The Tracy Log Book - A month in Summer - 1855. Charles Tracy, Frederic Church and The First Rusticators on Mount Desert Island

The Tracy diary offers us the unique opportunity to accompany 27 nineteenth century travellers 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 travelling 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.