In the 1930s she organized the "Smokeless Fuel Federation" to eliminate the environmental hazard of coal as a home heating fuel. Horne Hall, one of the Heritage Halls constructed in 1956 by Brigham Young University, was named after Alice Merrill Horne.

Alice Merrill Horne died of a heart attack on 7 October 1948; she was eighty.

See: Harriet Horne Arrington and Leonard J. Arrington, "Alice Merrill Horne, Cultural Entrepreneur," in Mary E. Stovall and Carol Cornwall Madsen, eds., A Heritage of Faith (1988); and Robert S. Olpin, Dictionary of Utah Art (1980).

Harriet Horne Arrington