Church in the Wildwood

This song was actually composed in 1857 by a young music teacher named William S Pitts as a result of a June visit to Bradford, Iowa. Pitts was on a stagecoach ride that stopped at the town.  During a trip to visit his fiancée in Fredericksburg, Iowa, the stagecoach stopped at Bradford, allowing Pitts to wander through the woodlands there. He happened upon a particularly beautiful spot in a valley close to the Cedar River and an image formed in his mind of a church building at the location. Returning to his home in Wisconsin and unable to forget about the image, Pitts wrote a poem that he later set to music, saying at its completion, “only then was I at peace with myself”.  When Pitts returned to the area with his wife in 1862 he discovered a church being erected where he had imagined it to be. The church members had been meeting in a variety of temporary rooms until Rev. J.K. Nutting led the drive to create a permanent home for the congregation. Providentially, the very plot where Pitt imagined a church would stand was donated by the family that owned it and soon a church building was erected on the exact spot. Not only that, the church was being painted brown, the color mentioned in the song. At the time, Ohio Mineral Paint’s brown paint was the cheapest paint to be found.  During the winter of 1863-1864 Pitts taught a singing class at Bradford Academy. He resurrected the song and tutored his class to sing the song at the dedication of the new church in 1864. This was the first time the song was sung by anyone other than Pitts himself.