Year in The Boston Evening Transcript, and made some final additionsįor several years "America the Beautiful" was sung to almost any popular air Bates revised her lyrics in 1904, a version published that
On July 4, 1895, Bates' poem first appeared in The Congregationalist,Ī weekly newspaper.
It was then and there, as I was looking out over the sea-like expanse of fertile country spreading away so far under those ample skies, that the opening lines of the hymn floated into my mind." We were hoping for half and hour on the summit, but two of our party became so faint in the rarified air that we were bundled into the wagons again and started on our downward plunge so speedily that our sojourn on the peak remains in memory hardly more than one ecstatic gaze. Prairie wagons, their tail-boards emblazoned with the traditional slogan, "Pike's Peak or Bust," were pulled by horses up to the half-way house, where the horses were relieved by mules. To "America the Beautiful." As she told it, "We strangers celebrated the close of the session by a merry expedition to the top of Pike's Peak, making the ascent by the only method then available for people not vigorous enough to achieve the climb on foot nor adventurous enough for burro-riding.
#OH BEAUTIFUL FOR SPACIOUS SKIES FOR AMBER WAVES OF GRAIN FULL#
Style came through in poems such as "The Falmouth Bell:"īates, who eventually became a full professor of English literature at WellesleyĬollege, made a lecture trip to Colorado in 1893 and there she wrote the words Massachusetts in 1859 and grew up near the rolling sea. The author of "America the Beautiful," Katharine Lee Bates, was born in Falmouth,
protectĬrops, contribute to human comfort and happiness. Farms need trees : Trees prevent wind erosion, save moisture.