“Drawing to Represent”: Lewis Miller of York, Chronicler of 19th-Century Life

Young Lewis Miller enjoys his day visiting the self-sufficient Geiger family.
Collections of the York County History Center, York, PA

Lewis Miller’s depictions of people and their everyday lives have been used repeatedly to illustrate 19th-century American life. Whether it is a flood of molasses flowing down the street or Simon Einstein bringing a load of cabbages to town to celebrate his election victory, Miller seemed to have seen it all, and he depicted many of these scenes during his long lifetime. Miller also recorded notable events, such as the 1863 Confederate invasion of his beloved hometown of York, Pennsylvania, and the great meteor shower of 1833. It is in these slices of life, often shaded with humor, that the flavor of the times comes through.

Even though a lot of the incidents occurred in York County, the appeal is universal. If something happened in York, whether it was rambunctious youths disassembling a wagon and reassembling it on a rooftop or elephants and giraffes coming to town as part of traveling menageries, similar scenes more than likely occurred in many other towns of the period.

Declaring that there were no better cooks than the wives of the tavern keepers, Miller details the abundance of splendid victuals they prepared.
Collections of the York County History Center, York, PA

Miller’s detailed drawings can transport you back in time, as in his 1810 visit to the Geiger brothers’ farm. At age 14, Lewis probably walked the 6½ miles from York to the Windsor Township farm, where he enjoyed the ripe strawberries and the music that one brother played on his shepherd’s pipe. He tells us how the brothers self-sufficiently supported themselves, describing the farm, garden and orchard and drawing the buildings and animals in great detail. And Miller seems to have kept up his walking excursions throughout his life. He describes strolling to Baltimore with George Small in May 1827 to see the sights; his European travel journals in the 1840s reveal that he sometimes walked from one town to another on the Continent. The slower pace probably allowed him to better absorb his surroundings, recording it in his seemingly photographic memory. The earliest event he claims to remember was crying when his sister took his cradle from him for his new nephew in 1798.

Detailed indoor scenes didn’t escape Miller’s pen and brush either. His depiction of Mrs. Hersh cooking at the open hearth of her tavern kitchen is one example of a rich interior. He did not miss the coffee mill on the mantel or the fish in the three-legged frying pan. His ability to “picture off” what he remembered, even many years later, was extraordinary.

Miller’s drawing of his parents’ house on a blank page of ‘S alt Marki-haus mittes in d’r Schtadt by Henry Lee Fisher. The wooden pediment, carved by Lewis Jr., is on display at the York County History Center.
Collections of the York County History Center, York, PA

Even though some of the individuals and scenes Miller recorded would had to have been witnessed when he was quite young and put on paper decades later, contemporary portraits of these people and photographs of buildings that stood during Miller’s lifetime show the accuracy of his memory. He was proud of that ability. For example, Pennsylvania German poet Henry Lee Fisher considered Miller a good friend, penning his biography in John Gibson’s History of York County, Pennsylvania and writing his very lengthy front-page obituary in the York Daily. When Fisher gave Miller a copy of Fisher’s own Pennsylvania German dialect book on olden times in York, Miller dismissed the engravings in it. He proceeded to fill the volume’s blank pages and margins with his own colorful illustrations of York, noting that they were more accurate.

Lewis Miller was born in York in 1796, the youngest of seven surviving children of John Ludwig Miller and Eve Catherine Rothenberger, emigrants in 1772 from what is now the Baden-Württemberg region of Germany. Father Ludwig was a trained potter, as many in the Miller family had been. He practiced that skill when first coming to America, but in 1790 he became the schoolmaster and choirmaster at Christ Lutheran church in York, a town of nearly 2,100. (Ludwig is the German counterpart of Lewis. The younger Miller usually used Ludwig when referring to his father and Lewis for himself, but not always.)

Growing up in the center of the town, young Lewis had a good vantage point to observe the political, religious and commercial goings on. He recorded these events, large and small, with his drawings and often lengthy captions. York is a county seat, so the town was busy with people coming for court or to take care of legal business. There was an open-air market, many stores and lots of taverns, the latter providing lodging, food and meeting places. Citizens enthusiastically followed politics, perhaps more so because York had been the temporary seat of the United States government only a couple decades earlier. Although we know that Miller created some of his engaging drawings long after the event occurred, he might have started chronicling what he saw around him at an early age. One image shows Ludwig Miller teaching children at the Lutheran school. One small boy, perhaps Lewis as a child, sits to the side looking on, with paper and pen or pencil in hand.

