Margaret Nowell Graham

Margaret Nowell Graham (1868–1942) was an accomplished watercolor artist who specialized in landscapes and architectural subjects in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and Marblehead, Massachusetts. She was born outside of Boston, the daughter of an official of the Boston & Maine Railroad, and married John L. Graham, from Augusta, Georgia. He worked for the railroad and was in charge of tobacco shipments to the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco factories in Winston-Salem. He died in the early 1930s. Charles Frost, a friend of her son John, lived for a few years with her in the house at 645 Summit Street and recalled that she would work from pencil sketches made on travels with her husband and develop watercolors in her studio in the attic.

Graham is one of approximately eighty artists active between 1900 and 1950 in the North Carolina Women Artists Archives in the Sloane Art Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her status as a distinguished citizen of Winston-Salem is evident in the list of honorary pallbearers at her funeral, which included Richard J. Reynolds, Jr., and Gordon and James A. Gray. In her home state of Massachusetts, she is recognized by the endowed Margaret Nowell Graham Memorial Lecture Fund at the Peabody-Essex Museum, Salem.