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The Susquehanna is believed to be one of the oldest rivers in the world, flowing even before the continents drifted apart. The longest river in the eastern United States, its tentacles reach far into the valleys and stream beds of three states. My connection to this mighty river runs deep, my father raised in the coal mining river town of Plymouth, PA and my mother in the house known as “Roundtop,” a commanding stone structure, formerly an inn, perched on a rocky hilltop in eastern York County overlooking the Susquehanna where it bends a sharp ninety degrees at Chickies Rock before flowing south to the Chesapeake Bay.

 

Summer escapes to Roundtop felt like a childhood paradise; the river remained an ever-present fixture, its glint shining through the trees and its distant form framed by many of the home’s windows. Roundtop offers one of the few vistas where the Susquehanna runs east-west, showcasing spectacular sunsets mirrored in the river. Watching thunderstorms roll through the valley, great floods inundate the rivertowns below, massive ice jams, and seasonal bird migrations— all of it left a deep imprint.

 

At the time, I didn’t realize I was standing on the ground where the American Sublime was first conceptualized. I only knew the river possessed a certain dreamy mystique—a gravitational force that had pulled in and inspired artists, writers, and scientists for centuries. Eventually, I was drawn into the river’s orbit as well, purchasing the farm adjacent to Roundtop. It was on that farm—overlooking the river—that my wife, Renée (also an artist), and I were married. For the last four decades, we have lived there, raised a family, and maintained side-by-side studios in the renovated barn, enabling me to forge a long artistic career mining the wellspring of inspiration provided by the surrounding river valley and its flora and fauna.

 

In 2005, curious about the lineage of past Susquehanna artists, I launched a curatorial project to explore my artistic roots, ultimately uncovering the Susquehanna’s long-forgotten but nationally significant artistic legacy. The resulting traveling exhibit, Visions of the Susquehanna: 250 Years of Paintings by American Masters, featured works by the nation’s most renowned landscape painters. As I continued to build the Susquehanna River Art Collection with my friend and patron Jim Snyder, I discovered that the artists who worked here had chronicled the entire pageant of human history and economic expansion that unfolded along the river’s shores, from the first western contact with its Indigenous inhabitants in the early 17th century, to the construction of major dams in the 20th century which permanently altered its landscape. And an even broader narrative emerged: the Susquehanna River—not the Hudson—was the primary catalyst for a distinct American visual and literary identity. The Susquehanna served as the conceptual foundry for the aesthetics that would later be rebranded as the Hudson River School, considered America’s first authentic art movement.

 

This legacy began with John Smith’s iconic image of a Susquehannock warrior on his seminal 1612 map, establishing the river as an early symbol of the New World’s vast wilderness. As a clash of cultures ensued, artists documented the cataclysmic events along its shores, making the river world-famous. Even the British master J.M.W. Turner produced a watercolor of the Susquehanna, translated into an engraving to illustrate Thomas Campbell’s epic poem, Gertrude of Wyoming, immortalizing the Wyoming Valley Massacre for a global audience.

 

In the nation’s infancy, its cultural center was Philadelphia, home to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the nation’s first art museum and school, and a nexus for the country's top engravers and publishers. Magazines such as The Port Folio and The Columbian, based in Philadelphia, championed the Susquehanna, with writer Joseph Sansom and others often referring to it as the “American Rhine.” These publications no doubt caught the attention of a young Thomas Cole, who moved to Philadelphia in the 1820s and frequented local print shops. His early aesthetics were likely shaped by Lucas’ Progressive Drawing Book, the most lavish art instruction manual of the day, which utilized Susquehanna views to teach atmospheric perspective and luminous effects, later hallmarks of the Hudson River School founded by Cole.

