HOLDINGS>Manuscripts>Edward Stuhl Wildflower Collection

  Edward Stuhl was born in 1887 in Budapest, Hungary. As a young man, he spent his time hiking and climbing in the Austrian Alps. He worked as an apprentice in his father's stained glass studio and studied at the Graz Academy of Art and the Munich Academy of Art. His formal art education, blended with his love of nature, is evident in Stuhl's sensitive and accurate wildflower paintings. Stuhl's artistic talent wonderfully preserves the beauty of the wildflowers of Mount Shasta and other regions of California. A prolific painter, Stuhl created a legacy of more than 400 exquisite watercolor paintings.

  Stuhl climbed his first California mountain in 1912. He went on in the next seventy years to climb every mountain peak in California, Oregon and Washington, and kept a precise journal of each climb. Stuhl had a strong attachment to Mount Shasta. He climbed it successfully twenty-two times. Upon first seeing the mountain Stuhl's journal reveals, "I had not seen a real mountain for years, and such a mountain…awed and spellbound, I settled on a rock…and let the knapsack slip from my shoulder to the ground. I rested and looked and wondered…old dreams and new longings arose, the love for the mountain of a stray mountaineer, the restless impulse for adventure and conquest-and conquer I will this mountain."

  Ed Stuhl was the custodian of the Sierra Club's Alpine Lodge at Horse Camp. Stuhl became known as the local authority on the mountain's flora geology, history, and lore. He lived at the foot of Mount Shasta for the last thirty years of his life.

  Stuhl's paintings, as well as his personal correspondence with other plant enthusiasts such as William Bridger Cooke (the first to catalog the flora of Mount Shasta), his photograph collection of mountains and flowers, and his personal journals are a part of the Stuhl Mount Shasta Collection. Mrs. Lare Tanner, a long time friend of Ed and Rosa Stuhl, made a gift of the collection to the Meriam Library's Special Collections in 1985.

Edward Stuhl