Ludwig Miller Sr. and his pupils at the Lutheran schoolhouse in 1805.
Collections of the York County History Center, York, PA

His conscious intent of creating a legacy for those who came after him is evidenced on a title page of one of his volumes of compiled drawings: “Ludwig Miller, Chronicle of York, Pennsylvania from 1799 to 1850: Being a valuable collection of interesting and miscellaneous incidents, or a picturesque looking glass for the mind.” His project eventually expanded into multiple volumes. He would continue his seeming compulsion to record all he observed until his death at age 86, whether it would be in York County or elsewhere, such as during his European trip or his visits with relatives in New York City and southwestern Virginia. Self-portraits are included in many of his drawings, showing him from a child of 3 to the white-bearded Lewis introducing a collection of 1882 sketches done for George Billmeyer. He is sometimes pictured as a participant, sometimes as an observer. Existing photographs capture his image from middle-age to the older Lewis. These can be easily matched with his drawings, especially since his life-long pompadour hairstyle was rather distinctive.

Another of his volumes declares that these are true sketches. “I myself being there upon the places and spot and put down what happened. And was close by of the greatest number.” Miller seems to have been well-educated; he was quite proficient in German and English, occasionally even throwing in a bit of Latin. His vocabulary was extensive, and he had a good knowledge of the classics, the Bible and world history.

Miller at his workbench with his tools and a recap of 30 years of carpentry clients.
Collections of the York County History Center, York, PA

Many of his hundreds of pages of drawings show several unrelated vignettes. Miller first featured a subject or so on each page, but he often went back later, perhaps several times, and added new incidents. Shades of ink vary between the captions, attesting to some of the scenes being later additions. He sometimes seemed to have a compulsion to fill any blank space on a piece of paper, including book margins.

Although Miller’s work is easily recognizable, there can be a wide spectrum of preciseness in his drawings. Some of them are casually drawn, seemingly with the main object of recording the fleeting incident, while others are very precise in execution. This meticulousness is particularly evident in the travel journals documenting his 1840–41 journey through Germany and several other countries of Europe. Many of these scenes are minutely drawn with ink, whereas more informal examples seem to have been initially done quickly with pencil or even strokes of watercolor alone. Care was also taken on the collection of more than 350 full-length profile portraits of 19th-century York County individuals, many of whom hold the tools of their trades. Miller jotted the notation ein Hess under 22 of the men depicted in this series. This identified them as having been among Hessian soldiers whose Germanic leaders sold their services to King George III during the Revolutionary War. These hired soldiers had more in common with most Pennsylvanians than the British for whom they were fighting, so some deserted or stayed after the war ended and settled here.

By the time Lewis was 17, he was apprenticed to his brother John to learn carpentry, a trade he carried on for more than 40 years. During at least one of those years he was the only carpenter officially working for the county. In that capacity he did everything from repairing bridges to making desks and ballot boxes. He even fabricated and installed shutters on the downtown jail to block upper windows from which inmates were insulting passing citizens. Miller’s skills were well-known, as he shows by a list of 110 private clients around 1850, including leading citizens of the town. A self-portrait of Miller at his workbench caps the list.

Local Union troops trained on the old York fairgrounds in the summer of 1861 at the start of the Civil War.
Collections of the York County History Center, York, PA

Miller lived with relatives after retiring from carpentry and selling his late parents’ house and his own dwelling in the 1850s. He paid lengthy visits to sister Elizabeth Kolb’s children in New York City. In the 1860 census he is listed in York under the occupation of “gentleman” in the household of niece Henrietta Miller Quickel and her master carpenter husband Jacob. The 1870 census catches him in the family of his nephew, Rev. Charles Miller, in Christiansburg, Virginia. He also spent considerable time in Christiansburg with niece Emeline Miller Craig. Charles and Emeline were children of Lewis’s brother Dr. Joseph Miller, who had moved to Montgomery County, Virginia, many years before. Lewis and many of his Virginia relatives are buried in the Craig cemetery in Christiansburg.

Citizens watch as York is surrendered to Confederate officers on June 28, 1863.
Collections of the York County History Center, York, PA

Miller was evidently in York in 1861 when he drew a military camp on the fairgrounds, at that time near the intersection of King and Queen streets. The site had been converted to a training facility for Col. George Hay’s 87th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry Regiment soon after the commencement of the Civil War. One of two related pieces depicts half of the regiment marching off for the depot on September 16 and another, dated September 28, shows the remaining companies at York’s Northern Central Rail Road station, embarking to join their comrades guarding the railroad’s tracks north of Baltimore. Local people of all ages are pictured giving them a hearty send-off.

