Humphry Marshall (163)

Humphry Marshall (10 October 1722–5 November 1801) was a botanist, seedsman, astronomer, and public officeholder, and a member of the American Philosophical Society via his 1768 election to the American Society. Born into a Quaker family in Chester County, Pennsylvania, he received a limited education before apprenticing as a stonemason and taking over the family farm. He served as county assessor, county treasurer, and trustee of the General Loan Office. Deeply interested in horticulture and botany, he assisted his cousin, APS member John Bartram, with his seed business. By 1767 Marshall had struck out on his own, sending seeds and plant specimens abroad to collectors like Peter Collinson and Dr. John Fothergill. He also corresponded with Benjamin Franklin, who proposed additional clients and even had a refracting telescope made for him. Marshall used the telescope to conduct astronomical observations of sun spots, which he sent to the American Society and to Franklin, who facilitated their publication in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. The American Revolution interrupted the seed trade but does not seem to have affected Marshall otherwise. With the war’s end—and with Bartram’s death in 1777—he became the principal supplier to a growing European botanical market, sending trees, plants, and seeds, as well as fossils, minerals, and preserved animals to collectors and institutions like Kew Gardens and the Jardin des Plantes. Encouraged by APS member Samuel Vaughan, Marshall published his Linnaean catalogue of American trees and shrubs, Arbustrum Americanum, in 1785. He was a member of the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture and a shareholder in the Susquehanna Bridge Company. He was also active in Quaker circles, serving on the Yearly Meeting’s Committee for Sufferings and its Committee on Indian Affairs and founding a boarding school at Westtown. (PI, ANB)