Tracy Log Bast:1855 I WebVoyage Record View 1 Page 1 of 2 Home Museum Collection Research About Support Shop Contact Morgan CORSAIR The Online Catalog of The Pierpont Morgan Library New Search Return To Headings List Return to Titles List Help Previous Searches Exit Search Results: Displaying 10 of 13 entries Previous Next Detailed Record Brief Record MARC Record Questions about this item?: Please include all the starred fields in this record in your enquiry or request *Location: Archives--] Bound Volumes (ARVBD) *Call Number: ARC 0320 *Bookmark for This Record: http://corsair.themorgan.org/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=116384 *Record ID: 116384 *Accession Number: ARC 320 *Author/Artist: Tracy, Charles, 1810-1885. *Biographical Data: New York city attorney, married to Louisa Kirkland. The couple had six children: Frances ("Fanny"), later Mrs. J. Pierpont Morgan; Annie, later Mrs. Miller; Mary, later Mrs. Pell; Clara, later Mrs. Hoppin; Louisa ("Daisy"), who remained unmarried; and Charles Edward. *Title: The log book : voyage from New York to Mount Desert Island, stay there, and return : autograph manuscript, *Date of Writing: 1855 July-Sept. Description: 1 V. (113 p.) ; 21 cm Summary: Documents the summer excursion taken by Charles Tracy, his family and friends to Mount Desert Island off Bar Harbor in Maine during July-September 1855. The journal records their travel to the island; Tracy's first impressions of the island; their activities, including their hikes, fishing trips, farm visits, conversations, and Sunday sermons; and his descriptions of the local landscape. Of particular interest are those entries in which he mentions the activities of his daughter, Fanny Tracy, and those of artist Frederic Edwin Church, a member of the party. The journal contains, too, examples of verse written by Charles Tracy as well as by some of his fellow travelers. Housed in: (square 8vo) 3/4 black leather cloth slip case. Credit: Gift of J.P. Morgan, 1932. Genres: Diaries. Notes: Originally shelved as part of the Morgan Family Collection. http://corsair.themorgan.org/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?v1=10&ti=1,10&Search%5FArg=M. 12/26/2013 WebVoyage Record View 1 Page 2 of 2 Provenance: Autograph signature of J.P. Morgan with brief note in pencil on verso of front fly-leaf indicating that the journal was given to him by his mother, Frances Tracy Morgan, in 1916. Associated Names: Morgan, Frances Tracy, 1842-1924, former owner. Morgan, J.P. (John Pierpont) 1867-1943, donor. Formatted Place: United States Maine Mount Desert Island. Publications on: Mazlish, Anne. The Tracy log book : a month in the summer with original sketches and drawings by Frederic Edwin Church. Bar Harbor, Me.: Acadia Publishing Co., 1997. Subjects: Tracy, Charles, 1810-1885 --Diaries. Tracy, Charles, 1810-1885 --Journeys --Maine --Mount Desert Island. Church, Frederic Edwin, 1826-1900. Morgan, Frances Tracy, 1842-1924. 1855. Mount Desert Island (Me.) -- --Description and travel. Mount Desert Island (Me.) --Social life and customs. Dept./Collection: Pierpont Morgan Library Archives Previous Next Record Options Select Download Format: Full Record Format for Print/Save Enter your email address: Email New Search Return To Headings List Return to Titles List Previous Searches CORSAIR home page C The Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, (212) 685-0008 Home Museum Collection Research About Support Shop Contact http://corsair.themorgan.org/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?v1=10&ti=1,10&Search%5FArg=M... 12/26/2013 G.B.Dorr Commentary on The Tracy hog: 1855. The first stages of Mr. Tracy's journal I did not have dopied with the rest but left to be done separately, and now, at the moment of writing, I can not put any hand on them. But these pages come back to me in memory clearly, save for certain details. Mr. Tracy starts, amusingly, with 'the children flattening their noses against the windowpanes' in his house on 17th Street, New York, on a morning of pelting rain, looking out for the stage which was to come and get them all and take them to the station. They were sure it would not come Then it came and they all bundled in, bag and baggage, and the whole family went off to Boaton, to the Tremont House I think it was, to spend the night and make connection with the friends they were to join, and to make sure of their tickets and state- rooms for the