Tag: Art

Mount Booker near Lake Chelan (1903) 29″ x 42″ (Collins Memorial Library, U. Puget Sound)

Abby Williams Hill ’07, who has been featured before, was one of the most prominent artists to come out Grinnell. Her collection of landscape paintings, from the early 1900s, portrayed the national parks and western landscapes to a wide public audience, being exhibited at the World’s Fair in St. Louis in 1904, and then published in serial form (subsidized by railroad companies eager to promote western tourism).

Hill was painting one particularly arresting peak, in the Cascades in 1903, when she was surprised to learn that no one knew of a name for that specific mountain.  She wrote to the U.S. Geological Survey, which reported back (to their own surprise) that it was one of the few peaks that had not been assigned an official place name, a toponym, in their records. So they gave Hill the opportunity to choose its official name. She wrote back saying that she would like it to be named after Booker T. Washington, someone she admired deeply. Only a few years earlier, Hill had taken her four children on a whistle stop tour of Progressive America, visiting prominent reform sites such as Jane Addams’ Hull House, in Chicago, and Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, in Alabama, where she spent a considerable amount of time in the company of both Booker and Margaret Murray Washington.

When interviewed by a New York newspaper about the name choice, Hill explained:

Here was a glorious monument not made by the hand of man but carved by the Almighty. What could be more fitting than to name it for one of the most truly great men of our times… When we look at Mt. Booker let us be thankful for Booker Washington’s life, for what he did to solve seemingly impossible problems… His influence like the stream from the mountain will go on through the ages to bless and help mankind.

Naming a mountain after an African American stirred some controversy in the press, , as Grinnell’s local newspaper, the Herald, explained:

This aroused negro-phobia into activity. The name became a red rage for anti-negro venom. Choice epithets easily imagined, fell in a shower of mud around her [Abby Hill]; an effort was made to change the name. The Government at Washington was consulted but only to learn that the name was given by authority, was a matter of record, and could not be changed.

In Grinnell, Booker T. Washington was a widely admired figure, invited twice to speak to the Grinnell community, and the subject of many talks and papers on campus during this period.