In the archives of the Farlow Reference Library of Cryptogamic Botany at Harvard University, there is a curious volume of 249 original watercolors of fungi species bearing the title Icones fungorum Niskiensium.

Devoid of any creator identification, the provenance and historical significance of the volume seems shrouded in mystery. A cursory examination of the work reveals a collection of charming, but often incomplete, figures and a myriad of annotations in pencil and ink, some struck through, others revealing uncertainty over species identifications or recording observations on specimen quality or coloration.

In short, there is little to suggest that this sketchbook is actually an important document in the history of mycological research.

The truth, however, is that this volume is the work of the “Father of North American mycology”, Lewis David von Schweinitz (1780-1834). It served him as a sketchbook that was used to inform his monumental Conspectus fungorum in Lusatiae Superioris agro Niskiensi crescentium, e methodo Persooniana (1805), co-authored with Johannes Baptista von Albertini (1769-1831) and documenting over 1,000 species of fungi from the Niesky, Germany region, including 100 published as new-to-science. The volume is also related to a collection of six other original watercolor volumes by Schweinitz dispersed throughout several American institutions.

The history of this volume, dubbed the Harvard Icones, and its relationship to the Conspectus and Schweinitz’s other watercolor volumes, was recently examined in-depth within the article “New Light on the Mycological Work of Lewis David von Schweinitz” (2018) by Jason M. Karakehian, William R. Burk and Donald H. Pfister, published in IMA Fungus: 9(1). The article presents research made possible in-part thanks to the digital copies of the Harvard Icones and Schweinitz’s other works available in the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

We recently explored this fascinating history in our Book of the Month series. The findings presented by Karakehian et al. underscore the importance of the Harvard Icones to the development of Schweinitz and Albertini’s research and the progression of mycology in the early 19th century.

“Our research is important because the volumes of watercolor illustrations produced by Schweinitz have been little known to mycologists who worked with fungi described by Albertini and Schweinitz,” explains Karakehian. “These high-quality illustrations can help to inform our concepts of some of these species, as often times early nineteenth century verbal descriptions can be short and somewhat vague.”

Jason M. Karakehian is a Master’s degree candidate at the Harvard Extension School, studying biology with a focus on mycology and the systematics of ascomycetes or “cup-fungi.” With a background in the visual arts, Karakehian’s interest in mycology stems from his career as an artist, when he began perusing illustrated books on fungi as a creative reference point for his large, outdoor sculptures exhibited in wooded environments. This inspired him to take a short class on fungi, join a local mycological club, and begin collecting and identifying mushrooms. Eventually, he gave up his art career and embraced mycology full-time.

Karakehian’s journey down the fungi path includes serving as the archivist for the Boston Mycological Club. The task of organizing the mass of artifacts and documents held by the archives necessitated research at other libraries and archives, such as the Reference Library of the Farlow Herbarium of Cryptogamic Botany at Harvard University. He was welcomed by the Herbarium and Library staff, including Professor Donald Pfister and Judy Warnement (Head Librarian of the Harvard Botany Libraries).

Karakehian’s work at the Boston Mycological Club and the relationships he developed as part of that process led to research on other topics in mycological history, especially Schweinitz’s fungi watercolors.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library played an essential role in that research.

“I don’t think that we could have done this work without regular access to BHL,” affirms Karakehian. “BHL is invaluable to us for the wide selection of classic mycological literature that we needed to reference in our research.”

That research involved indexing the more than 1,000 species treated in the Conspectus and cross-referencing them to the species figured in Schweinitz’s watercolor volumes in order to examine the relationship between the works and understand how the archival materials informed Schweinitz’s research.

This work required regular access to Schweinitz’s Conspectus and other classic mycological publications, including Christiaan Hendrik Persoon’s Synopsis methodica fungorum (1801), which outlines a systematic framework for fungi that was employed by Schweinitz and Albertini.

“For both of these volumes, we had to go through them page by page to populate spreadsheets with data that we could then collate to make inferences about the relationship between them,” explains Karakehian. “This was greatly facilitated by having high-quality electronic versions of the volumes with OCR.”

Karakehian and his colleagues also created an index to the figures in the Harvard Icones, cross-referencing them to their treatment in the Conspectus, Persoon’s Synopsis, and Schweinitz’s six other watercolor volumes. This index was published as part of their IMA Fungus article.