morrow on the Boston and Bangor steamboat line which was to carry them to Rockland the following afternoon where they would transfer to a lesser steamer that would take them on to Southwest Harbor, Mount Desert Island, and there leave them. 2. Such a way of going was but a recent possibility at that time, sprung from the trade steamboat service had created between local ports along the shore and Boston, in salt fish, lumber and the much-appreciated lobster this latter in bulk, so great was the demand. Passenger service in amount and value was but a bi-product to this and was only just beginning to be taken advantage of by sportsmen coming down in the spring to fish in the lakes and streams, or by hunters in the fall. Bar Harbor as a port for steamboats of any kind had no existence then nor would have till 1868, thirteen years later, when we came down ourselves, steamers putting in to Bar Harbor only once a week that summer on their freight- collecting way from Portland, as a terminus, to Eastport at the Canadian Line. One took, for this, the train from Boston to Portland, a two hours' trip, to catch the steamer leaving in the early evening, reaching Bar Harbor the end of the following forenoon, making long stops everywhere upon the route to leave or take on freight, the main business of the line. 3. with Mr. Tracy and his family the Rev'd Dr. Stone of Brookline, Massachusetts, also with a good-sized family, had arranged to come and there were others whom the narrative in its progress will bring forth, who ultimately brought the party up to twenty-six in all. When the journal, which I have preserved, opens the party, transferring at dawn at Rockland to the local freight-collecting steamer which was to bring them on to Southwest Harbor and drop them there, had just ar- rived at Somesville, the little village at the head of the glacial fiord, the 'River' or Somes Sound as it is called, where they had arranged to stay, some making their way there from Southwest Harbor by wagon, others, at their will, being rowed up the Sound. Somes Sound has the distinction of being the only true and complete glacial flord on the eastern coast of the United States, extending beyond Somesville itself, at the head of navigation, in a tide-swept estuary for another mile, and, interrupting the Island's ocean-fronting mountain chain at its entrance just north of Southwest Harbor, leaves but a slight subsidence to divide Mount Desert Island into two at its center. 4. When Governor Bernard, of Massachusetts, of which the so-called District of Maine was then a part, visit- ed the Island of Mount Desert, which the State had grant- ed him, barring squatters' rights, in reward "for dis- tinguished service", sailing down in a Government ship from Fort Williem in Boston Harbor with a considerable outfit in the way of surveyors and others to take note of his new possession, he anchored off Southwest Harbor, which, sheltered by outside lesser islands, he calls the Great Harbor of Mount Desert, and was rowed up the 'River' to visit Somes, at the head of it, then -- 1763 -- just arrived with his family on their first, his own second, trip and completing the log house which was to be his home -- very neat and orderly, the Governor notes. Mr. Tracy's journal, lively and entertaining in itself, is notable as giving us the first account we have of the coming of summer visitors to Mount Desert Island, which was later to swell to so great a flood, drawn from all portions of the country. He presents an admirable portrait of the Island and its people as he found it. 5. One of the party, Frederick Church, famous artist and painter of great scenery, had visited the Island, in exploration of the coast, the summer before that of 1854 -- and had given Eagle Lake its name from the many eagles he saw soaring over it -- sea eagles of the fish- ing species, whose fornidable scientific title is Haliaetus leucocephalus or, turned into the vernacular, the White- headed Sea Eagle, abundant naturally along these coastal shores and frequent still. It is interesting to note in this earliest account of the Island from the surmer-visitor point of view the evidence of the great fire which swept over the western side of the mountain we now call Cadillac from some point south of Eagle Lake, for days together, fed by the slash left from early lumbering and driven before a southwest wind in a time of drought. This, according to accounts which