A Great Blooming

Every age has strong, independent women who are driven to follow their hearts and minds at whatever the cost. One such maverick was Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore (1856-1928). Today she’s known mostly as the first person to propose the planting of Japanese cherry trees on the National Mall in Washington.

Yet she was so much more — journalist, travel writer, author and lecturer, first woman photographer for National Geographic magazine, Oriental art collector, activist for international peace.

Telling her story has intrigued me in part because her personal life dovetails with many interesting events of U.S. history: Frontier life in territorial Alaska. The opening of Japan to Westerners. The birth of National Geographic. The rise of mass tourism and “globetrotting.” Oriental exclusion laws in America. U.S. expansionism in the Pacific. Seeds of the international peace movement. And the changing roles of women in the late 19th/early 20th century.

Also fascinating is her association with many people who were famous in their own right. She corresponded with John Muir, dined with Alexander Graham Ball, socialized with President and Mrs. Taft, received high honors from the Emperor and Empress of Japan.

Roots in the Midwest

Eliza — called “Lillie” as a child — was born in Clinton, Iowa. The family spent a few years among her mother’s relatives in Madison, Wisc. (which later led to contradictory information about her place of birth). After the Civil War broke out Eliza’s father went West and joined a cavalry unit in Colorado. Mrs. Scidmore moved with Eliza, then about 6, and her brother George, two years older, to Washington, D.C., where she did charity work at military hospitals and ran a boarding house. 

Eliza and her brother were both well educated. He graduated from law school in Washington and joined the Foreign Service; she attended Oberlin College for two years, then began writing for newspapers. Among her early assignments, at the age of 19, was reporting on the Centennial International Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876.

Eliza’s uncle David Atwood was an influential newspaperman in Wisconsin and founder of the State Journal in Madison. Her much-older half brother, Edward P. Brooks, also went into the newspaper business. Their connections were useful, and Eliza gradually showed herself to be a prolific correspondent. While working as one of the “lady writers“ who covered society news for out-of-town newspapers she cultivated important contacts in Washington society. She came to write for many magazines, such as Century, Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly and the children’s magazine St. Nicholas. 

Birth of Travel Writer

A formative experience occurred in July of 1883 when Eliza went to Alaska for the first time. Sixteen years after it was acquired by the U.S., Alaska was still a little-settled wilderness, and Americans knew almost nothing about it. Eliza and her fellow sightseers traveled aboard the Idaho, one of the local steamers that made monthly excursions up and down the Inside Passage delivering mail and supplies. 

When the captain, James Carroll, veered off the established route to explore the area, the Idaho became the first ship to enter the upper reaches of what we know today as Glacier Bay. (See my video of that adventure.) Eliza wrote newspaper accounts of that trip and a follow-up journey the following summer. Those dispatches were published as her first book. It laid the foundation of her long and prolific career as a travel writer. By the end of the century, Americans and foreign visitors were flocking to Alaska on cruise excursions.  

In the mid-1880′s Eliza also went to Japan to visit her brother George, who was posted there as a consular officer. That trip launched her lifelong love of  the country and its culture. In the decades that followed she traveled widely in Japan and many other areas of the Far East, lecturing regularly and writing for many publications.

Besides newspaper and magazine articles, her work includes travel books on Japan, Java, India and China; travel guides to the Orient produced on commission; reports for the federal government and scientific societies; and a novel — published anonymously — based on her experience working at a military hospital during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5. She wrote widely in support of the International Red Cross and became an ardent advocate of cross-cultural understanding and world peace efforts.    

Eliza’s mother, Catherine Sweeney Scidmore, moved to Japan to live with her son. Eliza also lived there on and off for much of her adult life, while also keeping an apartment in Washington. She eventually died in Geneva, Switzerland, where she moved late in life after donating or selling most of her Oriental art collection.   

Neither Eliza nor her brother George ever married. They and their mother remained close, and today they’re all interred together at a cemetery in Yokohama.

Long Ties to National Geographic

Eliza became a member of the National Geographic Society soon after it was founded in 1888. Such was the respect for her work that its all-male leadership unanimously elected her to the board of managers. During the Society-sponsored Russell expedition to an unexplored area of Alaska in 1891, Mount Ruhamah was named for Eliza in recognition of her achievement in introducing so many readers to the wonders of the region.

When the Society hired a new editor who turned its staid journal into the precursor of the picture-heavy magazine we know today, Eliza became a contributing writer and editor. In From the Field (1997), a collection of excerpts from the magazine, former editor Charles McCarry called Eliza Scidmore “the best pure National Geographic writer the magazine ever had.”

Beginning in 1914 Eliza also contributed photographs to the magazine to illustrate her articles. In March 1912, in conjunction with the centennial of the planting of the first Japanese-donated cherry trees in Washington, the National Geographic Society organized an exhibit of two dozen of Eliza’s photos.

A Springtime Legacy

Eliza wrote that it was her first trip to Japan that inspired her idea that Washington should have a park of flowering cherry trees along the banks of the Potomac. She met with a park official to propose it, but he showed no interest. In successive administrations she tried again, also with no success.

In the early 1900′s a USDA botanist and plant explorer named David Fairchild also become enamored of Japanese cherry trees. After testing their hardiness at his estate outside of Washington, he arranged to have them planted along the streets of his neighborhood in Chevy Chase, Md. Soon he and his wife, Daisy (the daughter of Alexander Graham Bell),  began urging the planting of cherry trees in downtown Washington as well.   

When Eliza Scidmore and David Fairchild learned in 1909 about First Lady Helen Taft’s beautification plans for Washington’s new Potomac Park — plans that included building a bandstand for summer concerts and sprucing up a popular motorway — they wrote letters encouraging her to add Japanese cherry trees to the landscape. Mrs. Taft had traveled in Japan (where she dined with Eliza Scidmore’s mother on several occasions), so she understood immediately how lovely the effect would be. To support the project Japanese officials sent 3,000 flowering cherry trees as a gift to Washington. They were planted in 1912. (An earlier shipment had to be burned when they were found to be diseased and infested with pests.)

As I learned about Eliza’s vision in the early stages of my research, I couldn’t help but wonder:

What would give a young woman of that era the audacity and confidence to propose such a thing? What does it say about her that she persisted in pushing the idea for more than two decades, until it finally came to pass in 1912? And what was it about Japan and its cherry blossoms that made her so fiercely wedded to the idea in the first place?

In my research at the Library of Congress and other places, I’m finding some of the answers to the fundamental question: Who was Eliza Scidmore?