Lily Peter didn’t graduate from Moravian College, but family, a passion for the arts, and love of education, woven together, created a strong bond to the college and to Bethlehem. Her relatives included the first organist of Central Moravian Church and a former Moravian College President. Peter, the oldest of 10 children, was born on her parents’ farm in 1891 in Marvell, Arkansas. Five of her siblings died in childhood, and she lost her father when she was 16, so after high school she became a teacher to help support her family and send her siblings to college. Later, those siblings would return the favor, paying for Lily’s college education at Columbia University, where she majored in English, and then Vanderbilt, where she earned a master’s degree. She also studied violin at Juilliard.
In 1978, Peter funded the conversion of the New Chapel into a recital hall, which was then named Peter Hall in her honor. She led a remarkable life as an educator, poet, musician, farmer, and benefactor. Peter lived to see 100 and died on July 26, 1991, in her hometown of Marvell. Here, a story about Peter that originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times on October 6, 1985.
‘Miss Lily’s’ Poetry Is Music to Arkansas Ears
By Charles Hillinger
BIG CYPRESS BAYOU, Ark. — . . . the slender papyrus speaks in the evening with so faint a whisper, that only the falling darkness makes less sound . . . –Lily Peter from “In the Beginning”
At 94, poet laureate Lily Peter is one of Arkansas’ greatest treasures.
Peter, who never married, has provided hundreds of scholarships to college and university students, erected and presented theaters, auditoriums and public buildings to the America people of Arkansas and is given much credit for the establishment of the state symphony orchestra.
A remarkable woman, “Miss Lily” or “Lily of the Bayou,” as she is affectionately known, is as alert, witty, productive as ever with her writing, music, lectures, photography and civic and philanthropic endeavors.
Although she readily reveals that she was born in 1891 in the wilderness of the eastern Arkansas swampland not far from the Mississippi River, she prefers not to dwell on her age. “When people find out how old you are they want to put you on the shelf,” she said.
But no one is about to put Peter on the shelf. She is a bundle of energy and possesses an uncanny photographic mind, vividly recalling episodes spanning her entire life. She tells of her childhood in the log cabin in which she was born not far from her present 80-year-old, white-frame bungalow in Big Cypress Bayou in Phillips County.
There were no schools in Big Cypress Bayou when Peter was a girl; her mother and father were her teachers. By age 6, she was writing poetry and, by 10, she was learning Latin and calculus, she said. All her life she has been fascinated with mathematics.
Among four books of poetry she recently completed is one about higher math called “The Mad Queen.” “Numbers govern everything. Numbers put the universe together,” she said.
She attended high school in Ohio, graduating at 16. She did her university work at Columbia, Vanderbilt, Johns Hopkins and Juilliard, then taught off and on for 40 years in the Delta country of her eastern Arkansas home, interspersing her teaching with undergraduate and graduate studies.
In her mid-50s, Peter left teaching to devote full time to farming, becoming a successful, progressive cotton and soybean farmer.
She built, owned and operated a cotton gin. She owned and ran farm equipment agencies. She farmed 7,000 acres, which she recently has rented out in order to devote full time to her poetry.
“Farming 7,000 acres was enough to keep anybody out of mischief,” said the 5-foot, 110-pound Peter.
During the years she operated her farming empire, she also kept busy performing at concerts and recitals as an accomplished violinist, photographing Arkansas landscapes and writing poetry. She also was an active member of numerous state committees and commissions.
With a deep appreciation of the wilderness of her childhood, Peter has championed many causes. She single-handedly took on the Army Corps of Engineers and successfully stopped the channeling of a bayou.
One of Peter’s better-known coups occurred on June 3 and 4, 1969, when she did “what I thought would be a most dramatic thing to appeal to the imagination and emotions of the people of Arkansas.
“I wanted to do something that would awaken the people to the beauties of symphonic music,” she said.
A year and a half earlier she had commissioned composer Norman Dello Joio to write a suite for Arkansas for $8,000. Then she wrote a letter to Eugene Ormandy, conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and invited him and his orchestra to come to Little Rock and perform the suite. “Set your fee,” she wrote Ormandy.
“He later told me he thought the letter was a joke, that no single individual had ever written him asking to hire the Philadelphia Orchestra,” she said.
Ormandy answered the letter, never expecting a reply, noting that it would cost $45,000 to bring the orchestra to Little Rock and that for that price he would give two performances.
“Well, I replied immediately, sent along a check and he had to reset his whole schedule for 1969 to fit in his Little Rock appearance.”
Peter said she believed the only way Arkansas would ever have a symphony orchestra “would be to get the businessmen of the state so aroused they would open their pocketbooks. Money is a lifeblood of a symphony orchestra.”
The Poet
“I Hear a Hawk Calling”
by Lily Peter
I hear a hawk calling from the top of a cypress:
“Babylon is fallen, is fallen! That great city!
Whoe! Whoe! Those who dwelt in her borders
are destroyed utterly, and her
princes are sunk in
her ruin!
Babylon indeed is fallen!”
What does a hawk
know of Babylon? He knows only that his own
dominion is gone forever–the green wilderness
is vanishing swiftly and he who was once a king
and looked down upon the swamp with a proud,
impavid,
golden eye has been dispossessed and is doomed.
But perhaps he is looking afar and sees farther
from the top of his lonely cypress tree than we