have come to us, took place in 1835, twenty years before the Tracy visit, and burnt so long and fiercely as to have loft a deep impression on the early settlers' mind. It was set, the story runs, by a small boy sent out to watch the cattle grazing on the shoots of the hardwood trees which had been cut for lumber and made good pasture, though the cattle must wander far to get their fill. The boy confessed that be had set the fire; 6. he wanted to see it, burn, he said And so, abundantly, he did, and all upon the Island then besides. It is interesting, too, to note that the Coast Survey at that time had a surveyor living on the moun- tain top in 'a shelter looking out upon the sea' and taking observations. They called the mountain Newport then, but how this came about there is nothing to tell. Thirteen years later, in 1868, when we first came down and ascended it, the name had changed to Green Mountain inappropriate surely in the light of what Mr. Tracy tells of its fire-scarred, western side reflecting, from across the lake, the red hues of the sinking sun, while the east- ern side is precipitous and naturally bare of vegetation. At that time, in 1868, the name Newport had, in some mysterious way, got shifted to the eastern mountain of the range looking down precipitously on Schooner Head, a mountain which was nameless for Mr. Tracy though staying at the old Lynam farmhouse at the Head. From the early settlers of the Island, not interested in climbing, the mountains had received no names other than those of the men who lumbered round their bases Jordan, Sargent, and the rest. The lakes, too, had none save, for like reason, those of the men who lived upon their borders lumbering the forests there, convenient to haul the logs 7. away in winter time across the ice; but they distin- guished them in a way by their size or the position they occupied as Great Pond for Eagle Lake, Southwest Pond for the present Bubble Pond, and Long Pend for the else nameless lake Mr. Tracy describes as lying behind the mountains to the west of Somes Sound. It is worth noting that among these early settlers the name lake of Latin origin -- did not exist; all sheets of water on the Island, of whatever size or character, they called ponds, and this name for them still exists today. In reading Mr. Tracy's journal, the earliest record we have of summer-visitor travel to Mount Desert Island, one needs to remember, to get the right perspective, that only two centuries and 9. half before, on the 4th of September, 1604, Champlain, brought out by De Ments, on his trip for the founding of Acadia, as navigator and lieutenant, sailed up into the broad sheet of water later called Frenchmans Bay to the Narrows, and, discovering the mountainous land he had sailed past on the west to be an island, named it on the spot l'Isle des Monts Deserts the island of the bare and lonely hills, a name that has persisted strangely through all change of race and times to the present day. But, finding his way blocked at the 8. Narrows and returning the next day, he came on an Indian encamprient st what is now called Hulls Cove and walting over a night to make friends with them was guided by them on his further way around Mount Desert Island and up through Penobscot Bay and its long estuary to the Calls just above the city of Bangor, founded on the mill power these falls furnished and the good shipping opportunity from their base. The river did not bear the name of Penobscot then but the Norunbogue, as it was rendered by the French in their early narratives. [G.BDORR] Copyright © 1997, Mount Desert Island Historical Society THE TRACY LOG BOOK All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce in whole or in part, in any 1855 form, without prior permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages for a review. Address all inquiries to Acadia Publishing Company, P.O. Box 170, Bar Harbor, Maine 04609. A Month in Summer First edition published June 1997. G Printed in the United States of America 1098765432 With original sketches and drawings by Frederic Edwin Church by permission of Anne Sidamon-Eristoff TM ACADIA PUBLISHING COMPANY Edited by Anne Mazlish Bar Harbor, Maine Under the auspices of the Mount Desert Island Historical Society Mr. George B. Dorr and Mrs. J.P. Morgan (Frances Tracy) at the Lynam Farmhouse near Schooner Head, C. early 1900s RE: Archival Query: F.E. Church & Mount Desert - Inbox - Verizon Yahoo! Mail