Writer Whose Books Became Fonda Films Dies At 94 Walter Edmonds Captured History Of Upstate New York

Walter D. Edmonds, author of three historic novels, including the best-known “Drums Along the Mohawk,” that were made into motion pictures starring Henry Fonda, has died. He was 94.

Edmonds, who published his final novel only three years ago, died Saturday in Utica, N.Y.

He wrote about the area he knew best, upstate New York near the Erie Canal and the Adirondack Mountains where he grew up. His 1936 book, “Drums Along the Mohawk,” detailed the lives of pioneer farmers along the Mohawk River during the American Revolution.

The book remained on the best-seller list for two years, and in the late 1930s was second in popularity only to “Gone With the Wind.”

Renowned director John Ford made the book into a film for 20th Century Fox in 1939, starring Fonda and Claudette Colbert.

But that was not the first of Edmonds’ books for the studio or Fonda. The author’s first novel, published under the title “Rome Haul” in 1929, shortly after he graduated from Harvard, was turned into a play and then Fonda’s first film in 1935.

Retitled “The Farmer Takes a Wife,” the story revolved about a farming family living near the Erie Canal in the 1800s. The studio remade the film as a musical in 1953, starring Betty Grable and Dale Robertson.

A third Edmonds book, “Chad Hanna,” about 1800s circus life in central New York, was made into a motion picture starring Fonda and Dorothy Lamour in 1940. That book began as a series of articles for the Saturday Evening Post called “Red Wheels Rolling.”

Edmonds wrote for young people as well as adults. His “The Matchlock Gun,” about a 10-year-old boy defending his home against Indians in colonial New York, won the Newbery Medal for Children’s Literature in 1942.

The author also garnered the Boys’ Clubs of America award in 1955 for “Hound Dog Moses and the Promised Land,” and a National Book Award in 1976 for “Bert Breen’s Barn.”

Collectively, Edmonds’ books are considered the richest body of fiction about the time and region since the works of James Fenimore Cooper.

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