From the start, medicine in the colonies was markedly different from practices in Europe. Formally trained physicians already had a dubious reputation in Europe and were only scarcer and more expensive in the Americas, and their imported medicines were constantly in short supply. Medical science was, at best, imprecise, and at worst actively harmful to patients who came down with sickness. Most care was instead outsourced to apothecaries, who stocked their shelves with plants not native to the Americas and concocted recipes used to treat all sorts of ailments, from common colds to venereal diseases to tropical diseases like yellow fever. And without any knowledge of the strange and new plants they encountered in the region, apothecaries and commoners alike often turned to Indigenous people for care or otherwise sought cures from their medical botanicals.[1]

Needless to say, the often-improvised reality of medical treatment in America did not conform to the theories of the country’s most-remembered physicians. Two prominent Philadelphia physicians, Dr. Benjamin Rush and Dr. Benjamin Smith Barton, wrote treatises that attempted to organize this rudimentary system of medical treatment, but generally excluded the original context that the remedies they described were discovered within. Those physicians had an economic incentive to appropriate Indigenous remedies while simultaneously disavowing their usage by Indigenous healers, since they would have competed directly with them for patients.[2] As a result, the contributions that Indigenous botanical knowledge made to early American medicine is usually underemphasized, but the writings of William Bartram preserve some of that history.[3]

Recent scholarship has suggested we should understand early American medicine as part of a distinctive “Atlantic World medical complex” which “melded people, plants, and knowledges” from Indigenous, African, and European sources.[4] Cures from Europe were widely used in this context, but so too were remedies that had their roots in the medical systems of the Lenape or Cherokee, and remedies that reached Euro-Americans through the African diaspora.[5] By tracing references William Bartram makes to Indigenous medical botany in his writings, we can reconstruct the Indigenous roots of early American medicine that have been left out of the record by authors like Barton and Rush. Bartram’s journey across the lands of the Creek and Cherokee in the southeastern part of the country, published in his literary classic Travels and other correspondences, offers a rich look into the medicinal world of those groups:

Indigenous Medical Botanicals described by William Bartram [6]

* Indicates a plant that was included in Bartram’s 1807 catalogue of plants at the garden.

Unlike other writers, Bartram’s ethnographic interest in Indigenous societies led him to record the cultural context that many of these remedies were used in. Euro-American physicians sometimes shared an interest in the specific properties of plants, but Bartram’s commitment to describing the rituals associated with medicine reveals the contours of Indigenous medical systems.[7] The Creek and Cherokee did not confine their treatments to remedies alone, for instance, but usually combined them with “regimen and a rigid abstinence with respect to eating and drinking, as well as the gratification of other passions & appetites.”[8] Sometimes, Bartram describes the preparation of different plants, for example how the China Brier and Sassafras root were combined with cuttings from the Bignonia crucigera vine and boiled to produce what he calls a “Diet Drink.”[9] An infusion of the tops of Collinsonia was “ordinarily drunk at breakfast” and unlike most medicines, this one was of “exceeding pleasant taste and flavor.”

Elsewhere, he recounts the processes the Creek and Cherokee underwent to turn plants into medicines. Podophyllum peltatum, the May-Apple, which Bartram described as “the most effectual and safe emetic and cathartic,” was prepared through digging up the roots in Autumn, drying them in a loft, and reducing them into a “fine sieved powder” that could then be used as medicine.[10]

William Bartram’s illustration of Collinsonia canadensis, horse-balm, ca. 1801-1802. Both John and William Bartram held Collinsonia in high regard as a febrifuge. [Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society.]

At the time the town was fasting, taking medicine, and I think I may say praying, to avert a grievous calamity of sickness, which had lately afflicted them, and laid in the grave abundance of their citizens; they fast seven or eight days, during which time they eat or drink nothing but a meagre gruel, made of a little corn-flour and water; taking at the same time by way of medicine or physic, a strong decoction of the roots of the Iris versicolor, which is a powerful cathartic; they hold this root in high estimation, every town cultivates a little plantation of it, having a large artificial pond, just without the town, planted and almost overgrown with it, where they usually dig clay for pottery, and mortar and plaster for buildings, and I observed where they had lately been digging up this root.[11]

Medical texts might list Iris versicolor as a cathartic, but they would not list its role as part of a complex procedure for staving off sickness that Bartram describes. We cannot determine from this description if this medical ritual was replicated across the region, but the fact that “every town” would “cultivate a little plantation of it” indicates that it was among the most important medicinal plants to the Creek and likely carried strong symbolic significance.

The transfer of medicinal knowledge was not always a frictionless process. Indigenous people were acutely aware of the dangers posed by Euro-American settlers in this period, and in one case Bartram recalls the Cherokee nation withholding medicinal information from him:

The Cherokees use the Lobelia siphilitica & another plant of still greater power and efficacy, which the traders told me of, but would not undertake to show it to me under Thirty Guineas Reward for fear of the Indians who endeavor to conceal the knowledge of it from the whites lest its great virtues should excite their researches for it, to its expiration.[12]

Still, William Bartram lists at least four remedies that became widespread among white settlers after being described to them by the Indigenous inhabitants of the region, and as mentioned earlier, white settlers often turned to Indigenous doctors for care.

