Downtown Colorado Springs at 6000 feet and Pikes Peak at 14000 feet!

"America The Beautiful" was written by Katharine Lee Bates, Wellesley Class of 1880, in its original form in the summer of 1893 after a trip to Colorado Springs. It first appeared in print in The Congregationalist two years later, and within a few months Silas G. Pratt set it to music. In 1904, after receiving many requests for use in publications and special services, Katharine Lee Bates rewrote it to simplify the text. She made one additional change in the wording of the third stanza a few years later, to give us the version we know today.