Annie Pike Greenwood Collection exhibit on display at Oboler Library during month of October

Greenwood’s grandson and donor of the collection, H. Kingsley Thurber III, will be in attendance at the reception, as well as Marcia Franklin, PBS Idaho producer of the Idaho Experience series. Annie Pike Greenwood will be the focus of an upcoming episode airing Oct. 25. PBS filmmakers were on the ISU campus last December and January conducting interviews and filming the collection in preparation for the documentary.  

Greenwood was, among other things, an early 20th-century western writer. Her novel, “We Sagebrush Folks,” was first published in 1934. It was republished in 1988 with a foreword by Jo Ann Ruckman, emeritus ISU faculty in the Department of History; and again in 2003 with an introduction by Susan H. Swetnam, emeritus ISU faculty in the Department of English.

The book is a memoir of Greenwood and her husband's move to southern Idaho and their farming life. Her collection includes, in part, her original manuscript for “We Sagebrush Folks,” published and unpublished poetry, prose, manuscripts, correspondence, photographs and family history.

Greenwood was born in Provo, Utah in 1879 and was a graduate of the Brigham Young Academy in Provo. While there, she wrote the lyrics to school’s song, and then attended the University of Utah and the University of Michigan.

Prior to living in Idaho, Greenwood taught school and worked for the Salt Lake Tribune as a reporter, and for a Los Angeles paper. She met her husband, Charles O. Greenwood, in Salt Lake City. They married in Los Angeles in 1905 and settled in Idaho in what was known as the Minidoka tract, which was part of the Twin Falls irrigation project that was part of the Carey Act project. It was her life there that inspired her to write “We Sagebrush Folks.”