Their daughter Harriet proved to be versatile as well as talented while a student at Newcomb College. Her studies centered around both the "scientific" course -- the study of languages, literature, history and the sciences -- and the art curriculum. She graduated in 1895, one of nine members of the first class to work extensively with pottery and china painting alongside teacher Mary Given Sheerer. The vase at the bottom right is an example of red glazed Newcomb Pottery that Joor completed after her graduation (ca. 1903). The piece is incised with a plantain design (Potter Joseph Meyer).
Always an enthusiastic person, Joor described her co-workers as a "little band of stout-hearted students who worked shoulder to shoulder with Miss Sheerer in the low, gaunt, barn-like room which was at once kiln room and studio, turning room and sales place." She remembered the tubs of clay that had been brought from the Bayou Boguefalaya and the many lessons about the "vagaries of the kiln" and the "mysterious interrelation of pastes and glazes."
This learning served her well. In 1900, she traveled to the Dow Summer
School at Ipswich, Massachusetts--and in this journey, she was one of the
first Newcomb
students to leave the South. During that same year, her work earned a
bronze medal at an international exhibit in Paris. She also sent a
cracker jar with tansy motif, a vase with holly design, and a large vase
with magnolia motif to the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition in 1904. She won
the Neill medal for proficiency in watercolor painting in 1904.
Shortly thereafter, she moved to Chicago where she taught at the
University of Chicago and directed the work of an art pottery. Then
she homesteaded in South Dakota, writing a number of articles on her
experiences in a mud cabin. She returned to the South to teach at various
schools in Louisiana and Mississippi, including All Saint's School in
Vicksburg. In the late twenties through the 1950s, she taught at
the University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette.