E. Neville Harnsberger
About the Artist
Born in 1908 to John Baldwin Harnsberger and Florence Peake Irwin Harnsberger, Eva Neville Harnsberger (1908–1980) spent her childhood in Front Royal, Virginia. In the late 1920s, she enrolled in art school at the Maryland Institute in Baltimore, Maryland (now the Maryland Institute College of Art). There she majored in advertising design, completing the three-year course at the School of Fine and Practical Arts in 1929.
Just two years after graduating from the Maryland Institute, Harnsberger found work as an artist. She was commissioned by the WPA to create drawings of Virginia houses for the Virginia Conservation and Development Commission's Division of History. From 1931 to 1933, Harnsberger produced about fifteen pencil drawings and watercolors of houses, landscapes, courthouses, and taverns in six Virginia counties. According to the commission's meeting books, she was paid a monthly salary of $62.50 in 1931, which was reduced to a monthly rate of $56.25 in 1932 and $53.12 in 1933. In addition to the drawings of houses, Harnsberger produced a map of Fairfax in 1931 and a "pictorial map" of Cold Harbor.
In February 1933, Harnsberger took leave from the project for a "three months' furlough." On March 25, 1933, she married John Hilton Freeman of Richmond, Virginia, at her parent's Front Royal home. Living in an apartment on West Avenue and later in a house on Kensington Avenue, the couple stayed in Richmond through 1939 when they had their first son. Her husband was employed as a manager at the Retail Credit Company (later known as Equifax), a position that would take the Freeman family from Richmond to Detroit, Michigan, in 1939 and from Detroit to Atlanta, Georgia, in 1945. The Freemans moved again in 1952, staying in Kansas City only one year before returning to Atlanta in 1953. After spending years with the company, Hilton was promoted to vice president and operating manager of the Retail Credit Company, and the family established roots in Atlanta (R. Freeman, Personal communication, September 19, 2012).
Harnsberger did not continue to work as an artist after she married and started a family. The busy full-time mother of three was also involved in the garden club and local historical society in Atlanta (R. Freeman, Personal communication, September 19, 2012).
Harnsberger died at age 72 on October 11, 1980, in Atlanta, fifteen years after her husband's death. Their three children continue Harnsberger's artistic legacy to this day. All three chose to work in creative professions—including painting, photography, architecture, and space design (R. Freeman, Personal communication, September 19, 2012).
View more drawings by E. Neville Harnsberger
References
1927 Baltimore City Directory
1933 (also 1934, 1935, 1936, 1937, 1939) Richmond City Directory
1947 Atlanta City Directory
Monthly Summary Report, Division of History and Archaeology, Financial Statement for History and Archaeology, November 1931, Virginia State Commission on Conservation and Development, Minutes and Program Meeting Books, 1926–1933, Accession 23645, State Government Records Collection, the Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia.
Monthly Summary Report, Division of History and Archaeology, Financial Statement for History and Archaeology, December 1932, Virginia State Commission on Conservation and Development, Minutes and Program Meeting Books, 1926–1933, Accession 23645, State Government Records Collection, the Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia.
Monthly Summary Report, Division of History and Archaeology, Financial Statement for History and Archaeology, February 1933, Virginia State Commission on Conservation and Development, Minutes and Program Meeting Books, 1926–1933, Accession 23645, State Government Records Collection, the Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia.