- Kathleen Scavone
- Posted On
Lake County Time Capsule: Poet Carrie Stevens Walter
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – April is National Poetry Month.
The Academy of American Poets instigated this celebration in 1996 to create an awareness of the wide variety of poetry that has been written, both past and present.
The Academy of American Poets supports and promotes the creative art of poetry, and has been doing so since the Academy became a nonprofit in New York in 1934.
April is the time of the year for libraries, bookstores, educators and writers to celebrate, encourage and promote poetry internationally, nationally and locally.
The poetry awareness activities have traditionally included readings, writing to a favorite poet and distributing poetry.
Here in Lake County poetry is celebrated via readings and through the Lake County Poet Laureate program.
Although not a Lake County resident, nor poet laureate, Carrie Stevens Walter was a poet who wrote about our fair county in some of her poems.
Here is a portion of one poem.
Through Lake County
by Carrie Stevens Walter
(Excerpted from her book, "Rose Ashes and Other Poems")
A lake, which seems a silver mirror, swung
Up near the clear blue sky,
Around whose loveliness the guardian hills
In circling beauty lie.
Mountains, that hike within their silent breasts
Ashes of fires long spent,
Whose torches lighted, through the night of
Time,
Chaos' black firmament
Cedars and pines, which strike their piercing
roots
In cold volcanoes' hearts,
That throbbed their lives out in some dead
world grief,
As human pain departs.
In Walter's book entitled “Rose Ashes and Other Poems,” she wrote poems about Lake County entitled, “Through Lake County,” “On Monte Piedra – A Mountlet in Lake County,” “At Lakeport” and more.
Carrie Stevens Walter was born in Missouri, depending on the reference, in either 1846 or 1848, and died in 1907.
Carrie Stevens Walter lived in California with her parents and five siblings from the age of 10, and later became an educator and writer.
Her father, Josiah E. Stevens, who was a Mason and California politician, moved the family to the West, where, according to “A Woman of the Century: Fourteen Hundred-seventy Biographical Sketches” edited by Frances Elizabeth Willard etc., “...at an early age was carefully educated in the Oakland Seminary, and at eighteen years of age was the valedictorian of the first graduating class of that institution.”
At that time Walter's verses had been published in various periodicals in California. She enjoyed a long teaching career, married, had four children, one of which died at age 19, and she continued writing on the side.
In 1886 Walter published a book of poetry called “Santa Barbara Idyl.” Walter lived in Santa Clara County where she also wrote prose for magazines and newspapers which described the beauty of California.
Her obituary ran in many prominent newspapers of the day.
The obituary notice in the Sacramento Union, April 27, 1907, read, “Carrie Stevens Walter, a well-known California writer, died this morning from pneumonia. She leaves a son, Roy, who is city clerk of San Jose, and two daughters.”
More of Carrie Stevens Walter's writing may be read online at https://archive.org/details/roseashesandothe00waltiala .
Kathleen Scavone, M.A., is a retired educator, potter, writer and author of “Anderson Marsh State Historic Park: A Walking History, Prehistory, Flora, and Fauna Tour of a California State Park” and “Native Americans of Lake County.” She also writes for NASA and JPL as one of their “Solar System Ambassadors.” She was selected “Lake County Teacher of the Year, 1998-99” by the Lake County Office of Education, and chosen as one of 10 state finalists the same year by the California Department of Education.