For Karakehian, BHL’s impact is about more than just providing online access to materials. It’s the quality of the available materials that really distinguishes BHL from other online repositories.

“BHL volumes are high-quality digitizations and I am never frustrated by missing pages, cut-off words, or poor-quality digitizations of delicate line drawings in figures,” lauds Karakehian. “I often think of BHL in contrast to Google’s digitization project that is easily searchable, but the digitizations are of such poor quality that one often needs to track down the original volume somehow to understand the print or the figure that you need.”

Karakehian and his colleagues were instrumental in advocating for Schweinitz’s archival materials to be made available online and for free to the public through BHL. This not only facilitates future research on these works, but also allows more people to explore and enjoy these archives and the history they represent.

“For us, BHL is the gold standard, and for our papers on Schweinitz’s watercolor illustrations, it was important to request that the archives holding these volumes digitize them and have them available in BHL to the public,” asserts Karakehian. “We were absolutely confident that the product would be usable and high-quality. It is a true gift that they are now freely available to users.”

We are honored to host a digital copy of the Harvard Icones in BHL, and are grateful to the Botany Libraries, Farlow Reference Library of Cryptogamic Botany, Harvard University for digitizing the volume and making it freely available to the world. We’re also thrilled that Schweinitz’s other archival materials and the Conspectus are freely available in the collection, and extend our sincere thanks to the Library & Archives of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, the Wilson Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of The New York Botanical Garden for digitizing these works.

Thanks to these contributions from so many libraries, BHL was able to play a vital role in allowing Karakehian and his colleagues to provide new insight into the contributions of such an important figure in the history of mycology.

“Our work broadens our knowledge of the scientist and artist that Schweinitz was,” affirms Karakehian. “He was an accomplished and prolific mycological illustrator with a keen sense of depicting his subjects in ways that would convey the maximum of biologic information as well as capturing their natural beauty.”

That “natural beauty” is now freely available for everyone to enjoy through the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

The information in this post is derived from the article “New Light on the Mycological Work of Lewis David von Schweinitz” (2018) by Jason M. Karakehian, William R. Burk and Donald H. Pfister, published in IMA Fungus: 9(1).

In 1805, the “Father of North American mycology”, Lewis David von Schweinitz (1780-1834), published an account of the fungi in Niesky, Germany with his friend and mentor, Johannes Baptista von Albertini (1769-1831). Documenting over 1,000 species, including 100 published as new-to-science, Conspectus fungorum in Lusatiae Superioris agro Niskiensi crescentium, e methodo Persooniana is still referenced to this day as a classic mycological text and ecological record.

The Conspectus is illustrated with 12 hand-colored plates based on drawings by Schweinitz, each featuring 6-10 figures of new species described. Whenever possible, Schweinitz based his drawings on fresh specimens, but when this was not an option, he referred to fungarium specimens or to a collection of earlier watercolors he’d created of representative specimens.

Today, these watercolor volumes are dispersed between several American institutions and offer a wealth of insight into the history and development of the Conspectus. A five-volume set created (ca.) 1802-1805 and bearing the title Fungorum Nieskiensium Icones is distributed between the Archives of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, Philadelphia (volumes 1-3 and 5) and the Rare Book Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (volume 4). Nearly every specimen featured in the Conspectus has a corresponding illustration in these 5-volumes.

A volume of original watercolors consisting of copies of figures from the 5-volume set, bearing the title Icones Fungorum and created (ca.) 1818-1826, is held by the Herbarium Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.

The earliest volume of original watercolors related to the Conspectus, however, is the Icones Fungorum Niskiensium, created (ca.) 1798-1802 and held in the archives of the Farlow Reference Library of Cryptogamic Botany at Harvard University. This volume (hereafter referred to as the Harvard Icones) served Schweinitz as a sketchbook of sorts, which he used to inform the final paintings in the 5-volume Fungorum Nieskiensium Icones and eventually the Conspectus itself.

The Harvard Icones has been digitized in the Biodiversity Heritage Library thanks to the Botany Libraries, Farlow Reference Library of Cryptogamic Botany, Harvard University, while the 5-volume set is available in BHL thanks to the Library & Archives of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University and the Wilson Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Conspectus has been digitized in BHL by the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of The New York Botanical Garden.

