William S. Pitts was an American physician and composer who wrote the well-known song "The Church in the Wildwood" in 1857.
Background
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.
Career
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. 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."
Upon his return to the Iowa, Pitts was surprised to find a church being erected where he had imagined it five years before. The building was even being painted brown, because that was the least expensive color of paint to be found and became known as The Little Brown Church.
During the winter of 1863-1864 he taught a singing class at Bradford Academy. This was the first time the song was sung by anyone apart from Pitts himself.
In 1865, Pitts moved to Chicago, Illinois, to enroll in Rush Medical College.
To pay his enrollment fees, he sold the rights to the song to a music publisher for $25. He completed medical school, graduating in 1868, but the song was largely forgotten for several decades. Pitts practiced medicine in Fredericksburg until 1906.
Grannis in 1887 and they moved to Clarion, Iowa in 1906.
Pitts served as mayor of Fredericksburg for seven years, school treasurer for twenty-six years, wrote a biographical local history, and was a Master Freemason. Pitts occasionally performed his most famous song.
He died in Brooklyn in September 25, 1918 and was buried in the Rose Hill Cemetery in Fredericksburg, Iowa.