Edward Mitchell Bannister was born in 1828, in New Brunswick, Canada. He was among the first Black Americans to win major recognition as an artist.
In the 1840s, Bannister moved to Boston, where he studied at the Lowell Institute. In the late 1860s, he married and moved to Providence, Rhode Island. When he won first prize in landscape painting at the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876, it caused a sensation.
Bannister painted the landscape in today’s illustration in 1856. He used artistic license to not include the bridge in his painting. The bridge can be seen in the middle image in today’s illustration, published in “Ballou’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion,” 1855. The Old Colony Railroad came to Dorchester in the 1840s, and the bridge between Savin Hill and Commercial Point is clearly seen in the 1850 map of Dorchester.