Ruth Rhoads Lepper Gardner (June 27, 1905 - April 16, 2011) was an American cartographer and artist known for her work along the coast of Maine. Born in Norwood, Massachusetts, Gardner attended Pembroke College of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Museum School at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She also received an art education from her artistic aunt, Annie L. Cox, as a young woman and had the opportunity to travel the world with her as her protégé. Gardner also lived in Greenwich Village in New York City as a young woman and remembered Wall Street financiers leaping to their deaths during the Great Depression. She served as an artist-in-residence at the Maine Sea Coast Mission in the 1940s, where she captured hundreds of scenes of life in Maine through pen-and-ink drawings while traveling aboard the Mission's ship Sunbeam III. During World War II, Gardner worked as a cartographer for the Navy, where she met her future husband, Cornelius Gardner. The couple married in 1947. It was during her time in the Navy that Gardner developed a love of cartography and, after the war, began producing pictorial maps of the Maine coast and the history of Maine.



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