Two plants that Bartram held in particularly high regard were the Swamp Lily (Saururus cernuus) and the mayapple, (Podophyllum peltatum), the latter of which he attributed to preserving “the lives of many thousands of people of the Southern states.”[13] Bartram himself wrote that he had been treated with it and attested to its “almost infallible good effects”. The mayapple, known as highly toxic both to Europeans and Lenape people in the Northeast, was used by the Cherokee and Creek to expel worms, and as an emetic (to induce vomiting), and a cathartic (a laxative).[14] Swamp Lily could be used to treat wounds or fight fevers. The virtues of both plants, Bartram recounts, “were communicated to the White inhabitants by the Indians.”[15] Etoposide, a chemical derived from Podophyllum peltatum, remains a widely used medicine in chemotherapy treatments today.[16]

William Bartram’s drawings medical botanicals were renowned for their accuracy and beauty. Members of the American Philosophical Society commissioned drawings of his plants for their research. This drawing is of Podophyllum peltatum, the mayapple, ca. 1801-1803. [Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society.]

William Bartram’s writings contributed to both the preservation and appropriation of Indigenous medical knowledge. In a very direct sense, the Bartrams commodified and perhaps profited off of the Indigenous cures they encountered. But William Bartram’s writings also preserved the Indigenous roots of early American medicine, when other sources have obscured or willfully suppressed them. William’s expeditions and careful observations of Indigenous medicine made Bartram’s Garden into an important node in the transatlantic exchange of medicinal knowledge and reveal the global and contested roots of modern medical science.

Notes

Cover image: William Bartram’s drawing of Silphium terebinthinaceum, rosinweed, engraved for publication in B. S. Barton’s Elements of Botany,  Philadelphia: 1803.

[1] Ray, Laura E. “Podophyllum peltatum and observations on the Creek and Cherokee Indians: William Bartram’s preservation of Native American pharmacology.” The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine. vol. 82,1 (2009), 31.

[2] McCulla, Theresa. “Medicine in Colonial North America,” Colonial North America at Harvard Library Project, 2017.

[3] Ray, “Podophyllum peltatum,” 29. Ray has shown how Barton’s writings borrowed or even plagiarized many of William Bartram’s observations on medicine in his Collections for an Essay towards a Materia Medica of the United-States, omitting reference to the Indigenous context that Bartram found his plants in. Rush openly dismissed the idea that Indigenous sources could offer anything to Euro-American physicians, writing that “we have no discoveries in the materia medica to hope for from the Indians in North-America” (Cited in Robinson, “New Worlds, New Medicines”).

[4] Schiebinger, Londa L. Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017), 3.

[5] See our blog post on Cleome gynandra, an African plant that William Bartram found in Louisiana.

[6] This table compiles descriptions from four sources:

Bartram, William. “Observations on the Creek and Cherokee Indians.” In William Bartram on the Southeastern Indians, ed. Gregory A Waselkov and Kathryn E. Holland Braund, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995),161-164.

—The Travels of William Bartram, Naturalists Edition, annotated by Francis Harper, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), 207-288.

—Travels in Georgia and Florida, 1773-1774: A Report to Dr. John Fothergill, annotated by Francis Harper, (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1943).

— “William Bartram’s ‘Remarks’ descriptive specimens he sent to Dr. Fothergill and Mr. Barclay,” 1774, in William Bartram: Botanical and Zoological Drawings, 1756-1788, ed. Joseph Ewan (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1968), 154-168.

[7] Robinson, Martha. “New Worlds, New Medicines: Indian Remedies and English Medicine in Early America,” Early American Studies, vol. 3,1 (2005), 97.

[8] Bartram, Observations, 162.

[9] Bartram, Observations, 163.

[10] Ibid., 163. [Podophyllum or mayapple can be fatally poisonous, do not try this at home.]

[11] Bartram, Travels, 276.

[12] Bartram, Observations, 163.

[13] Ibid., 163.

[14] The Pennsylvania Moravian missionary John Heckewelder (1743-1823), who spent years writing about the Lenape, includes the May-Apple on his list of their medical botanicals, but only references its toxicity. John Gottlieb E. Heckewelder, Names of various trees, shrubs & plants in the language of the Lenape. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1815)

[15] Ibid., 164.

[16] The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, “Etoposide”. Reviewed on Jun 29, 2021. Drugs.com, https://www.drugs.com/monograph/etoposide.html.

[17] Many of these plants are still cultivated at the garden today. These include Angelica atropurpurea, Bignonia capreolata, Collinsonia canadensis, Erigeron pulchellus, Ilex vomitoria, Iris versicolor, Panax quinquefolius, Persea borbonia, Saururus cernuus, Silphium terebinthinaceum, and Spigelia marilandica.

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“Here are few habitations, and some fields cleared and cultivated; but the inhabitants neglect agriculture; and generally employ themselves in hunting, and fishing; we however furnished ourselves here with a sufficiency of excellent Batatas. I observed no new vegetable productions, except a species of Cleome, (Cleome lupinifolia) this plant possesses a very strong scent, somewhat like Gum Assafetida, notwithstanding which the inhabitants give it a place in soups and sauces.” [1]

William never mentions the plant again, but he must have taken some seeds of it back with him to grow at Bartram’s Garden, because the plant re-emerges in an illustration that he made for the book Elements of Botany in 1803. That illustration can clearly be identified as cat’s whiskers (modern name Cleome gynandra), which at the time Bartram named Cleome lupinifolia but later corrected to Cleome pentaphylla owing to its foliage that came in leaflets of five. The plant was still in cultivation at the Garden for some years after that, appearing in catalogues William Bartram compiled for interested botanists in 1807 and 1819, before it disappears from the historical record.

