John Bartram

John Bartram was born into a Quaker farming family in colonial Darby, Pennsylvania near Philadelphia, on March 23, 1699.  He developed an early interest in botany while growing up on his father's farm.

John Bartram Library of Congress. https://www.historynet.com/

Orphaned at the age of 13,  Bartram taught himself botany, medicine, and surgery when he was not working as an agricultural laborer.

In 1728 he purchased land at Kingsessing, near Philadelphia. Bartram developed it into the first botanical garden in the American colonies and he conducted there the first hybridization experiments in America. 

Over four decades, Bartram made frequent collection expeditions, travelling north to Lake Ontario, then to Florida and the Ohio River in search of plants and natural history specimens for his own botanic garden and for collectors at home and abroad.

He and his botanist son William Bartram are credited with identifying and introducing into cultivation more than 200 of America's native plants.

Bartram's botanical garden was a favorite place of visit for the Founding Fathers, including Benjamin Franklin. The garden is still maintained by the city of Philadelphia as Bartram’s Garden. 

By 1765, Bartram’s international reputation earned him the notice of King George III. The British monarch honored him as King's Botanist for North America with an annual pension of £50, a position he held until his death in 1777

A naturalist as well as a botanist, Bartram described and collected zoological specimens, proposed geological surveys of North American mineral sites, and argued that fossils be investigated scientifically, rather than exploited as curiosities.

His best-known work is Observations on the Inhabitants, Climate, Soil, Rivers, Productions, Animals, and other Matters Worthy of Notice, made by Mr. John Bartram in his Travels from Pennsylvania to Onondaga, Oswego, and the Lake Ontario, in Canada (1751).

In 1743 Bartram was one of the co-founders, along with Benjamin Franklin, of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. It supported scientific studies as well as philosophy.   

He was married to Mary Maris from 1723 to her death in 1727.  She bore him two sons, Richard and Isaac. Bartram married Ann Mendenhall (1703–1789) in 1729. They had five boys and four girls together. 

A Quaker, Bartram demonstrated his opposition to the slave trade by freeing his slaves; his outspoken religious opinions caused him to be disowned by his coreligionists in the Society of Friends.

Bartram died on September 22, 1777, just four days before the British invaded Philadelphia. He was buried at the Darby Friends Cemetery in Darby, Pennsylvania. 

Bartramia, a genus of mosses, was named in his honor. 

Sources Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia,  Europress Family Encyclopedia 1999