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               6 Green Street, Kingston Massachusetts 02364                 781-585-0517

Ada Brewster's Wild West

Born on May 25, 1842, at her family’s home “Woodside,” Ada Brewster showed her talent early, studying art at the Lowell Institute. During the Civil War, she and her sisters served as nurses at the Portsmouth Grove Hospital in Rhode Island. Following the war, Ada took up her brush and pencil again and carried them all the way across the country, documenting the peoples and places she saw. From 1865 to 1867 she taught in the art department of Baker University in Baldwin City, Kansas. From 1874 to 1876 she worked in the U.S. Mint in Carson City, Nevada, where she weighed the first trade dollar coined by the federal government.

By 1877 Ada had crossed the Mojave Desert and opened her own studio in San Francisco, California. There, her reputation as a teacher, portraitist, illustrator and china painter grew, but her travels continued. Between 1886 and 1919, she lived in Kissimee City, Florida; Alameda, California; New York City; Nantucket; Tallulah Falls, Georgia; and St. Petersburg, Florida. In 1919, she returned to Kingston and lived at “Woodside” until her death in 1929.

Ada criss-crossed the continent during a time of tremendous change, when territories became states, settlers populated the plains and railroads replaced wagon trains. As her drawings show, she saw cowboys, Native Americans and Chinese, exotic individuals doing extraordinary things in amazing landscapes. Her pencil captured the wildness and her drawings convey the wonders of her journey to us more than a century later.

The sketches on display here are a small selection from a larger collection in the Local History Room, which includes more sketches, essays, scrapbooks, photographs, pamphlets and books, and materials about the Brewster family.