. He worked for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II and continued to live abroad. Gwyneth visited him at various times in Pakistan, Borneo and Morocco.

At the age of 21, Gwyneth married Eugene Harrington; they had two children, Josephine and Alan. In 1932, she divorced and went on a trip to Haiti with a friend. She collected some artifacts on the island of La Gonâve in Haiti which she donated to the Peabody Museum at Harvard in 1934.

Gwyneth went to Yugoslavia with Vladimir Fewkes' Peabody-sponsored expedition at Starcevo in 1932. In 1934, she went to the Guajira Peninsula (Venezuela/Columbia, South America) with Lewis Kron and Vincent Petrullo on an expedition sponsored jointly by the University Museum and Columbia University. Sometime during 1930-34, she worked on Lloyd Warner's Yankee town study in Newburyport, Massachusetts.

In 1936, she was a field worker for the Soil Conservation Service on the Wind River Reservation, Wyoming. From 1936-38, she was working for the Soil Conservation Service on the Pima and Papago Reservations in Arizona. In 1938, she was transferred to the Indian Arts and Crafts Board on the Papago Reservation at Sells, Arizona. She remained with the Indian Arts and Crafts Board until 1942 when she had to quit work as an anthropologist as a condition of her marriage to Juan Xavier, her Papago interpreter. She worked on the Museum of Modern Art (New York City) exhibit of American Indian Art that opened in January, 1941 with René d'Harnoncourt, manager of the I.A.C.B.

She and Juan were divorced after a few years. In the early '50s, she returned to Boston to care for her mother. In 1954, she worked for the Amerind Foundation in Dragoon, Arizona. She wrote monographs on Algeria and Tunisia for the Human Relations Area Files during 1955-57. From 1958 until her marriage to Frederick Wulsin in 1959, she was hostess at the Christopher Square Inn, a not-for-profit hotel owned by her friend, Helen d'Autremont. Fred Wulsin had been an anthropology professor at Tufts University before his retirement. He died in 1962. Gwyneth died on May 28, 1978. See ASM Archivist Jeanne Armstrong's biographical sketch of Harrington for additional information, published in the Journal of the Souhtwest, 30(4) in 1988.