EDWIN WHITEFIELD

Edwin Whitefield, artist and land promoter, was born on September 22, 1816, in East Lulworth, near Wareham, Dorset, England. His father was John Fitzgerald Pennie (1782-1848) and his mother was Cordelia Maria Elizabeth Whitfield (1772-1848).

Whitefield was educated in England and left for America sometime around 1835, leaving behind an English wife, Maria Earp (Bollen) Pennie (b. 1812) and a son, Edgar Smedmore Whitfield Pennie (1833-1900). From 1840 to 1855 he studied and taught drawing and established himself as a professional artist and engraver in New York and New England. He painted views of Hudson Valley estates (1841-1842), worked in New York City (1844), illustrated Emma C. Embury's American Wild Flowers in their Native Haunts (1845), published a series of news inNorth American Scenery (1847), and developed a specialty in color lithographs of North American city views. He traveled extensively in the eastern United States and Canada (1845-1856) making paintings and pencil drawings of scenery and cities, which were later reproduced as color lithographs and sold to subscribers. The works also were used to illustrate books and lectures and were displayed at exhibitions.

Whitefield visited Minnesota Territory briefly during the summer of 1855 and was very favorably impressed with the region. He recorded in his diary, "I never saw any country that pleased me half so much as this." He returned the following summer to add to his series of American towns and cities a view of St. Anthony Falls flanked by the towns of Minneapolis and St. Anthony, a lithograph of which was published in the fall of 1857.

During his stay in Minnesota (1856-1860) Whitefield became involved in land and town site promotion, which offered new commercial outlets for his artistic gifts and his nascent talents as a writer and lecturer. By September 1856, he had organized the Whitefield Exploring Company, whose members explored an area in what in now southern Kandiyohi County and staked out several towns in the vicinity (Kandiyohi, Charlton, Whitefield, and Swainson). The following month he helped organize the Kandiyohi Town Site Company and served as one of its land agents.

Whitefield also was keenly interested in the Sauk River Valley in what is now southern Todd County. About 1857 he and several others laid out a town near Sauk Center on the shore of Fairy Lake that they named Kandotta. The townsite was incorporated as a village in 1878 under the same name but spelled with only one "t" as Kandota. Whitefield lived at Kandota from 1858 to 1860 with his sons Alfred and Wilfred and his second wife, Lillian Stewart of Blair Athol, Scotland, and their daughters. During these years he promoted his town site ventures and continued to paint and draw

Whitefield used various methods to publicize his town site projects. He displayed a collection of Minnesota landscapes at the Minnesota territorial fair of 1856. During the winter of 1856-1857 he gave a series of lectures in the East to promote settlement in Minnesota, illustrated with his drawings, watercolors, and lithographs. He wrote illustrated promotional articles, which he sent to a number of newspapers and magazines. One of them appeared in Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper of May 30, 1877. He also published lithographs of some of his Minnesota views, which he sold on a subscription basis, and 37 watercolor sketches in The Lakes of Minnesota (1859).

Whitefield's real estate ventures, including a real estate office known as the Minnesota Land Agency that he opened in St. Paul in 1857, fell victim to the financial panic of 1857. In order to earn money he designed embroidery patterns, filled orders for lithographs, invented and promoted the sale of "Drawing Machine" and gave lessons in its use, and taught drawing and perspective in Minneapolis, St. Anthony, and Prescott, Wisconsin.

In the 1860 Whitefield moved to Chicago, where he lived until 1864. He then returned to the East, living chiefly at Reading and Boston, Massachusetts. Much of his later life was devoted to writing and illustrating a series of volumes on historic New England home entitled Home of Our Forefathers (1879-1889). Whitefield died in Dedham, Massachusetts, at the home of a daughter on December 26, 1892.

Wilfred J. Whitefield, also an artist, was born in 1839. He came to Minnesota with his father Edwin in 1856. He remained in Minnesota after his father left and accompanied Henry H. Sibley's expedition against the Dakota Indians in 1863. He lived for many years in Sauk Center, where he died on August 31, 1926.