Pennsylvania Scenery

For a larger view and a map featuring the scene’s location, click on the image above.

Artist unknown
American, nineteenth century?
After Edwin Whitefield
American, b. England, 1816–1892
Falls on the Lackawana, Pa.
Color lithograph, 6 7/8 x 9 3/8 inches
From North American Scenery
Printed by Francis Michelin, New York
Published in 1846 by H. Long & Brother
Partial gift and purchase from John C. O’Connor and Ralph M. Yeager
86.613

Born Edwin Pennie, Whitefield had assumed his mother’s surname by the time he immigrated to the United States around 1837, apparently to obscure the life he left behind, including a wife and child, in his native England. A self-taught artist specializing in landscape, Whitefield traveled throughout the Northeast in search of picturesque locations for his various projects. Twenty-eight of his sketches were lithographed for North American Scenery. They were issued, four at a time, in seven monthly installments beginning in January 1846, together with explanatory texts for each of the scenes by the well-known New York bibliophile John Keese.
    
The Lackawanna is a forty-two-mile-long river in northeastern Pennsylvania, flowing southwest, through Scranton, and joining the Susquehanna River just north of Pittston. The falls depicted here, which have not been identified, may be located along any of the river’s sixty-five tributaries. Some examples of this print from North American Scenery, though, bear an appended title that place the falls near Tuckhannock, a town on the Susquehanna some fifteen miles upstream of Pittston.