Someone You Should Know
Julia Elizabeth Oliver (right), her sisters Clara (left) and Frances, ca. 1886.
Someone You Should Know
By Robert Engel
Great Camp Sagamore’s Historian
Julia Elizabeth Oliver was born in the winter of 1879 near the Adirondack Town of Johnsburg. It was a difficult birth. The doctor set her down to attend to the mother, thinking baby Julia was stillborn. Then she began to move, and kept moving.
Julia had a rough and meager childhood. When times were especially bad, she moved in with friends or relatives on School House Road in North River, the remote town of Griffin on the Sacandaga River, and the Putman Farm at the base of Crane Mountain. To help her family pay the bills, she charged tourists a quarter to guide them up and down Crane.
As a young girl, Julia had an embarrassing speech impediment. Nosey neighbors called her homely and doubted she would amount to much. But Julia loved learning. She observed her world. She saw farmers always moving rocks. She saw lumbermen leave their families in the cold cutting months, and the Hudson filled with logs during the spring river drives. She saw sweaty draft horses, housewives gathering vegetables, and the blue gray mountains that made up her childhood.
Just a few years later, that poor, homely Adirondack farm girl would attend Radcliffe College at Harvard University. She became a leading fashion model in New York. She traveled Europe and became friends with artists and writers who would become famous. She acted in, and wrote, a successful play and became an influential arts journalist and editor. In 1913, she wrote a controversial article in the American Review of Reviews about a New York exhibition of little-known European modernists that included Cezanne, Seurat, and Picasso, all of whom she knew.
Along the way, Julia started using a pen name: Jeanne Robert Foster.
But Jeanne Robert Foster is best remembered for the vivid, detailed poems she wrote about her childhood in the Adirondacks. She had conquered New York and Paris, but her heart never left the mountains. Here is a verse of a poem she published in 1916:
Balm of Gilead
It’s curious how one can miss a tree
Down through the years. I’ve had so many friends
In the North Woods besides the human kind.
When I was small there weren’t too many folks
Back where I lived - so I made friends with trees.
I loved white pine and a old yellow birch,
Grandfather of all birches; the gales took it down,
And when it fell my tears dropped on the bark.
But one tree somehow crept into my blood -
A kind of saint of trees - the Balm of Gilead.
We lumberjacks were careful trimming brush
Never to cut a Balm of Gilead tree.
At the start of the Great Depression, she moved to Schenectady and lived there until her death in 1970. She became a municipal housing administrator, fighting for the elderly poor. She remembered the isolated, desolate lives of the old people she observed as a child and encouraged the city of Schenectady to construct cheerful, sensible public housing, built especially for low-income elderly people. They were the first such apartments in the state. So, go ahead and add social reform leader to her resume.
Jeanne Robert Foster is buried in the tiny Chester Rural Cemetery in Chestertown, next to her dear friend, the artist John Butler Yeats, father of the legendary Irish poet William Butler Yeats.
Jeanne Robert Foster, ca. 1902
Learn more . . .
What’s another name for the Balm of Gilead tree?
Why were Adirondack farmers always moving rocks?
What style of painting is Georges Seurat famous for?
Find one of Jeanne Robert Foster’s Adirondack poems online. They are easy to read.
Walk around a rural cemetery and imagine the lives of the people buried there.
Two great books about Jeanne Robert Foster:
Adirondack Portraits: A Piece of Time by Jeanne Robert Foster, edited by Noel Riedinger-Johnson,
reprinted 2016
Breaking Trail: Remarkable Women of the Adirondacks by Peggy Lynn and Sandra Weber,
published 2004