Unlike most other plants Bartram found during his expeditions, however, cat’s whiskers was not recorded anywhere else in the Southeastern United States, nor was it native to the region. Cat’s whiskers is actually native to the Old World. In many areas in Asia, locals treat it as a weed. But in many parts of Africa, especially eastern and southern Africa, the cultivation of cat’s whiskers as a leafy vegetable was (and remains) widespread.[2] At the time there was no evidence of anyone growing cat’s whiskers within thousands of miles of Louisiana.

How could William Bartram have found it on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain in 1775? Answering this question requires looking closely at the context he provides and at social histories of the region. Doing so gives a look into a lost piece of Louisiana cuisine and horticultural practice. Cleome gynandra shows that plants carry with them a social story that deserves careful investigation, filling in the gaps left by written records of the past.

We suspect that Bartram may have encountered a community that included free people of African descent who knew how to cultivate cat’s whiskers. Although Bartram does not give any more details on this community, we can infer that they probably were not of wholly European origin. Robert Hastings, in his The Lakes of Pontchartrain, speculates that the dwellings described by Bartram here were “apparently of European settlement.”[3] This was likely not the case, as the presence of Cleome gynandra would indicate.

When Bartram encountered European settlers, he usually identified their name and country of origin, as in the case of the “English Gentleman” named James Rumsey who Bartram had stayed with earlier that week. We know that Rumsey was deeply involved in the West Floridian slave trade. A fact that Bartram often tried to obscure in his writings, possibly owing to his own failed experience starting a plantation in Florida in 1766. Perhaps this is why no enslaved people are mentioned during his time at Rumsey’s.[4] But he does explicitly refer to Rumsey’s settlement (and other sites he visits) as a “plantation.” The settlement where he encounters cat’s whiskers is described with entirely different terminology, as “a few habitations” in a “fertile and delightful region.”

William Bartram journeyed along the northern shore of Lake Pontchartrain, eventually stopping at a fort along the Iberville River. Bartram found Cleome gynandra somewhere near the mouth of the Tangiapahoa river. Credit: Brad Sanders of the Bartram Trail Conference.

This part of Louisiana, which oscillated between British and Spanish colonial control, has been described by historian Frances Kolb as a “borderland” where all sorts of people sought to survive on the porous boundary between empires.[5] Indigenous Acolapissa and Choctaw people, many of whom were displaced by conflict with Britain during the Seven Years’ War, still lived on the north shores of Lake Pontchartrain and traded with colonial settlements.  While Louisiana was under Spanish control, French Acadians and Canary Islanders flocked to the region. The period of British control brought a flood of European planters, who frequently brought with them enslaved African people, usually originating from West Africa.[6] And most importantly, the Louisiana borderlands were home to freed African Americans and Black Creoles, who sought whatever escape they could from a rapidly expanding slave system, sometimes even forming self-sustaining Maroon communities who lived on the outskirts of plantation society.[7]

The boundaries between these groups were blurred, since they intermarried throughout the eighteenth century.[8] Research on Louisiana Folklife by local historians has shown that so-called “swamp communities” on the northwestern side of the Lake persisted through the 20^th century, where creolized families of mixed European, African and Native descent live fishing and hunting “virtually as did the Choctaw.”[9] That description lines up with evidence describing eighteenth century makeup of this part of Louisiana.

If Africans did indeed live at the settlement Bartram encountered, they could have brought with them the knowledge of how to cultivate and prepare Cleome gynandra. People in West Africa sometimes ate cat’s whiskers, especially during times of famine when they would foraged it naturally in disturbed or unsown fields. There, it may have been referred to as “boanga” or “mugole.”[10] Although most of the enslaved people in Louisiana came from Senegambia, which was not known to cultivate cat’s whiskers, there is evidence of the Birifor people of Burkina Faso preparing the leaves in sauces and soups, which matches William Bartram’s description.[11] Some enslaved people sold on the Gold Coast and transported to the Americas through the Middle Passage could have originated from that region.[12] They also could have come from another part of West Africa such as Nigeria, Ghana, or Benin where Cleome gynandra cultivation has been documented.

Photograph of  wild cat’s whiskers growing in Tanzania. Credit: Dick Culbert, Wikimedia Commons

Cat’s whiskers would certainly not be the only plant to make its way from West Africa into the cuisine of Louisiana, where close contact between people of vastly different ethnic backgrounds led to a high degree of cultural diffusion. Enslaved people from West Africa would have found a climate and ecosystem suitable to growing many of the vegetables they grew at home. Okra, for instance, was brought to the region by people of African descent via the West Indies and became an important part of the region’s distinctive gumbo, while knowledge of rice cultivation came via the slave trade at the beginning of the eighteenth century and was quickly taken up across the region.[13] Perhaps Cleome gynandra is a forgotten part of this story of transcontinental cultural exchanges.

Slavery and settler colonialism cast a long shadow over early American plant science, and historians have documented how the labor of enslaved people and dispossession of Indigenous lands contributed to producing the profits that made empirical botanical research from people like the Bartrams possible.[14] William Bartram’s encounter with Cleome gynandra highlights an underappreciated part of this story, one that centers the contribution and agency of free Black Creoles in disseminating botanical knowledge.

