Carroll Thayer Berry

Berry was born and raised in New Gloucester, Maine, where his father was a dairy farmer. In 1905, reluctant to follow a farming career, he enrolled at the University of Michigan, with the intention of becoming a marine engineer. After completing his undergraduate work, he moved back to New England, where he worked as a mechanical draftsman for an engineering firm in Massachusetts.

In 1910, Berry joined an architectural firm in Portland, Oregon, and was sent to Panama to participate in the construction of the Panama Canal. After a year, however, he contracted malaria and was sent back to the United States to recuperate. While in the U.S., he began to take art classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Subsequently, when Berry was sent back to Panama as an inspector of construction, government officials were so impressed by his artistic abilities that they commissioned him instead to paint a series of large murals of the Canal's construction for the walls of the administrative building.

When Berry returned to the U.S. in 1915, he moved to New York City, where he earned his living as a commercial artist. Soon after, he married, and he and his wife raised a son. In 1917, when the U.S. entered World War I, he volunteered for service. He was commissioned as a first lieutenant, and assigned to camouflage. According to Rickard (1942, p. 190), Berry was one of the first seven officers (nearly all of whom were either artists or architects) attached to the American Camouflage Corps, along with Homer Saint-Gaudens, Evarts Tracy, Aymar Embury, Andre Smith, Lawrence Hitt and Victor White. In December 1918, he and his unit were shipped to France (Behrens 2009), where they spent the remainder of the war.

After World War I, Berry settled in Chicago, where he worked as a designer of installations and interiors for office buildings. He also met his second wife, Janet Laura Scott, a successful illustrator, who later designed Raggedy Andy dolls and books about the Bobbsey Twins.

During the Depression, Berry and his wife left Chicago and moved back to New England, where they bought a house in Wiscasset, Maine. Their home became a meeting place for craftsmen and artists of the region. Meanwhile, with World War II on the horizon, the Bath Iron Works commissioned Berry to document (through a series of paintings) their construction of fighting ships for the U.S. Navy. These oil paintings depict the shipyard in full production, at a time when the phrase “the delivery of a destroyer every other Friday” was a common slogan (Hammond).