Page 1 of 1 Verizon Yahoo Mail Venzon Central Yahoo' Search: Web Search Welcome, eppster2@verizon. Mail Home All-New Mail Tutorials Help YAHOO! [Sign Out, Member Center verizon MAIL Classic Mail Contacts Calendar Notepad What's New? Mobile Mail Options Check Mail Compose Search Mail Search the Web Previous Next Back to Messages Mark as Unread Print Folders [Add Edit] Delete Inbox (7) Reply Forward Spam Move.. Drafts (8) RE: Archival Query: F.E. Church & Mount Desert Tuesday, September 9, 2008 2:28 PM Sent From: "Ida.Brier@oprhp.state.ny.us' Spam [Empty] To: eppster2@verizon.net Trash (Empty] My Folders [Hide] Dear Mr. Epp, DorrBio2008 (33) Starting with the easy answers, the Charles Dudley Warner biography of Church was printed in its entirety in the 1989 catalogue of the Frederic Edwin Eliz messages (6) Church exhibition at the National Gallery of Art (Franklin Kelly, Stephen Jay Gould, James Anthony Ryan). Unfortunately, Warner died before the project Horseshoe Pond was completed, and don't think he'd reached the point in the chronology to cover the visit to Mount Desert Island Member Informa You have asked whether there are Church journal entries or memoirs for this period. (No); And whether Church continues corresponding with Ron Archives (31) Tracy/Morgan family members. We have two brief letters from Charles Tracy to Frederic Church, one identifying two botanical specimens (4/6/1863) , and the other about some legal Search Shortcuts paperwork related to (Church) acquiring property (3/15/1864). My Photos There is a letter from Louisa Kirkland Tracy to Elizabeth Church 4/4/1856 following up on a visit from Elizabeth; and one dated 5/25/1856 including an My Attachments amusing mock "complaint" in rhyme created by Theodore Winthrop against Cornelia Fay ("defendant") for leaving a gathering early and later we have her response (also in rhyme). And that's all I can find. Judging from the "acknowledgements" page, the Olana staff was in contact with Anne Mazlish and members of the Tracy family in putting together the book. I checked John Howat's latest book on Church, and he adds no new sources to this adventure. So I'm sorry, but don't think we have anything new to add. Best wishes on your project. Ida Brier Librarian/Archivist From: ELIZABETH and RONALD EPP [mailto:eppster2@verizon.net) Sent: Tuesday, September 02, 2008 1:59 PM To: Brier, Ida (TAC) Subject: Archival Query: F.E. Church & Mount Desert Dear Ms. Brier, Last week my wife and I again toured Olana. A number of questions about Church and Mount Desert Island came to mind that I suspected could not be fielded by the well prepared tour guide. I am a recently retired academic library director who is completing a biography of George Bucknam Dorr (1853-1944), the founder and Ist superintendent of Acadia National Park. It was his good fortune to have as a close friend Frances Tracy, the daughter of Charles and Frances Louisa Tracy, who journeyed in 1855 with Frederick Church to Mount Desert Island. A decade ago, The Tracy Log Book of 1855 (Ed. by Anne Mazlish, 1997) was published that included original sketches and drawings by Church and an account of Dorr's role in interpreting and preserving the Tracy Log Book which eventually came to the J.P. Morgan Library. I write to ask whether your collections contain any Church journal entries or memoirs for this late summer month long journey beginning July 30th, 1855 or whether you know of any secondary sources which address this creative episode of his early years. Does Church continue correspondence with Tracy/Morgan family members? Does the unpublished Charles Dudley Warner Church biography treat this excursion? If you believe that your collections would be germane to my research I would gladly pay a return visit before the winter sets in. Thank you for the professional consideration. With best wishes, Ronald H. Epp, Ph.D. Ronald H. Epp Ph.D. 47 Pond View Drive Merrimack, NH 03054 (603) 424-6149 eppster2@verizon.net Delete Reply Forward Spam Move.. Previous Next I Back to Messages Select Message Encoding Full Headers Check Mail Compose Search Mail Search the Web Copyright © 2008 Yahoo! Inc All rights reserved I Copyright/P Policy Terms of Service Send Feedback Help NOTICE We collect personal information on this site To learn more about how we use your information see our Privacy Policy YAHOO! http://us.mc842.mail.yahoo.com/mc/showMessage?fid=Inbox&sort=date&order=down&st 9/16/2008