Abby Williams Hill: Artist and Advocate

Abby Williams Hill (1861-1943) was a landscape painter who worked primarily in the American West. She was also a prolific writer who produced a vast amount of letters and journals addressing issues of continuing social and historical interest including education, tourism, and the rights of women, African Americans, Native Americans, and the working class.

Hill was born in Grinnell, Iowa. As a young woman, she studied painting at the Chicago Art Institute and with William Merritt Chase at the Art Students League in New York. In 1889, she and her husband Frank moved west to Tacoma, Washington, where he started a medical practice. That same year their son, Romayne, was born. They would later adopt three girls, Ione, Ina, and Eulalie. The Pacific Northwest offered Hill a plenitude of scenes for her continued artistic creation. From expeditions to Mount Rainier and the Hood Canal to summer-long camping trips on Vashon Island, Hill was inspired daily by the nature that surrounded her. She wrote in one of her journals, “I was cut out for the wilds." She preferred hiking with her four children, being outdoors, and wearing comfortable men’s clothing to the typical female duties and fashions of the day.

Between 1903 and 1906, Hill accepted four commissions from the Great Northern and Northern Pacific railways to paint the spectacular vistas of the Pacific Northwest and Yellowstone National Park. The commissions allowed for extended stays in the wilderness, often in the company of her four children. Her paintings for the railroads were used in promotional materials and exhibited at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, the 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition in Portland, the 1907 Jamestown Tricentennial Exposition, and the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle. In between railroad commissions in 1905, Hill and her children also spent time living on the Flathead Reservation in Montana, where Hill undertook a personal project to paint portraits of the Flathead people. 

The materials in this digital teaching collection date from 1903 to 1907 and relate to Hill’s commissions for the Great Northern and Northern Pacific railroads. There are also several documents and images that relate to the time Hill spent on the Flathead Reservation in Montana in 1905. If you want to learn more about the Abby Williams Hill collection, you can access the finding aid here.