The history of these watercolor volumes and their relationship to the Conspectus was recently examined in-depth within the article “New Light on the Mycological Work of Lewis David von Schweinitz” (2018) by Jason M. Karakehian, William R. Burk and Donald H. Pfister, published in IMA Fungus: 9(1). The article presents research made possible in-part thanks to the digital copies available in BHL.

As a sketchbook, the Harvard Icones provides a unique window into the development of Schweinitz’s research on the fungal species presented in the Conspectus. The 249 watercolor figures in the the Harvard Icones depict specimens he collected and painted during his time attending a Moravian seminary in Niesky. Most figures are labeled with a binomial in ink, although edits and annotations to the names throughout the work, as well as notes on the quality of the illustrated specimen, varieties, and colorations, illustrate the working-manuscript nature of the volume.

As outlined in the IMA Fungus article, the Harvard Icones has a rather convoluted history. A clue to that history can be found in the single fly-leaf bound within the volume and featuring the hand-written inscription on the recto: “Catherine Eliza Perceval — Philadelphia — March 8th 1826 —”.

Born in Quebec in 1811, Catherine Perceval was the daughter of Anne Mary Perceval and Michael Henry Perceval. Anne had an interest in botany fueled by her association with other local female botanists, Christian Ramsay, the Countess of Dalhousie, and Harriet Campbell Sheppard. The group actively botanized together, and Anne is listed as a collector in several important botanical works of the era, including Hooker’s Flora boreali-americana ([1829]-1840) and Torrey and Gray’s A Flora of North America (1838-43).

The Harvard Icones passed into the Perceval family’s possession during a meeting in 1826 between Anne and William Darlington, a correspondent of Anne’s, at their mutual friend J. Daniel Steinhauer’s residence in Philadelphia. Schweinitz described Steinhauer as an “excellent friend…[and]…botanist”. As detailed in the IMA Fungus article, Schweinitz and Daniel Steinhauer were likely introduced by Daniel’s brother, Henry Steinhauer, who was also a friend of Schweinitz’s from his time at the Moravian seminary in Germany.

Henry had attempted to have copies made of the figures in Schweinitz’s 5-volume watercolor set, and towards this end, Schweinitz had given Henry his “Icones Fungorum Niesk’m” shortly prior to January 1818. The watercolor volume held in the Michigan Herbarium Library is the result of these endeavors. Karakehian et al. postulate that as part of this exchange the Harvard Icones may have ended up in Henry’s possession and passed to Daniel Steinhauer upon Henry’s death, after which it was passed along to Anne or directly to her daughter, Catherine (whose name is found in the Icones inscription).

The volume later passed from Catherine to her son Francis Denys and eventually ended up in the possession of antiquarian book dealers and scholars William and Marianne Salloch, after whose death it was sold to a Bungay book dealer at a Christie’s auction in 1991, advertised as “Original American Watercolors” by Catherine Eliza Perceval.

Microbiologist and mycophile Elio Schaechter eventually purchased the volume from the book dealer and showed it to Donald Pfister at the Farlow Herbarium, whose research ultimately allowed him to attribute the work to Schweinitz. He also generated a manuscript index to the illustrations, which has also been digitized in BHL along with the Harvard Icones itself.

In the early 2000s, David Hewitt of the Farlow Herbarium was the first to propose that the Harvard Icones served Schweinitz as a sketchbook after comparing it to the four volumes of watercolors held at the Academy of Natural Sciences. Karakehian et al. support this conclusion, presenting further evidence within their IMA Fungus article including the incomplete quality of the sketches, the lack of any systematic arrangement of the specimens on the plates, and the annotations reflecting edits or uncertainty about species identifications, none of which are present in the five-volume set or the Conspectus.

The research presented by Karakehian et al. provides novel insight into the development of a foundational mycological work. As Karakehian explains,

“These watercolor volumes are part of the knowledge-base that Schweinitz employed in his studies of American fungi. Therefore, understanding the history of these volumes is essential not only to a clearer understanding of the American mycobiota, but to an elucidation of the depth of the scientific knowledge-base at the founding of mycology in North America.”

The Harvard Icones and its related works also provide a prime example of how unprecedented research is made possible thanks to digitization initiatives like the Biodiversity Heritage Library, which allow easy reference to and comparison between volumes held in multiple institutions across the United States. As Karakehian et al. acknowledge within their paper,

“It is important to note that much of this work that resulted in this paper was made possible because archives, manuscripts and books are becoming increasingly available through digital efforts being made around the world.”

