Women's History Month: Amy Jones

For this Women's History Month Museum Monday, we want to share this pen and ink drawing from our collection. This image, titled "Adirondack Arrival," was created by Amy Jones. Jones was an accomplished artist who accompanied her ailing husband, David Blair Jones, who came to Saranac Lake for the cure in 1930.

While her husband cured, Jones taught watercolor painting at the Saranac Lake Study and Craft Guild and was a founding member of the Saranac Lake Art League. While living in Saranac Lake, she became one of the first artists to work for the Section of Fine Arts established by the United States Treasury Department as part of the New Deal. As a part of this project, she painted murals in post offices in Painted Post and Scotia, both in New York, and Winsted, Connecticut.

Throughout her career, Jones also contributed to magazines such as Women's Day, provided art work for advertising and illustrated books for World Publishing, Thomas Y. Crowell, and Random House. Although she moved to Mt. Kisco, New York in 1943, she maintained ties with the village. In 1946, she illustrated A Child’s Garden of Verse by Robert Louis Stevenson, another famous health seeker. In 1969, she returned to Saranac Lake to give a demonstration at the opening day of the village's annual Paint and Palette Festival.

"Adirondack Arrival" was created around 1940 as an illustration for an unpublished children's book by Louise Leser. The illustration depicts passengers arriving at Saranac Lake's Union Depot, and the caption underneath reads "Down the street came a dog team at full gallop." The drawing was donated to Historic Saranac Lake by her daughter Lucy Jones Berk in 1996.

To learn more about Jones' career, and see more of her work, click the button at right to visit our wiki!

Historic Saranac Lake Collection, TCR #327. Courtesy of Lucy Jones Berk.

Amy Jones at the 1st TB Reunion in Saranac Lake, 1987.

Learn more about Amy Jones!