FROM SEA TO SHINING SEA
In 1895, Wellesley College English professor Katharine Lee Bates published a poem inspired by a cross-country railroad trip and a climb to the top of Pikes Peak in Colorado. That poem would later be set to music to become “America the Beautiful.”
Katharine Lee Bates graduated from Wellesley — a women’s college just west of Boston — in 1880 and began teaching at area high schools. In
1889, her young adult novel, “Rose and Thorn,” won a publishing prize and her poem “Goody Santa Claus on a Sleigh Ride” popularized the notion of a Mrs. Santa Claus who worked behind the scenes to help her husband make Christmas happen. Bates used her prize money to travel and study at Oxford
University in England. Upon her return in 1891, she was hired as an English instructor at Wellesley. She would eventually earn a master’s degree there and be promoted to full professor of English literature. In 1893, Bates took a three-week summer assignment teaching at Colorado College in Colorado
Springs. She traveled there by train, marveling at the sights along the way.
During a stopover in Chicago, Bates visited the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where she saw the famous White City fairgrounds designed by architects Daniel
Burnham, Frederick
Law Olmstead, Charles B. Atwood and John Wellborn Root. She would later refer to the grounds as “alabaster cities.” Traveling across Kansas, she saw seemingly endless “amber waves of grain.” But it was from atop Pike’s Peak that Bates was most inspired. Looking across the Great Plains, she felt as if she could see across the entire nation, “from sea to shining sea.” “It was then and there, as I was looking out over the seas-like expanse of fertile country spreading away so far under those ample skies,” she would write later, “that the opening lines of the hymn floated into my mind.” Despite the inspiration, it would be more than a year before Bates would pick up her notebook and complete the poem she had been working on that summer.
Bates called her poem “Pikes Peak.” It was finally published two years later — under the name “America” — in a special Fourth of July edition of a weekly Boston-based church magazine, the Congregationalist. It would be published again in the Boston Evening Transcript on
Nov. 19, 1904.
Bates’ poem caught the eye of a number of composers, who tried setting “America” to music. By the turn of the century, there were reportedly 75 versions of the song. The one that would stick: A hymn called “O Mother Dear, Jerusalem,” published the year before Bates’ trip by Samuel A. Ward, the choir director of Grace Church in Newark, New Jersey.
The song — now titled “America the Beautiful” — would be published in 1910. It would be an instant hit.