Mary Jane Colter was born in Pittsburgh and grew up in Texas, Colorado, and St. Paul, Minnesota. While attending the California School of Design in San Francisco she apprenticed in an architect's office and then went into teaching back in St. Paul.

Through informal contacts with the Fred Harvey Company, Colter eventually landed a job as interior designer of the Indian Building adjacent to the Santa Fe's new Alvarado Hotel in Albuquerque, along the main line. Although the Mission Revival style had been popular in California since the 1890s, the Alvarado Hotel and its adjacent Indian Building (both destroyed) were the first of their kind in New Mexico.

Her reputation swiftly grew, and her use of natural materials in forms that mimicked nature served as the basis for later work by architect Herbert Maier and others who designed what we now term "rustic" architecture. Colter was a perfectionist, who spent a lifetime advocating and defending her aesthetic vision in a largely male-dominated field.

In 1948, at the age of 79, Colter officially retired from the Fred Harvey Company. She had been associated with the company for more than 46 years since her first job in 1902. At the age of 88, Mary Jane Colter died.