A fascinating illustrated diary of the first summer visitors, including the artist Frederic Church, to Mount Desert Island, Maine, in 1855.
The Tracy diary offers us the unique opportunity to accompany 27 nineteenth century travelers on an adventure of a lifetime, exploring Mount Desert Island, Maine, in August of 1855. This first group of summer visitors was a distinguished company and hailed primarily from New York, Hartford and Boston.
In addition to Charles Tracy, a prominent New York lawyer, whose descendants through his son, Charles, daughter, Francis, and son-in-law, J. Pierpont Morgan, continue to summer on the island. The traveling party also included Frederic Edwin Church, a leading Hudson River School artist, and his friend, Theodore Winthrop, who died gallantly in the opening battle of the Civil War and then became posthumously famous as a novelist.
After more than 170 years, Church’s playful sketches have been reunited with the first-hand account penned by Tracy, whose words strike a familiar chord in the memory of all who return again and again to the beauty and variety of Mount Desert Island.
Includes a folded, full-color map of Mount Desert Island in 1855, created for this new edition by famed illustrator Pete Gergely.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The 1855 diary was written by Charles Tracy (1810-1885), a lawyer from New York City. His daughter, Francis, who was on the trip that summer and later married J. P. Morgan, passed it to her son, Jack Morgan, who donated it to The Morgan Library in 1932. TheLog Book, as it was titled, was edited by Anne Mazlish (1934-2025) and published with her notes and research in 1997. She was able to locate the 19 sketches by Frederic Church mentioned in the diary and included them in that publication. This new edition has been updated by John Bigelow Taylor, great-great-grandson of Charles Tracy.
PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN: 9788833674001 Publisher: Officina Libraria Pub Date: 20261020 Height: 10.04 inches Width: 8.74 inches No. of Pages: 144 Illustrations: 60 color illustrations; 20 black and white illustrations Category: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY/Political Category: TRAVEL/United States/Northeast/New England
