On September 28, 1903, composer and organist Samuel Augustus Ward died in Newark, New Jersey, at age 54. He could not have known that a melody he had written more than two decades earlier would become inseparable from one of America’s best-loved patriotic songs.
Ward was a prominent Newark church musician and the organist at Grace Episcopal Church. In 1882, he composed the soaring tune “Materna” for the hymn “O Mother Dear, Jerusalem”; it was published in 1892.
In the summer of 1893, Wellesley College English professor and poet Katharine Lee Bates traveled to the summit of Pikes Peak in Colorado. Inspired by the view, she wrote the poem that would become “America the Beautiful.” Her poem, then titled “America,” first appeared in The Congregationalist on July 4, 1895.
For years, Bates’s words were sung to several melodies. Over time, however, Ward’s “Materna” became the most popular musical setting. In 1910, the text and melody were published together under the title “America the Beautiful,” creating the version that endured.
Ward died before that familiar title appeared in print and never met Bates. Yet his stately, hymn-like melody gave lasting musical force to her vision of “amber waves of grain” and “purple mountain majesties.” Together, their words and music became a defining expression of American patriotic feeling—an unofficial anthem whose legacy has far outlived both of its creators.
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