Sketching the Adirondacks in 1851 Book Reading: Edward Pitts

In the summer of 1851, long before the central Adirondacks became a vacation destination, two young landscape painters crossed the region from Lowville to Crown Point looking for wilderness scenes to sketch. Jervis McEntee and his friend Joseph Tubby would go on to become respected landscape painters. Guided by Asa Puffer, a local woodsman, they walked and paddled over 200 miles not including side trips. During the trip they met every working Adirondack guide of those times as well as many early settlers, hermits and a surprising number of other travelers. The true story of this trip is told in a new book by Edward Pitts titled Sketching the Adirondacks: Letters from the Wilderness [Syracuse University Press, 2025].
This epic sketching trip has received little notice until now. Drawing from original sources, Pitts has extracted the story of the trip from a host of obscure original sources including McEntee’s journal, newspaper articles, letters and an anonymous magazine article published 165 years ago. From this material he crafted a series of letters that the artists could have written about the trip. His talk will describe the historical and artistic context of the sketching trip and include readings from the book. The talk will be illustrated with images of engravings made from sketches by McEntee and with landscape paintings by both artists.  

Ed Pitts is a retired attorney and former Social Security Administrative Law Judge who lives in Syracuse, NY. He now spends his time researching, writing and lecturing about Adirondack history. Syracuse University Press has published two of his Adirondack history books: Beaver River Country: an Adirondack History (2022) and Sketching the Adirondacks; Letters from the Wilderness (2025). His articles on Adirondack history have appeared in Adirondack Life, Adirondac, LOCALadk, and online on Adirondack Almanack and the New York Almanack. He also maintains a blog of short illustrated articles titled Annals of the Beaver River. He is a member of the Rap-Shaw Club on Stillwater Reservoir in the west-central Adirondacks.