John Clayton (25)
Election date: 1744 (Elected to the original American Philosophical Society.)John Clayton (1694–15 December 1773) was a botanist, planter, and public official and a member of the American Philosophical Society, elected in 1744. Born and educated in Fulham, England, he had immigrated by 1720 to Virginia, where his father was the colony’s attorney general. Clayton served for over fifty years as clerk of Gloucester County, Virginia, and ran a 450-acre plantation containing a botanical garden. Inspired by his grandfather, a Royal Society fellow also named John Clayton, the younger Clayton assiduously collected American plants. He corresponded with APS members like John Bartram, John Mitchell, and Alexander Garden and with European naturalists like Mark Catesby, Carolus Linnaeus, and Johann Friedrich Gronovius, to whom he sent numerous specimens. Gronovius published Clayton’s “catalogue of plants and trees native to Virginia” in his Flora Virginica (1739–1743; 1762). A landmark work of Linnaean classification subsequently utilized by Linnaeus himself, this publication secured Clayton’s international reputation for painstaking observations and accurate identifications. He was elected to the Swedish Royal Society of Science and served as first president of the Virginia Society for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge, an organization modeled on the APS. Thomas Jefferson reportedly deemed him “America’s first botanist,” while Peter Collinson called him “the Great Botanist of America.” (PI, ANB, DNB, DAB)
Prepared by Gronovius using findings supplied by Clayton and printed without his knowledge (but with attribution). First published in two volumes in 1739 and 1743, respectively. A second printing containing both parts also appeared in 1743. Clayton prepared an expanded edition that never appeared, in part because it was preempted by a 1762 expanded edition published by Gronovius’s son Laurens Theodorus Gronovius, entitled Flora Virginica exhibens plantas, quas nobilissimus vir D. D. Johannes Claytonus, Med. Doc. etc. etc. in Virginia Crescentes observavit, collegit & obtulit D. Joh. Fred. Gronovio. In 1812, APS vice president Benjamin Smith Barton set out to publish an updated edition in four parts entitled, Flora Virginica: sive plantarum, praecipuè indigenarum, Virginae historia inchoate, but only the first part appeared. The original text included a map depicting Clayton’s travels.