The University of Puget Sound has contributed more than 120 images of works by the painter, activist, and writer Abby Williams Hill to the Artstor Digital Library.

Abby Williams Hill (1861-1943) moved to Tacoma in 1889, the same year Washington achieved statehood. She is best known for her commissions for the Great Northern and Northern Pacific railways. Her railway works were exhibited at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, the Lewis & Clark Exposition in Portland in 1905, the Jamestown Tricentennial in 1907, and the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle in 1909. These pieces, along with her other landscapes, offer a rich portrait of the American West during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The University of Puget Sound is the permanent repository of the Abby Williams Hill Collection, comprising her famous landscape paintings and works on paper, as well as an archive of related materials including her correspondence and journals, photographs, postcard collection, and other ephemera related to Hill and her family.The Abby Williams Hill Collection was donated to the University of Puget Sound by Hill’s daughter, Romayne (Ina) Hill, and is housed in the Collins Memorial Library.