Given the unique and rare nature of the  Harvard Icones, the book was scanned at Harvard using an Internet Archive TableTop Scanner that is shared with between the Harvard Botany Libraries and the Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology.  This mini version of an Internet Archive scribe allows Harvard librarians to scan rare or fragile materials without the wear and tear of off-site transportation. Once scanned, the Internet Archive processed the images and the final product was made accessible in the Internet Archive and BHL.  We are so grateful to the Botany Libraries, Farlow Reference Library of Cryptogamic Botany, Harvard University for all of their work to digitize the Harvard Icones in BHL and make it freely available to the world.

Similarly, we extend our sincere thanks to the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of The New York Botanical Garden, the Library & Archives of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University and the Wilson Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for digitizing Schweinitz’s Conspectus and other, complementary archival works, ensuring that they are also now freely available through BHL.

Take a closer look at how BHL facilitated research on these remarkable archives with our BHL User series, where Karakehian provides more insight into BHL’s impact on his work to unravel the mysteries surrounding Schweinitz’s Icones.

Post with contributions from Jason M. Karakehian (Master’s degree candidate at the Harvard Extension School), Judith A. Warnement (Librarian of Harvard University Botany Libraries), and Diane Rielinger (Digital Projects Librarian, Harvard University Herbaria & Libraries).

What is Economic botany?

Economic botany can, in a nutshell (excuse the pun), be described as the use of plants by people. This relationship spans thousands of years and includes both individuals and cultures – making this subject a rich and fascinating link between botany and anthropology. Economic botany collections can essentially be described using the term biocultural.

Kew’s Museum of Economic Botany.

The Economic Botany Collection at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew holds around 100,000 objects from around the globe. Established as the Museum of Economic Botany by Kew’s first official Director, Sir William Jackson Hooker, in 1847, it was cited as a public repository for ‘all kinds of useful and curious Vegetable Products, which neither the living plants of the Garden nor the specimens in the Herbarium could exhibit’.

Raw materials are housed in the Collection, alongside objects ranging from jewellery, musical instruments and an array of dyes and medicines. Many of these items were acquired by Kew during the peak of colonial expansion, with the majority dating from around 1847 to 1930. Kew staff are currently working with indigenous cultures and partner institutions to ensure that traditional crafts, such as the use and manufacture of Tapa (Pacific barkcloth), are being kept alive and in some cases revived in the communities where they first originated.

The Mobile Museum Project.

In parallel with this research and outreach, Kew’s Museum of Economic Botany has recently embarked on a project called The Mobile Museum: Economic Botany in Circulation. This is, in effect, where the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, Library, Art & Archives and Biodiversity Heritage Library comes in.

As part of the Mobile Museum project, Kew is digitising and making available online through BHL the Collection’s “Entry and Exit books”. These huge tomes each consist of thousands of entries made by Kew staff over the years, listing every specimen either sent out from or sent in to the Museum of Economic Botany from 1847 right up to the present day. Each book is in the process of being scanned and uploaded to BHL, and the project team, including a number of dedicated volunteers, are working hard to transcribe each page so that there will be both a physical and digital record of these unique and invaluable logbooks. This data transcription is initially being entered into searchable Excel spreadsheets, which will then be transferred into an Access database and raw data files from this will be available to download from the project website.

The existing Kew Economic Botany Database will also be enhanced, with all objects located in other institutions being added. This will mean that interested parties will soon be able to search not just for objects currently in the collection, but also objects that were once at Kew and are now housed elsewhere.

The first of these books, which is now freely available on BHL, is entitled “Specimens Distributed” and spans from 1881 to 1901. It is a fascinating continuous record of specimens, materials and artefacts that were sent from Kew to over 1000 institutions worldwide, including other botanic gardens, schools and universities and local museums.

Specimens distributed.

The first thing that I noticed when researching this blog, as I skimmed through the hundreds of pages of handwritten entries, was just how many plant parts the Museum of Economic Botany held. On first thought, you may think of a few important parts of a plant that could be held in this sort of collection – bark, petals, seeds, stems or similar. But what struck me was the sheer scope of plants and all their various facets that were collected – resins, gums, fibers, bulbs, fruits, roots, pods, pulps, rubbers, even galls (a kind of benign growth on the external tissue of some plants, usually a reaction to parasites or bacteria).

