William S. Pitts

William S. Pitts (1830 – 1918) was an American physician and composer who wrote the well-known song “The Church in the Wildwood” in 1857. Early life in upstate New York William Savage Pitts was born at Lums Corners within the town of Yates in Orleans County, New York on August 18, 1830 to Charles Pitts and Polly Green Smith Pitts who were descended from New England Puritans of English and Scottish ancestry. Pitts was the eighth of nine children and had musical ability from an early age, taking formal music lessons from a graduate of the Boston Handel and Haydn Society. Move to Wisconsin and Iowa At age nineteen Pitts traveled with his family to Rock County, Wisconsin where he worked as a rural schoolteacher. Pitts found particular beauty in a wooded valley formed by the Cedar River. While viewing the spot, Pitts envisioned a church building there and could not seem to ease the vision from his mind. Returning to his home in Wisconsin, he wrote “The Church in the Wildwood” for his own sake, eventually saying of its completion, “only then was I at peace with myself.” By 1862 Pitts was married in Union, Wisconsin, and he and his wife moved to Fredericksburg to be near her elderly paren