Lewis Miller's Art

In doing historical research for my 1830s mysteries, I read books and articles. I study photographs of artifacts such as wagons, tools, and firearms. But there are no photos of people from that era, since photography didn’t become widespread until the mid-19th century. Instead, I rely on artwork – drawings, paintings, and lithographs – to gain insight into the clothing people wore, how they styled their hair, how they worked and played, held elections and parades and church gatherings, how they lived and how they died. 

The drawings of Lewis Miller offer many vivid details. Miller was born in 1796 in York, a small city in southcentral Pennsylvania, and lived until 1882. He was Pennsylvania Dutch: his parents had emigrated from Germany in 1771. His nickname was “Loui.” He never married. He was “physically delicate and slender of frame,” according to Lewis Miller, Sketches and Chronicles: The Reflections of a Nineteenth-Century Pennsylvania German Folk Artist, a delightful book published in 1966 by the York County Historical Society and chock-full of his illustrations. (Used copies can be found online for around $20.) 

Lewis Miller, “Jesse Hines. Black Smith, menden his pale fence,” 1813, in Lewis Miller, Sketches and Chronicles: The Reflections of a Nineteenth-Century Pennsylvania German Folk Artist (1966), p. 86.

Miller worked as a carpenter. A self-taught artist, he used pen and ink and watercolor to draw seemingly anything and everything he came in contact with – in York, in the surrounding countryside, and in places he visited, including Maryland, Virginia, and New York City. Between 1810 and 1865 he made around 2,000 colored sketches. They have a simple, somewhat cartoonish aspect, and are full of action and life. Miller once referred to his art as “a picturesque looking Glass for the mind.” 

In his sketchbooks, Miller added text describing the things he drew. (He often spelled phonetically, as did many people in the early 1800s.) He was adept at capturing the characters of his friends and neighbors: rich and poor, upright and devious, of different races, all ages and both sexes, generally in a sympathetic and often in a humorous and occasionally earthy way. 

Sometimes Miller drew himself. In one illustration he uses a block plane to smooth a board on his workbench; saws, chisels, augurs, and a measuring stick are racked on the wall, with a teakettle close at hand. He sketched himself playing the bassoon, riding a horse, strolling down a road with an unopened blue umbrella tucked under his arm. One drawing recalls an event from his childhood, when he watched his brothers grab a boy who was stealing apples from the Millers’ tree and heave him over a fence. 

Miller shows people getting baptized in creeks, and catching fish with three-pronged gigs and gill nets. Folks listen to a sermon in a packed church heated by a stove with a long, rickety-looking chimney pipe. They take lessons from a singing master and play musical instruments, including an object Miller labels a “horse fiddle,” a large, open, coffinlike box that produced a sound when several men drew a rosin-treated board across its rim. 

Here comes the Marquis de Lafayette, riding in a yellow barouche, visiting York during an 1825 tour of the United States, where he received a hero’s welcome for his military service to our fledgling nation during the Revolutionary War. 

Miller gives us coopers making barrels, a man gathering rags, lame people limping along in the street, a woman taking a loaf of bread out of a beehive-shaped bake oven, boys getting “cowhided” with a whip for misbehaving, a doctor sawing off a man’s leg. We see the human skeleton that hung, articulated, in the office of Dr. W. McIlvain in 1840. We observe a bear baited by dogs for sport on the town square (“a barbarous custom,” Miller wrote). 

We see the man who “dug the grave for my Brother David, who lost his hand in a Apple mill ground up [and] had to die.” From blood loss? Sepsis? Miller doesn’t say. He draws David, clad in a blue coat, turning suddenly when a flirtatious girl throws an apple at him, and catching his hand in the horse-powered mill. 

Accidents of all sorts drew Miller’s attention. A woman tumbles down a well, a man suffocates when a sandbank collapses while he’s digging, another falls to his death while trying to rob honey from a bees’ nest high in a tree. Not all mishaps that Miller sketched were dire. A young steer, driven down the street toward the butcher shop, barges through a house door and into someone’s kitchen, “breaking and crushing the earthen ware to pieces.” 

Miller depicts houses, their exteriors, interiors, and furnishings. (Also houses burning, and the horse-drawn fire engines and leather water buckets used to fight the fires.) Food being set on the table in front of hungry diners – or snatched from a frying pan by an opportunistic dog. 

Quirky things, like a man walking on stilts. A cow deliberately trampling a pigeon. (“This was the first Cow I saw Kill a pigeon.”) A man placed in a trance through mesmerism. A woman in a shift, lying in a field: “Old Mrs. Schreck laying in the oats – ‘Pah,’ she said, ‘I am in my room in bed, I am sure.’ . . . She was drinking to much Rum – her habit was to take a Tea Cup, and brown Sugar and with her finger stir it up.” 

So many details, so many incidents and characters for a writer of historical fiction to pilfer. An introduction to the Lewis Miller book calls his sketches and commentary “the next best thing to being there.” I wholeheartedly agree.