As I browsed the book, I became engrossed in 6 pages in particular entitled November 14th 1887 – Sir James Paget, Royal College of Surgeons – A large collection of specimens of vegetable morphology.

Sir James Paget.

As I looked over these pages, I noticed that words such as “undeveloped”, “abnormal” and “malformation” were preceding plant names or plant parts. It occurred to me that the plants being described had possibly been collected due to their interesting morphological or biological anomalies – and they were being sent out, maybe for further investigation, to Sir James Paget at the Royal College of Surgeons. This name rang a vague bell, so I did a little research.

Sir James Paget is considered one of the most outstanding medical researchers of the 19th century and is known as the father of British pathology. He described diseases including Paget’s disease of the bone and Paget’s disease of the nipple, and throughout his career he stressed how vital science research was for medical practise.

Interestingly, Paget was a close friend of Charles Darwin, who helped his medical research by sharing thoughts and musings. Darwin also sent Paget books, including a book that he wrote on earthworms, prompting this response from Paget: “It seems to me the best that ever you have written in showing the splendid and great truths that may be found in common things”.

The next chapter.

As part of the Mobile Museum Project, Kew are also in the process of digitising the Museum of Economic Botany’s “School Letter Books”. These are logbooks containing hundreds of letters of correspondence between the Museum of Economic Botany and schools across the UK – the first book spanning from 1877 – 1894. These letters are mainly requests from teachers and lecturers who asked Kew for educational objects and samples, either to use as teaching aids or to help establish their own small collections.

The Economic Botany Collection at Kew has a rich and varied history that spans over three centuries. By making these unique books available online through BHL, we hope that more people can make use of the fascinating information held within them that has been so meticulously recorded throughout the years.

 

William Brewster (1851-1919) was a renowned American amateur ornithologist, serving as a co-founder of the American Ornithologists’ Union, the first president of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and a curator at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ). As a part of the CLIR-funded BHL Field Notes Project, MCZ has been digitizing Brewster’s journals, diaries, letters, and photographic prints, which are held in Special Collections at the MCZ’s Ernst Mayr Library.

Most of Brewster’s observations are based in New England, where he split his time between two homes in Cambridge and Concord, Massachusetts. Brewster would stay in a cabin by the Concord River to study nature and escape city life in Cambridge. He also took notes when travelling: his notebooks document trips to the southern USA, the Caribbean, and Europe.

Brewster’s writings contain a wealth of information, from data on temperature and weather conditions to descriptions of animal behavior and personal musings. Some of the extensive Brewster collection is already available to view on BHL – here’s a sampling of the kinds of information you’ll find.

In the warmer months, Brewster often camped at Lake Umbagog (north of the White Mountain National Forest, straddling Maine – New Hampshire border), where he spent his days tracking the progress of bird nests around the lake and making other general observations. Here’s a typical example of one of Brewster’s bird lists, recorded at Lake Umbagog in 1907. The larger numbers are dates, with superscripts indicating the number of individuals counted that day. Asterisks tell us that the bird was heard vocalizing. Some additional details are also penned in (for example, he notes that Dendroica pensylvanica, the Chestnut-sided Warbler, was in an apple tree). [1]

Beginning in the 1890s, Brewster’s journals document a transition of focus from mainly specimen-collecting to photography and documenting behaviors. (His journals reveal an interesting story about his increasing ethical conflict and desire to study wildlife without contributing to its decline. You can read more about this in a previous BHL blog post found here.) Earlier in Brewster’s career, his journals list and provide details on species collected – data that is similarly useful to the list above in that it gives an indication of species distribution and abundance. It also corresponds with existing specimens and documents the impact made by scientific collectors of the era.

The kinds of data in these journals diversifies as Brewster started devoting more time to documenting animal behaviors. In many ways, this work seems to have been harder than getting a good shot at a bird. Even with today’s apps and audio libraries, figuring out bird calls can be a challenge. Equipped with just pencil, paper, field glasses and ears, studying bird vocalizations is much trickier, as shown by Brewster’s notes below from 1902. [2] Today, we can represent bird vocalizations visually using spectrograms. In order to translate sounds to text, Brewster listened diligently to invent mnemonics, describe patterns, and make comparisons to other more familiar sounds.

