Orra White (1796-1863) was the gifted daughter of a South Amherst, Massachusetts, farmer.  At the age of 17, she began teaching the young ladies at Deerfield Academy in Deerfield, Massachusetts.  She taught mathematics, cartography, the sciences, painting, and drawing. After marrying geologist, educator, and minister Edward Hitchcock, she stopped teaching and devoted her time to raising a family and her art, primarily creating illustrations for Edward’s publications and for his classroom use at the academy. She painted landscapes, botanical, geological, and paleontological images, and occasionally portraits of people she imagined. Her husband gratefully recalled that “Though pressed by the cares of a numerous family, rarely, if ever, during forty years, has she turned a deaf ear to my solicitations for drawings…How providential that such a wife should be given me!” This lithograph of Turners Falls, Massachusetts, was one of a series of illustrations depicting the geology and landscape of the Connecticut River Valley.