Notes

Cover image: William Bartram’s engraving of Cleome gynandra for Elements of Botany in 1803.

Thanks to Joel Fry, whose research on Cleome gynandra made this article possible; and Brad Sanders, who created the map used here.

[1] Bartram, William. The Travels of William Bartram, Naturalists Edition, annotated by Francis Harper, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), 269.   

[2] Chweya, James A. and Nameus A. Mnzava. “Cat’s whiskers. Cleome gynandra L. Promoting the conservation and use of underutilized and neglected crops,” Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research, Gatersleben / International Plant Genetic Resources Institute, Rome, Italy, 11. Chweya and Mnzava list nearly 40 countries that C. gynandra is likely native to.

[3] Hastings, Robert W. The Lakes of Pontchartrain: Their History and Environments, (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2009), 45

[4] McGaughy, Taylor. “Bartram’s Westerly Wanderings: Economic Transitions in Travels”. In The Attention of a Traveller: Essays on William Bartram’s Travels and Legacy, ed. Kathryn H. Braund. (University of Alabama Press, 2022), p. 17. See Sharece Blakney’s blog post titled “Six Likely Negroes: John Bartram and the East Florida Plantation” to read more about William’s past with slavery.

[5] Kolb, Frances. “Profitable Transgressions: International Borders and British Atlantic Trade Networks in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 1763-1783,” in Atlantic Environments and the American South, ed. Thomas Blake Earle and D. Andrew Johnson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2020), 135-54.

[6] Usner, Daniel H. “‘A Prospect of the Grand Sublime’: An Atlantic World Borderland Seen and Unseen by William Bartram,” in The Attention of a Traveller: Essays on William Bartram’s Travels and Legacy, ed. Kathryn H. Braund. (University of Alabama Press, 2022), 22.

[7] Reeves, William D. Historic Louisiana: An Illustrated History. (San Antonio: Historical Publishing Network, 2003), 11-12.

[8] Gardner, Joel. “The Florida Parishes: An Overview,” In Folklife in the Florida Parishes. (New Orleans: Louisiana Division of the Arts, 1988).

[9] Gregory, H.F. “Indians and Folklife in the Florida Parishes of Louisiana,” in Folklife in the Florida Parishes. (New Orleans: Louisiana Division of the Arts, 1988).

[10] Chweya, James A. and Nameus A. Mnzava. “Cat’s whiskers,” 10.

[11] Freedman, Bob. “Cleome gynandra.” Purdue University Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture’s Famine Foods Project. https://www.purdue.edu/hla/sites/famine-foods/famine_food/cleome-gynandra/. Accessed 6-2-2022.

[12] Slavery and Remembrance Project, 2022. “Slave Trade Routes”. Published by The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and UNESCO’s Slave Route Project.

[13] Brasseaux, Carl A. The Founding of New Acadia, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987).

[14] McGaughy, Taylor. “Bartram’s Westerly Wanderings: Economic Transitions in Travels”. In The Attention of a Traveller: Essays on William Bartram’s Travels and Legacy, ed. Kathryn H. Braund. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2022), p. 18.

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Following Torbert’s journey through archival documents shows that the trajectory of his life took several turns despite being relatively brief. After he left school at age 16, archival documents placed him in the reception records of Eastern State Penitentiary in 1862. At 23, Ganges was arrested for rioting before serving in the Union Army during the Civil War. On February 26, 1864, 25-year-old Torbert Ganges enlisted with the 32^nd Regiment Infantry, U.S. Colored Troops, Company H.[4] The 32^nd was organized at Camp William Penn in Philadelphia before they were ordered to South Carolina where they fought in the Battle of Honey Hill.[5] The 32^nd Regiment Infantry lost a total of 150 men throughout the war. A pair of officers and 35 enlisted men were mortally wounded or killed, while 113 died of disease. Torbert Ganges and the remaining soldiers of the 32^nd Infantry were mustered out in August of 1865.[6] Ganges returned to Bucks County and was arrested for robbery and receiving stolen goods. He served two terms in Eastern State Penitentiary in 1876 and 1879.

In 1893, Torbert made the local paper after he helped apprehend an accused murderer. According to Ganges, a man came to his home and offered to pay him for food. He gave the man a loaf of bread but refused to take any money. A short time later, the man returned, asking to purchase tobacco from Ganges. After giving the man tobacco and refusing money, Ganges went into town and alerted authorities that he had seen a man fitting the description of Wallace Burt. Burt was wanted for the murder of a local elderly couple.[7] Torbert Ganges was awarded $448 of the $1,000 reward offered by the county following Burt’s conviction.[8]

In December of 1895, Ganges appeared in newspapers again when he was arrested for robbery. Torbert and Samuel Crusen from New Jersey were accused of stealing poultry and produce.[9] As a result, James Bunting’s poultry house was missing chickens, and William Vandegrift was robbed of food he kept at a boardinghouse for farm laborers he employed. In addition, Charles Pope was robbed of 30 bushels of wheat, 20 bushels of apples, 25 bushels of potatoes, and buckwheat flour. The irony of the crime is that Torbert and Crusen borrowed a cart from Charles Pope to carry the load of stolen produce.[10] The pair were caught after a resident of the boardinghouse tipped off the local farmers. According to the Allentown Leader, “Old Torbert Ganges has an old black horse with a crooked hind leg, that twists when he walks, making a peculiar hood-print on the ground. Detective Wharton traced this hoof-print seven miles between a house that had been robbed and Ganges’ hut.”[11] Ganges pleaded guilty to burglary and was sentenced to six years and six months at the local prison. Before handing down the hefty sentence, the judge reminded the 56-year-old Ganges that he had already sentenced him to prison twice.[12]

