A bronze sculpture of Mother Joseph stands at the US Capitol Visitor Center’s Emancipation Hall. It was donated to the National Statuary Hall Collection by Washington state in 1980. Felix de Weldon created it and its replicas. One of which stands in Southwest Washington Medical Center in Vancouver, WA.
Mother Joseph (1823-1902) was a Canadian Religious Sister and a leader of the congregation she had established in the Pacific Northwest. When she was twenty years old, she chose religious life and joined the Sisters of Charity of Providence in Montreal, Canada. She had many capabilities, and besides reading, writing, and housework, she knew how to build and design things. She was chosen to lead a group of missionaries to the Pacific Northwest to support the new settlers in the area. They settled in Vancouver, Washington. Over the years, her congregation built eleven hospitals, seven academies, five schools for Native American children, and two orphanages spread over the area that is now Washington, northern Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. Mother Joseph was the force behind all of it. She designed some of the buildings and supervised their construction, and for that, she is considered the first female architect in British Columbia and one of the first in the Pacific Northwest.
She passed away from a brain tumor, and her final resting place is at the Mother Joseph Cemetery in Vancouver, Washington.
The National Statuary Hall Collection contains about 10% statues depicting women. Among them are the statues of Florence R. Sabin, Hellen Keller, Maria Sanford, and Jeannette Rankin.
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