He also created two more sizable scenes of the three-day Confederate occupation of the town before the Southern army was called away to the gathering storm at Gettysburg. One view shows the invading army marching toward Center Square; the other depicts the outsized American flag being taken down from the tall flagpole in the square and being handed over to CSA officers. He wrote of literally hearing the battle of Gettysburg a few days later: “I heard the cannon’s roar, not twenty-nine miles from where I stood in old York.”

The rebellion is over, 1865, showing which way the balance tipped.
Collections of the York County History Center, York, PA

We know he had visited relatives in Virginia before the Civil War, as evidenced by depictions of enslaved people there, victims of an institution he decried. A Miller drawing commemorating the Union victory and end of the war in 1865 shows that he understood the economic dynamics that contributed to the outcome. On one side of a balance he places the Northern resources of “Coal, Iron and Wheat” tipping the scale that way in opposition to the Southern “Tobacco, Cotton and Corn,” shown on the back of an enslaved person. Even though he strongly supported the Union cause, he was saddened by the loss of life, especially as it touched branches of his family. He created a memorial page for niece Emeline’s son, John Craig Jr., who died in 1863 at Chancellorsville, fighting for his home state of Virginia.

Miller never shied away from a subject. He had strong opinions, for example, on the evils of strong drink and houses of ill fame. He was not shy about naming names of offenders either. Some of his drawings show certain individuals under the influence, and a memorable scene depicts a house of “ignomi” (shame) being torn down by citizens as the women flee over the fence.

Miller probably lived off his savings and proceeds from the York properties for some years after retirement. As he progressed in age, however, correspondence (in the York County History Center archives) between him and Yorkers reveals that he much appreciated funds sent to him in Virginia by Pennsylvania friends and relatives. In turn he sent numerous drawings back to York, including a 72-page illustrated book of poems and hymns created in 1876 for childhood friend Samuel Small, who had become a leading businessman and philanthropist. Great-nephew and railroad car manufacturer George Billmeyer sent Miller a $50 check in March 1882, asking him to send drawings of York in return. In response, Miller, apparently short of paper, quickly filled every available space of a Montgomery Female College catalog with portraits of at least 350 individuals and other scenes. He dated the catalog drawings “April 1882” and sent them to Billmeyer in June, indicating that Miller was still drawing and writing with a steady hand not long before his death on September 15, 1882. The reproduction of this volume makes up the second half of the 2014 Lewis Miller’s People publication, in conjunction with the several hundred full-length portraits mentioned previously.

Miller’s drawings give us a clear look into the lives of Pennsylvania residents in the 19th century. They provide insight into occupations, habits, religious practices, patriotism, food and drink, houses, and public buildings. They document the visits of famous folk who brought the outside world to the region. They describe community celebrations as well as spats between spouses, neighbors and adversaries. With his pen and brush, Miller created a chronicle of the people and substance of his time.

Self-portrait of Lewis Miller at age 86 in 1882.
Collections of the York County History Center, York, PA

Finding Lewis Miller Today

The York County History Center in York, Pennsylvania, holds the largest collection of original Lewis Miller drawings. Others can be found at the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum in Williamsburg, Virginia; Virginia Museum of History & Culture in Richmond, Virginia; Montgomery Museum of Art & History in Christiansburg, Virginia; New-York Historical Society in New York City; and The Henry Ford in Dearborn, Michigan.

Further Reading

Gibson, John, ed. History of York County, Pennsylvania. Chicago: F. A. Battey Publishing Co., 1886. / “Lewis Miller” (obituary). York Daily, September 29, 1882, p. 1. / Lloyd, June Burk, and Lila Fourhman-Shaull, eds. Lewis Miller’s People. York: York County Heritage Trust, 2014. / Miles, Lion G., and Jonathan R. Stayer. The Hessians of Lewis Miller. York: Historical Society of York County and Johannes Schwalm Historical Association, 1983. / Turner, Robert P., ed. Lewis Miller, Sketches and Chronicles: The Reflections of a Nineteenth Century Pennsylvania German Folk Artist. York: The Historical Society of York County, 1966.

June Burk Lloyd, librarian emerita at York County History Center, is the author of several books and articles on folk artist Lewis Miller, Pennsylvania German fraktur, and other aspects of regional history.