Ganges served a few months of his sentence before he was transferred to the almshouse for treatment, where he died on July 16, 1897. The article that announced Torbert’s death did not include details on his illness, but it did note that he was sent to the almshouse on the recommendation of an appointed court commission.[13] Torbert Ganges’ final appearance in the historical record is on a “Burial of Indigent Soldiers” list in 1899.[14]

Image: Torbert Ganges’ Gravestone, located at Slate Hill Burial Ground, Yardley, Pennsylvania. “Torbut Ganges,” taken by Stan Doremus, Findagrave.com, Memorial ID:8148456

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Notes

[1] 1850 United States Federal Census [database online], Census Place: Lower Makefield, Bucks County, Pennsylvania; Roll M432_758, Page 19A, Image 44.

[2] Ibid. While it is possible that Sampson Ganges was Torbert’s father, it is speculative since the 1850 federal census does not list a relationship to head of household.

[3] Materials on the U.S.S. Ganges, the indentured contracts, and documents from the court case can be found in Collection 0490, Pennsylvania Abolition Society Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Also see, Sharece Blakney, Stories We Know: Recording the Black History of Bartram’s Garden and Southwest Philadelphia, edited by Aislinn Pentecost-Farren (published by the John Bartram Association and Mural Arts Philadelphia, 2017).

[4] Compiled Military Service Records of Volunteer Union Soldiers Who Served with the United States Colored Troops; Infantry Organizations, 31^st through 35^th; Microfilm Serial: M1992; Microfilm Roll:22

[5] Samuel Bates, History of Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1861-5; Prepared in Compliance with Acts of the Legislature, 1871. Page 1061 – – On the same page listing Torbert, there is a Peter Ganges, also 32^nd USCT and page 1060 shows a William Ganges, 32^nd USCT as a Corporal. The 1850 Federal Census shows an 18-year-old William Ganges living in the same household as Sampson and Torbert.

[6]Frederick Henry Dyer, A Compendium of the War of the Rebellion (The Dyer Publishing Company, 1908), 1729.

[7] The Central News (Perkasie, Pennsylvania), Thursday, October 5, 1893; Page 3. The article describes Wallace Burt as an “Indian half-breed”, other papers running the story described him as a half-breed Cherokee and a negro looking half-breed Indian. Torbert Ganges is referred to as a colored man in some newspapers or an old negro.

[8] The Allentown Leader (Allentown, Pennsylvania), Friday, December 13, 1895; Page 1.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid

[11] Ibid.

[12] The Allentown Leader (Allentown, Pennsylvania), Thursday, December 19, 1895; Page 1.

[13] The Columbian (Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania), Thursday, July 22, 1897. Page 6

[14] The Central News (Perkasie, Pennsylvania), Thursday, February 17, 1898; Page 4. – – The Bucks County Gazette (Bristol, Pennsylvania), Thursday, February 16, 1899. He appears on this list twice. Once for his burial in 1898 and then when his headstone is placed in 1899.

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Walking through the produce section your footsteps came to a halt as your mother needed to pick up some veggies and fruits for the next household meal. Her process was always particular, never leaving any white lines and room for errors. As they say, mother knows best, and she sure was the best when it came to picking up her produce. Your mother’s glare would examine the firmness of the tomatoes to the vibrant colors of the oranges. Her hawk’s eye missed no mark. She would knock on the watermelons as she would her neighbor’s door questioning the hollowness to see if it’s ripe. From the crunch of the salad to the length of the cucumber, nowhere, no matter the fruit or vegetable is missed. Do not forget: your mother knows the seasons of her produce. If something is supposed to be in the market she would know, and if not she looks at it with a wary eye and disapproves.

But of course, your mother was raised with the greenest of thumbs, but convenience stops her from practicing it within her food process. So you tell her, you tell her about the farm and market which practices healthy natural practices. You overheard your neighbors in a conversation about it, so you share that same knowledge. You tell her, “Sankofa!” You tell her the learning process with Sankofa is never lonely, it is with a team, a community. The food sold in markets was grown with intention and energy. Her process of picking products will get easier with one visit to Sankofa’s market. The ripeness and quality of the produce are all in front of your eye. There of course is examining, but not much because that natural and organic produce lacks the flaws of the “normal market.”

This is marketing done right. It is the process of learning. It is the process of teaching. It is the process of practicing what is learned. The food selection has never been easier, trust me!

Asstan Cisse is a youth leader at the Sankofa Community Farm and currently serves as the market manager. She is a recent graduate of The Philadelphia High School for Girls and will begin her studies at Barnard College of Columbia University this fall.

The Sankofa Community Farm market will be open on Thursdays, 3–6 pm, at the entrance to Bartram Village, 5400 Lindbergh Boulevard. Cash, EBT, WIC Farmer’s Market vouchers, and Senior vouchers are all accepted. (Standard WIC retail vouchers not accepted). You can also catch the Sankofa Farm Stand at Clark Park, 43rd Street and Chester Avenue, on Saturdays from 10 am–1 pm.

