James Andrews’s “Fashionable Tour”: A Philadelphia Quaker Travels, not without Mishap, Up the Hudson River to Niagara Falls and Back in the Summer of 1821

Abstract

James Andrews’s “Fashionable Tour”: A Philadelphia Quaker Travels, not without Mishap, Up the Hudson River to Niagara Falls and Back in the Summer of 1821 Dee E. Andrews (bio) and Celeste L. Andrews (bio) Near the end of July 1821, James Andrews, a 25-year old unmarried Philadelphia Quaker, set out to Manhattan to visit his older brother Josiah who had recently moved to the city.1 From Manhattan, Andrews ventured up the Hudson River and across the Mohawk River Valley and western New York to Niagara Falls, a round-trip journey of nearly 1,200 miles, to view what was already recognized as one of the new nation’s great natural wonders. Along the way, he started a diary, initially in the form of a letter to his mother, that quickly turned into a travel journal.2 In the same summer, Gideon Minor Davison, a Saratoga printer, traveled much the same route and beyond to Montréal, Québec, and back by way of Boston, and produced the first of a series of travel guides called The Fashionable Tour from his trip. Davison knew a good thing when he saw it. A primitive version of a Fodors guide, The Fashionable Tour combined local highlights, patriotic anecdotes, and, most importantly, practical advice on transport and accommodations. As its title implies, Davison’s guide presented travel as something status-building and relatively easily accomplished: a fundamental component of the new American business of tourism.3 [End Page 1] The 1820s also marked the beginning of Americans’ explicitly aesthetic and spiritual connection with nature, pioneered by the Hudson River school of landscape art under the commanding influence of British-born Thomas Cole. Cole began his career at the Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia and ultimately settled in Catskill, New York. Inspired by the Romantic movement and the as-yet unspoiled vistas of the Hudson River Valley, he produced some of the most influential works of any landscape artist and shaped Americans’ perceptions of what the natural world should look like. Cole’s work was driven by the fear that Americans’ long march to improvement would destroy the natural landscape, including the rivers and ancient forests of upstate New York. And he was right: the Erie Canal and urban development were rapidly transforming many of New York’s natural scenes into industrial sites.4 In short, James Andrews came of age at a time when what we today would call environmental tourism and an ethos of naturalism were increasingly familiar to Philadelphians: an appreciation of what Davison, Cole, and Andrews himself, called “the sublime.” Andrews was by no means the first Quaker to make this journey. In October and November 1805, Robert Sutcliff, from York, England, had also gone out of his way to trek from Merion, Pennsylvania to Niagara and back. Along the way Sutcliff attended Nine Partners Quarterly Meeting and visited Nine Partners School, met and stayed with Friends and members of his own family who had emigrated to America, and conducted business. Sutcliff was not disinterested in his surroundings. He writes in detail about the people he meets, remarks on modes of travel, and, as a member of the Romantic generation himself, expresses sympathy for enslaved peoples and Indians and frequently comments on the as yet unchanged natural world of the New York and Pennsylvania interiors. His book includes engravings based on his drawings of Friends meeting houses as well as Niagara Falls.5 Andrews’s trip was different. Apart from visiting his brother in Manhattan, he appears to have met no other Quakers along the way and conducted no business or mission and stayed exclusively at public accommodations. The journal includes a surprisingly enthusiastic rendering, given Andrews’s Quakerism, of Continental Army commander Anthony Wayne’s triumph at Stony Point. But this too was from a family, rather than a religious, connection. General Wayne, like Andrews, came from [End Page 2] Click for larger view View full resolution From the Andrews Family Private Collection, courtesy of the Children of James Andrews, Jr. and Elisabett Bardsley Andrews. [End Page 3] Chester County roots. Andrews would marry Hannah Lloyd, a granddaughter of Hugh Lloyd, a Free Quaker, who had...