 

Cole’s exposure to the Susquehanna paintings of such esteemed artists as George Beck, Benjamin West, and Thomas Doughty (a regular exhibitor at the Pennsylvania Academy) helped forge his vision of a uniquely American landscape. In this context, the 1823 publication of James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Pioneers, or Sources of the Susquehanna, which reverberated through the nation’s top literary and artistic circles, ignited a generational shift in appreciation for the vanishing wilderness and displacement of its Indigenous peoples. Set at the Susquehanna River's headwaters, the novel was a precursor for the modern environmental movement, presenting the threat of encroaching settlement on a fragile frontier.

 

As this movement gained momentum, the Susquehanna played a central role in shaping an authentic American aesthetic. The river’s vistas were rendered on Staffordshire china, bringing the Susquehanna to dinner tables worldwide. This reach extended into industrial marketing and commercial printmaking; George Catlin, born and raised along the Susquehanna, collaborated with Colt Firearms to produce lithographs, sold throughout Europe and America, pitching Colt rifles and featuring the river as a backdrop. Simultaneously, the prolific firm of Currier & Ives used Susquehanna imagery in their widely distributed lithographs, sold through street vendors, galleries, and door-to-door salesmen, ensuring the river’s landscapes became a staple of the American parlor. The Susquehanna would even be the only landmark to garner two separate chapters (a separate chapter for its branch, the Juniata) in William Cullen Bryant’s Picturesque America, a massive two volume book published internationally and intended for the coffee tables of every prominent Victorian household as a way to rebrand America as a premier destination after the turmoil of the Civil War.

 

The river was also a center of scientific innovation, particularly within the orbit of polymath Samuel Haldeman. Residing below Chickies Rock, a distinctive outcropping along the river near Wright’s Crossing, Haldeman’s treatise on Susquehanna land snails was later cited by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species. Haldeman’s work was illustrated with hand-colored engravings by Helen Lawson, one of the nation’s first prominent women artists and daughter of renowned Philadelphia engraver Alexander Lawson. The Lawsons also engraved the plates for Alexander Wilson, popularly considered as the father of American ornithology, who laid the foundation for John James Audubon (whose large folio engraving, Canvas backed Ducks, depicting that iconic Susquehanna game bird, is also included in the exhibit). In 1809, Wilson’s epic poem, “The Foresters,” published in The Port Folio, immortalized his journey from Philadelphia to Niagara Falls and featured a landmark engraving by Alexander Lawson depicting a pivotal moment along the Susquehanna's banks. The river also appears prominently in the work of Edwin Whitefield—another acquaintance of Haldeman—whose illustrations for Emma Embury’s seminal 1845 book, American Wildflowers in their Native Haunts, the first popular book to cover that topic, placed the Susquehanna's landscape behind the flowers described by the verses of one of America’s first female poets. These connections position the Susquehanna as a unique primary source for some of the greatest scientific and biological shifts in human history, providing an empirical sublime—a landscape that was not only poetic but biologically foundational.

 

While the construction of the Erie Canal shifted the cultural focus to New York City, attracting the most prominent artists to build estates along the Hudson closer to wealthy patronage there, the Susquehanna continued to entice many of the movement’s top practitioners to paint along its shores. Many of the era’s most iconic images feature the Susquehanna Valley; in particular, Jasper Cropsey’s Starrucca Viaduct remains celebrated as one of the first masterworks to successfully depict the marriage of industry and nature. As modernism’s fascination with urban life and American industrial might gradually eclipsed the romantic landscape movement of the 19th century, the Susquehanna’s massive dam projects continued to capture the imagination of prominent artists such as Daniel Garber and Otto Koehler. But by the 1940s, with changing winds in the art world, the Susquehanna all but faded from the annals of art history, overshadowed by its sister river, the Hudson.

 

Unlike any other waterway, the Susquehanna remained at the forefront of scientific, artistic, and literary thought for nearly four centuries. It was central to the formation of America’s first authentic art movement. Though later supplanted by the Hudson in name, its critical role deserves to be restored to the spotlight. It is our hope that the collection featured in this exhibition, and eventually a dedicated museum, does exactly that.

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Rob Evans is an artist and independent curator whose works have been exhibited in museums internationally and can be found in many public collections including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

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