| Notes |
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humphry_Marshall
- Humphry Marshall was born in West Bradford, Pa., in 1722, the eighth child of Abraham and Mary Hunt Marshall. His parents, Quaker immigrants from Derbyshire, England, provided him with only a rudimentary English education, which ceased altogether at age 12 when he was apprenticed to a stone mason. However, from very early in life Marshall was drawn to the study of natural history and continued his education on his own, reading as widely as possible given the scarcity of books in Chester County at that time. With the encouragement of his cousin, the botanist John Bartram, Marshall developed considerable "practical" skill in botany and natural history by his mid-1730s, and began to cultivate friendships among other scientists both in America and abroad. Eventually, his correspondents came to include the British botanists John Fothergill, Peter Collinson, Sir Joseph Banks, and John Coakley Lettsom; the American scientists Thomas Parke, Benjamin Franklin, George Logan, Joseph Storrs, Timothy Pickering, John Dickinson, and Caspar Wistar; and French scientists and plant collectors including Michel-Guillaume St. Jean de Crèvecoeur, the Comtesse de Tesse, and Conrad-Alexandre Gérard; as well as a number of German, Dutch, Swedish and Irish plant collectors and scientists.
In 1748, Marshall married Sarah Pennock (ca.1720-1766) and took up the management of his father's farm near the west branch of the Brandywine River. During the next few years, his time was largely consumed by farming, however, he continued to use free moments to pursue his botanical research. By the late 1750s, he began to exchange locally collected specimens with natural historians in other parts of the country and Great Britain, receiving scientific equipment, books, exotic specimens, money, or marketable goods such as linen in recompense. His work had advanced to a stage that when he began a major enlargement of his father's farmhouse in 1764, he added a conservatory for the culture of rare plants, probably the first such structure in Chester County.
Upon the death of his father in 1767, Marshall was left a substantial inheritance, enabling him to concentrate more time and resources in his botanical work. By this time his correspondence with the British botanist, John Fothergill, had developed into an especially fruitful relationship, for Fothergill not only encouraged Marshall to collect plants beyond the confines of Chester County, but he paid well for Marshall's efforts. Equally importantly, Fothergill helped introduce Marshall to other botanists and plant collectors with the resources to pay for American plants. Within a few years, Marshall found that he could depend almost entirely on horticulture and plant collecting for his income. His business expanded rapidly by means of a network of relationships established through family members, fellow Quakers, and fellow scientists.
In 1772, Marshall established a botanical garden on his estate, stocking it with herbaceous and arboreal representatives of the local flora and as many exotic plants as he could obtain from other parts of the nation and Europe. The following year he began the construction of a new house adjacent to the garden, handling all phases of the construction by himself, and in that year, he was selected as a trustee of the General Loan Office. Despite pro-Independence sentiments, including long-standing support for the Non-importation agreements, Marshall was in a precarious position as a pacifist and Quaker during the early days of the Revolution. Marshall carefully monitored the events of the war as they unfolded, and was himself caught up when, in 1777, the Trustees of the Loan office resigned as a body. Under the leadership of Samuel Preston Moore, the Trustees felt that to remain true to their affirmations that they would carry out the business of the crown, they should resign rather than follow the new laws.
Marshall's publishing career includes contributions on the natural history of tortoises, on sunspots, and agriculture, however he is most remembered for Abrustrum Americanum (1785), the first botanical treatise written by a native American on American plants, produced in America. Despite very slow sales in the United States, its use of Linnean taxonomic nomenclature (though the plants are arranged alphabetically in the text) considerably enhanced Marshall's reputation among his European clientel. His scientific work and service to the scientific community earned Marshall honorary memberships in the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture and the American Philosophical Society.
Following the death of his first wife, Marshall married Margaret Minshall (1744-1823) in 1788. There were no children by either marriage. In the last two years of his life, his vision was greatly impaired by cataracts, for which he underwent an apparently unsuccessful surgery. He died in 1801 and was buried at Bradford Meeting House.
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1722 - 1801 (79 years)