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Both Elliot and the PAS used laws to support their arguments for freedom or bondage.  As required by Pennsylvania’s Gradual Abolition Act of 1780, children born in Pennsylvania to enslaved mothers after March 1^st of that year were free after a period of indentured servitude. The Act also required slaveowners to register those remaining enslaved with the court clerk by November 1^st. Those who failed to register the people annually held in bondage forfeited their rights to the enslaved person who was manumitted. Elliott claimed that the children belonged to him because their mothers were enslaved when the children were born. However, the PAS argued that the women’s legal status was altered when their previous owners died and their wills enforced. In short, the children were born free because their mothers were indentured, not enslaved. Elliott had sold four of the children to farmers in Chester County and registered the other five as slaves.

After 17 months, lawyers for the PAS resolved the case. Elliott was forced to free the women and three of the older children. Six of the remaining nine children were signed into indentured servant contracts with the permission of their parents. Due to the timeframe of Willing’s manumission document and the work of the PAS, there is a possibility that Dinah was one of the several women inherited by Elliott. Abraham Willing purchased the freedom of his wife and son for 30 pounds.[1]

[1] July 29, 1793, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Abolition Society Papers. Collection 0490, Box 2, folder 8.; Nash, Gary B. Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720-1840. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988.; Paul Finkelman, “The Kidnapping of John Davis and the Adoption of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793”, The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 56, No. 3 (1990): 400.

Image: 1781 deed of emancipation for Dinah Willing and Abraham Willing Jr. Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Abolition Society Papers. Collection 0490, Box 2, folder 8.

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Little is known about the lives of the Clarks during their time in bondage or after manumission. Although Ann Bartram lived in present day-Old City (Second Street between Walnut and Chestnut Streets) rather than at Bartram’s Garden, the Clarks’ manumission document is an example of the Bartram family’s involvement in the institution of slavery. Download Stories We Know for more on the Black history of Kingsessing and the Bartram family.

Notes

[1] Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Abolition Society Papers. Collection 0490, Box 2, folder 5.

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On April 5, 1766, John Bartram wrote a letter to his son about a shipment from Charleston to East Florida. William Bartram became a plantation owner in the British colony to plant rice on 500 acres of land along the St. Johns River. However, William needed his father’s help to finance his new venture. Supporting his efforts, John Bartram purchased six enslaved people in Charleston, South Carolina, and shipped them to William’s East Florida plantation.[1] In John Bartram’s letter to William, he described the enslaved group:

I have shiped on board the East Florida Captain Bachop 6 likely negroes called Jack a lusty man a new negro 5 foot 8 inches high & ¼: Siby his wife new 5 foot one inch ¾ Jacob 5 foot high & Sam 4 foot 7 inches ½   allso Flora a lusty woman not so black as many a cromantee… Bachus her son is a pretty boy 3 or 4 years ould.[2]

John Bartram’s letter to William reveals more than his participation in the slave trade but his attitude towards the people he held in bondage. Immediately after describing the group of people sent to East Florida, Bartram ends his letter the way it began, with a list of items he sent to William. The newly purchased human chattel was casually mentioned between four good yams and a grindstone. In a follow-up letter to William, Bartram reminds his son that he sent him “two young breeding wenches,” referring to Siby and Flora.[3]

Bartram’s use of ‘new’ in his description indicates the amount of time an individual had to acclimate to enslavement. In his letter, he explains that newly imported slaves are preferred since they, “as yet not haveing learnt the mischievous practices of the negroes born in the country and town which the people generally represents as if thay was all either murderers runaways [or] robers, or theeves; espetially the Plantation negroes.”[4] During the purchase process, John Bartram relied heavily on the advice and assistance of friends in Charleston who already owned people. Historians have found no archival evidence that Bartram ever manumitted the people he sent to East Florida. Further research is required to locate them in the historical record. The way scholars write about historical figures has evolved with the field of history itself. The ability to present a transparent historical narrative has grown more necessary with time. Early depictions of Bartram and more recent discussions of race and slavery create an opportunity to examine the past through a more transparent lens.[5]

After the failure of his East Florida plantation, William Bartram enslaved “a negro woman named Jenny” from North Carolina before transferring ownership to his brother-in-law, George Bartram.[6] Later in life, William wrote extensively of his opposition to slavery. Archival documents certainly support an argument for antislavery advocacy among John Bartram’s descendants. And still, John Bartram purchased six people. Building a complete narrative is imperative for posterity, credibility, and accountability. More importantly, we owe it to Jack, Siby, Jacob, Sam, Flora, and Bachus.

[1] “Letter from John Bartram, [Charleston, SC] to William Bartram, St. Augustine, April 5, 1766”, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Bartram Family Papers (Collection 36), Box 1, folder 62. This letter is published in the collection of William Bartram’s correspondence, edited by Thomas Hallock and Nancy E. Hoffman, William Bartram, The Search for Nature’s Design: Selected Art, Letters, and Unpublished Writings. (University of Georgia Press, Athens, GA: 2010), pp. 54-56. Quotes from the Bartram letters reproduced here reflect the original and sometimes erratic spelling of John and William Bartram.

[2] Ibid. Note: “Cromantee” is a subgroup of the Akan people from southern Ghana. Joseph K. Adjaye, “Time in the Black Experience”, Issue 167 of Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies, (Greenwood Publishing Group, 1994).

[3] “Letter from John Bartram, [Charleston, SC] to William Bartram, [St. Augustine, FL] April 9, 1766,” New York Historical Society, Miscellaneous Manuscripts Collection.

