Person

Barton, Marie

1905-1999

Marie Barton (nee Rossander) was born in Hundtofte, Denmark on April 21, 1905, the daughter of Karl Peder and Karen Marie Rossander. In 1911, the family immigrated to Canada where they raised eight children on a homestead near Kerrobert, Saskatchewan. At the age of eighteen, Marie started her teaching career and met Leonard Barton at a school dance. They were married in 1928 at the school's Christmas concert. Overcoming the barriers that existed for married women, she taught for four years so that she could help buy a farm in Davidson, Saskatchewan. The prairie drought of the 1930s drove them from their Davidson farm to a farm at Togo, Saskatchewan and then to Camperville, Manitoba. In the late 1930s Leonard was diagnosed with cancer and passed away in 1943, leaving Marie to return to teaching to support their four children, Arthur, Joy and twins Lois and Ray. She continued to upgrade her teaching skills through correspondence and summer school, and in 1955 graduated from the University of Manitoba with a B.A. and a B.Ed. Marie taught for twenty-three years in Manitoba, first in country schools in the Dauphin area and then in Winnipeg where she managed a pilot program for visually impaired junior high school students until her retirement in 1970. After her retirement Marie devoted much of her time to writing and published many articles in newspapers and magazines. She also organized a senior citizen's writing group and endorsed the on-going Marie Barton Award for Excellence in Short Fiction presented by the Canadian Author's Association (Manitoba Branch). In 1996, she completed an autobiography, In Search of Baked Pigeons, which chronicled her varied life experiences from driving oxen at age six to learning to use a computer at age eighty. Marie Barton passed away on October 13, 1999 at the age of ninety-four.