Barbara Fiske Calhoun was an American cartoonist, painter, and lover of Vermont since early childhood, causing her to found one of Vermont's oldest and, in many ways, its most intellectual, alternative community. She helped to found Quarry Hill Creative Center, the Fiske family property, in Rochester, Vermont.
Barbara Hall was born and named Isabelle Daniel Hall in Tucson, Arizona on September 9, 1919 to Isabelle Daniel Jones and John Hall, Jr., both newspaper reporters. Both were scions of upper-class Southern families who, uprooted after the Civil War, traveled West. Isabelle, called "Belle," came from Asheville, North Carolina, where she had modeled for the papers, known, with her sister Mary, or Polly, as one of the "beautiful Jones sisters of Asheville." Around 1912, she and her brother A.V. Jones, who had tuberculosis, came to Tucson seeking the warmth of the desert and hoping it would cure or remit his illness. John Hall, Jr., was from Alabama, though he had been born in Jacksonville, Florida. His mother, Lucy Herter Hall—a Yankee from Boston who had somehow defeated the prejudices that followed "The War Between the States" to marry John Hall, Sr., also had tuberculosis. Her husband, John Hall, Sr. being deceased, she came to Arizonawith her three sons, John, Richard and Harry. A.V., (named after the patriarch of the family and the close friend of John C. Calhoun, Abraham Venable, died in 1915. No longer needed to care for her brother, Belle finally felt able to marry John, a few years younger than herself. Lucy lived on long enough for "Babs" (little Isabelle, not yet Barbara) to know her, but she was never allowed to touch or kiss her grandmother.
Belle and John married on March 20, 1918, and "Babs," from the Scots word for "baby," was born in 1919. Sadly, her father was caught up in a late wave of Spanish Influenzaand died in February, 1920, when Barbara was only six months old. She grew up with her mother (who never remarried), her aunt Mary (Polly) Caldwell, who had also moved West to live with her sister while her husband worked as an engineer in various places around the world, and two cousins.
"Babs" grew up in rebellion against the rigid rules and mores of the Southern society of her family. She was not allowed to play with non-Southern children, and later, was forbidden to go out with a Mexican boy whom she liked. Eventually she rebelled against this and played with a family of Northern children, dropping the lush Southern upper-class accent, which her family kept as pure as if they were still living on Slate Hill a plantation of her ancestor, Patriot Nathaniel Venable. She also vowed that when she grew up she would marry a Jewish man—another goal that she made come true. She was aware of her beauty—she had blonde hair, sky-blue eyes, and a beautiful body. Everyone in the family had a talent or artistic bent of some kind; Babs grew up always drawing. "I just drew," she would say. "I could always draw." Even so, in a family of artists, her gift was considered special and to be given its due and care.
Barbara attended art school in Los Angeles, moving to New York in 1940. During World War II, after showing her portfolio to Harvey Comics in 1941, she was hired to draw the comic "Black Cat". Living in the Village, she met her husband-to-be, writer and playwright Irving Fiske, who suggested that she change her name to "Barbara Hall," which she did. Her next strip was Girl Commandos, about an international team of Nazi-fighting women. This comic was developed from Pat Parker, War Nurse, about a "freelance fighter for freedom". While stationed in India, Parker recruited a British nurse, an American radio operator, a Soviet photographer, and a Chinese patriot. Hall continued Girl Commandos until 1943, when it was taken over by Jill Elgin.
On January 8, 1946, she married Irving Fiske and began to use the name Barbara Hall Fiske. In 1946, she and her husband, both wildly unconventional Bohemian intellectuals, used wedding money to buy the farm in Rochester that later became the artist's retreat and "hippie commune" called Quarry Hill Creative Center.
They had two children: Isabella Fiske (born 1950) and William Fiske (1954-2008). Though she had given up drawing comics,to the loss of the world of cartooning, she continued and developed the sophistication of her artwork in the mediums of egg tempera and pastel. She divorced Irving Fiske in 1976. After a period of some tension, she and Irving reached a state of friendliness and mutual support, with the shared desire to see Quarry Hill continue. With the assistance of her son, William, and others, Barbara created a corporation to own the land, Lyman Hall, Inc. She attended Vermont College and got an MFA in Art History during the 80s, and returned to Quarry Hill after a time of living in Randolph, VT. In 1989, she married Dr. Donald Calhoun, a writer and sociology professor who had been her mentor at Vermont College. They both lived at Quarry Hill into their 90s. Donald Calhoun died on May 5, 2009.
Barbara lived at Quarry Hill Creative Center till she was 93,teaching art and encouraging the young. Finally, increasing ill health and disability led her to enter Brookside Nursing Home in White River Junction, VT. She was visited frequently by her family and friends. Her daughter and son-in-law, Brion McFarlin, were with her for almost all the last days of her life, reading her favorite books and poems. She died without anyone present, but in apparent sleep and peacefulness up to a few moments before her last breath, according to her nurses, on April 28, 2014.

Source: wikipedia.org