[4] “Letter from John Bartram to William Bartram, April 9, 1766”, HSP, BP 1:62. Hallock & Hoffmann, eds. William Bartram, The Search for Nature’s Design…, pp. 56-58.

[5] For more information on William Bartram’s failed plantation on the St. Johns River in Florida see: Daniel L. Schafer, William Bartram and the Ghost Plantations of British East Florida. (University Press of Florida, Gainesville: 2010), Chapter 2 pp. 29-38.

[6] This 1772-1773 Slave deed is reproduced in the Hallock & Hoffmann eds., William Bartram, The Search for Nature’s Design…, p. 91, Figure 29. The original document is at the American Philosophical Society. George Bartram (1735-1777) was the Scottish husband of Ann Bartram (1741-1824) referenced in Stories We Know, and father of Philadelphia alderman George Bartram (1767-1840). Joel T. Fry, “Slavery and Freedom at Bartram’s Garden”, pp. 13.

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Since starting this job in October, I’ve been thinking more about the concept of Black diasporic social agency and healing through the land, particularly in the context of Bartram’s Garden, a historical site that was established on colonized Lenape land by a man who benefitted from the labor of the enslaved, and that now exists in the middle of Southwest Philadelphia, a primarily Black area, complete with Sankofa Community Farm.[1] I became more deeply connected to this experience as a child when my mom introduced herself and my family to the world of urban farming, gardening, and green spaces as ways to treat the physical and mental stress that systemic oppression puts on our bodies.

So, I decided that this month, I wanted to dedicate more space to spotlighting the past and present of Black land stewardship—stories of the deep-rooted history of Black people in the United States loving and connecting to land that they were once forced to toil over, and the ways that we heal with it. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve had the luck of hearing about the work that my colleagues and others are doing to uncover this history and to keep it going. I’m excited to share their work!

I’d like to end this post with some words from Ashley Gripper, whom I’ve had the pleasure of meeting briefly during her time working at Sankofa Community Farm. Ashley is the co-founder of Land-Based Jawns, an organization that provides education and training to Black women and non-binary folk on food sovereignty, natural agriculture, and community as guided in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower series. She is an activist-scholar and is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in Environmental Epidemiology at Harvard.  She describes her work as at “the intersections of food, agriculture, spirituality, healing, environmental justice, and Black liberation”. She has dedicated almost a decade of her life to activism in food justice and land justice movements and is also a powerful writer.

In her article on Environmental Health News, titled “We don’t farm because it’s trendy; we farm as resistance, for healing and sovereignty”, she describes not only her own life experiences as a Black woman who has worked and found healing in agriculture but also the history of our deep relationship with the land and growing our own food, beyond just establishing sovereignty, caring for our communities and surviving under white supremacy.

“What I learned is that farming is not new to Black people. While some dominant modern narratives talk about urban agriculture as an innovative way to build community and fight food insecurity, Black folks in this country have been growing food in cities for as long as they have lived in cities. Before that, our ancestors lived in deep relationship with the land. For the first time in my 22 years, I understood that growing food is a tool for dismantling systemic oppression. I also realized that Black academics have a critical role to play in agricultural resistance and freedom movements, and it was in this moment that I decided to apply for graduate programs…

Despite migration patterns from the South to the North and Midwest, many Black urban communities have kept in touch with their agricultural roots, establishing farms and gardens throughout the United States. Black people have ancestral ties to this land—to caring for it, nurturing it, loving it, and allowing it to heal our communities and us—and we have faced immeasurable discriminatory practices and policies as we sought to reclaim and live in relationship with the land. We must not forget this history as we engage Black agricultural communities in our research endeavors.”

You can read the rest of this essay, which is a part of the “Agents of Change” series here.

Ashley was also kind enough to share a list of related resources with me, and I’d like to pass them along here as well.

• Grid Philly – The Blacker the Berry: Free the Land
• She hid seeds in her hair: The power of ancestral African Foods (featuring Chris Bolden-Newsome, Sankofa Community Farm co-founder and Chef Laquanda Dobson)
• Black-owned farms and gardens: Agriculture as Activism, Community, and Healing
• Black Farming: Food Justice and Land Stewardship
• Black Farmer Justice: Past, Present, and Future

[1]Recent archival research by historian Sharece Blakney reveals that the Bartram family engaged in the enslavement of Africans and people of African descent at multiple moments in history through the 18th and 19th century. This research is ongoing. Click here to read more.

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Determining if enslaved or free Black individuals were present on a mid-Atlantic farm is not entirely a straight-forward and simple process. Even determining which members of an extended family were resident on a farm in any given year can be difficult. Tax records that detailed slave or servant labor are generally not available until the last half of the 18th century for the rural townships around Philadelphia, and even then, those records are incomplete and very irregular. Probate records, court records, church or Friends meeting records, and family papers, letters, diaries and even ledgers can also be useful when available. But almost all those sources are either silent or unavailable for the Bartram family (although a large collection of personal letters from John Bartram and his son William are preserved and have been published in modern editions). Currently there is no primary evidence for Bartram family use of slave labor on their farms in Kingessing or Darby, Pennsylvania, and as will be seen, John Bartram has sometimes been held up as an early proponent of emancipation and an opponent of slavery.[1]