It’s worth mentioning that Brewster’s animal observations weren’t limited to birds, and that a lot of his animal encounters made for interesting stories. Below is a sketch of a moose from Lake Umbagog, observed in August 1869. [3] His impression: “He seemed like some long-forgotten antedeluvian creature which, arousing from a sleep of thousands of years, was wandering aimlessly about in a land so changed that it no longer had any place for such strange monsters.”

As though telling the story to a friend, he recounts following the moose through the wetland in his canoe – sometimes ending up way too close for comfort. After talking to a local guide, he learned that the moose that he’d seen was a mid-sized female, and concluded, “If she was not really a very large one I have no wish to be equally near to a big bull!”

Because he returned to Lake Umbagog year after year, Brewster was able to notice longer-term changes in familiar ecosystems. Increasingly, these changes were man-made disturbances: the clearing of woods, the creation of new roads, and other urbanizing changes. He also recorded how local communities of animals and plants responded after these disturbances. The following passages from Brewster’s field notes document some changes that he saw in the Maine woods as a consequence of logging for paper mills, and include some of his own predictions.

“Where the road passes through the woods … the roadworkers last May cut away the mountain maples, cornels and other shrubs and low trees that made such a beautiful border to the forest clearing in their places a broad belt of bare rocks half covered with the fallen brush wood. This deed of vandalism was performed while I was here and at the time I feared that years must elapse before Nature, with all her diligence, could repair the injury.

“I underrated her powers for already this thicket of road is, if anything, more beautiful than ever. Fire weed, Eupatorium, Impatiens, Asters, Golden rod and several other tall and rank flowering plants have shot up through and almost perfectly concealed the unsightly brush and stone heaps and I have rarely seen a more brilliant or attractive display of wild flowers. The fire weed is especially tall and fine and the jewel weed grows in solid beds yards in extent. Of course the Humming birds had not overlooked such a feeding ground. There were at least three of them there at once including an adult male with blazing ruby throat at which I fired an ineffectual shot.” [4]

In this instance, Brewster noticed that one year was enough time to see plant growth after the woods had been cleared, that the colonizing plants were different from the ones that characterized the location before, and that they had impacted animal life. He penned these observations on ecological succession just a few years before the first scientific paper on this concept was published (“An Ecological Study of the Sand Dune Flora of Northern Indiana”, Henry Chandler Cowles, 1898.). [5]

The following year, he wrote:

“The Lake shore has been sadly marred … by the lumbermen who last winter cut all the spruces and many of the fine, tall white pines all the way from this landing to the deep cove near the Tidswell place. […] Lumbering is a very different business now from what it was twenty years ago. Then only the larger trees were taken; now the pulp mills devour everything and nothing is spared thicker at the base than five inches! […] These changes in the character of the forests must make speedy & considerable changes in the bird fauna. The shore near Crocker’s camp, for instance, has been one of the chief breeding grounds for the Bay breasted Warbler. They will breed there no longer, now that all the spruces are gone.” [6]

Knowing now that local extirpations and even total extinction can occur (this was the decade when the passenger pigeon disappeared from the wild), he would have penned this prediction with heavy heart. To help preserve an area he cared about – his familiar stomping grounds along the Concord River in Concord, Mass. – over time, Brewster purchased 300 acres of the riverfront. His ‘October Farm,’ across the river from Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, is now protected land with trails recently opened to the public – while his writings, notes and photographs preserve the region for us as he knew it in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

(If you’re interested in learning more, I write an ongoing series of blog posts on the Brewster collection on the Ernst Mayr Library blog. You might like to see archival and modern photos of October Farm, Brewster’s property in Concord.)

References

[1] July and August 1907. Journals of William Brewster, 1871-1919 (inclusive). Find this journal on BHL.

[2] June 1, 1902. Journals of William Brewster, 1871-1919 (inclusive). Find this journal on BHL.

[3] August 27, 1896. Journals of William Brewster, 1871-1919 (inclusive). Find this journal on BHL.

[4] August 15, 1896. Journals of William Brewster, 1871-1919 (inclusive). Find this journal on BHL.

[5] ‘Henry C. Cowles’. The University of Chicago Centennial Catalogues. Web accessed: https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/projects/centcat/fac/facch14_01.html

[6] May 15, 1897. Journals of William Brewster, 1871-1919 (inclusive). Find this journal on BHL.