It has long been the story from early biographies of John Bartram that he “gave freedom to an excellent young African whom he had brought up, and who continued gratefully in his service while he lived.” This individual, presumably male remains in the shadows of the history of Bartram’s Garden. He was mentioned in several short, early biographies of John Bartram and eventually in 1860 was he connected with a name, “Harvey.” When the last Bartram heirs left the historic garden site in 1850, the grave of this individual was marked in the southeast corner of the garden, near the river. “Harvey’s Grave” remained marked for at least a century more and was generally included among the tourist attractions at Bartram’s Garden, even before the garden became a public park in 1891.[2]

But the same John Bartram who gave freedom to “an excellent young African,” had a half-brother who ran a large rice plantation, Ashwood, on the Cape Fear River in North Carolina with enslaved labor.[3] And the same John Bartram, with moral objections, purchased six slaves in Charleston in Spring 1766, so that his son William Bartram (1739-1823) could patent a plantation in the new British colony of East Florida. Son William’s plantation effort seems to have failed by the end of summer 1766 and there is no documentation for what happened to his enslaved labor force. And of course, almost all the beneficiaries of the Euro-American economy of the 18th and early 19th c. might be considered silently complicit in the world-wide trade in enslaved labor and the commodities produced through slavery.

There is limited historic inference and family tradition that John Bartram, founder of Bartram’s Garden acquired and freed a single slave. The first printed biographical account of Bartram appeared in London in 1782 and mentioned “Negroes” and implied Bartram once owned “slaves” that had been freed. But there are reasons to doubt many of the early biographies and the only tax records available from the period of John Bartram’s life — the 1767, 1769 and the 1774 assessments do not demonstrate any slaves at the Bartram farms (then in operation by John Bartram or his sons James Bartram and John Bartram, Jr.). A single “servant” was taxed for both John Bartram and James Bartram in 1767 and a single “servant” again for John Bartram in 1769.[4]

Later generations of the Bartram family repeated and elaborated the story of a single free Black individual, and as late as 1860 he was first given a name — “Harvey” based on family history or legend. So far it has been impossible to prove if that name “Harvey” is historically accurate, and only a few ambiguous 18th century documents provide support for a Black individual, servant or free in the Bartram household during the life of John Bartram. But there is physical evidence of a grave at Bartram’s Garden, attributed to this free Black individual, “Harvey.” That grave site was marked with a small marble head and footstone in the late 19th century, and it remained marked in the early history of the city park at Bartram’s Garden, perhaps with some marker into the mid-20th century.[5]

Within a decade of the departure of the last Bartram heirs from Bartram’s Garden, Ann and Robert Carr, the story of the “excellent young African” freed by John Bartram or “Harvey” became one of the essential 5 or 6 historical facts repeated about the site and the first John Bartram. Bartram’s Garden had seen nostalgic or “heritage” tourism from the decade of the 1830s during the third Bartram generation. Occasional published pieces and travelers’ letters about the garden in Philadelphia newspapers and national and international press repeated simple facts about John Bartram, his family, and their botanic garden. But at least so far, none of this early nostalgic history of the garden mentions the name “Harvey” or his gravesite at the garden. The limited published sources for the history of the Bartram family and Bartram’s Garden in the 19th and early 20th c. engendered a loop of close repetitions and elaborations of the few available sources.[6]

As noted above, the name “Harvey” first appears in The Bartram Tribute of 1860, an anonymous small local history tabloid printed as part of a local Kingessing church fundraiser. The story of Harvey becomes an even more popular theme in descriptions of the garden after the Civil War and emancipation.

Following the death of Andrew M. Eastwick in February 1879, his widow and younger children abandoned the old Bartram site in Kingessing. There was immediate concern about the future of the historic garden. In Summer 1879 local artist Howard Pyle spent some time at Bartram’s Garden taking notes and making sketches. These were turned into an illustrated article in a national magazine, “Bartram and His Garden” published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in February 1880.[7] Pyle used large quotes from the 1782 Crèvecoeur account of Bartram for his text combined with biographical material from Darlington’s Memorials of 1849.

Not far from the old cider mill stands a stone marking the grave of one of John Bartram’s servants, an aged black, one time a slave, for even the Pennsylvania Quakers had slaves in those days. At the time of the old negro’s death, however, he was a freeman, and had been for years, for Bartram was one of the earliest emancipators of slaves in the colony…

At the death of the old servitor referred to above, he implored “Mars’ John” not even then to remove him from the beloved grounds he had so often tilled, nor from among the trees he had seen growing so lustily beneath his hands; so Mars’ John, laid him to rest beneath the ground where-on he had wrought for so many years, there to sleep his last sleep in peace.[8]

Pyle used Crèvecoeur’s fictional dialogue for John Bartram combined with his own fictionalized personification of the one-time slave, who in this case might have stepped out of the pages of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Pyle does not include a name for this individual, and may not have known the name “Harvey,” but he does include an image of the person in his illustration “Departure for New York,” at the far left holding an axe.[9] Pyle’s illustration is the first of many images of Bartram’s freed slave, created for the media and for advertising in the 20th century.

Beginning around 1880 a campaign to preserve the Bartram house and garden was organized with several supporting groups. Thomas Meehan (1826-1901), who had worked as head gardener for Andrew Eastwick at Bartram’s Garden, 1850-1852, went on to a very successful career as a nurseryman and writer on horticulture and botany in Philadelphia. He was interested in the history of Philadelphia gardens, and frequently included bits of Bartram history in the periodicals he edited — The Gardener’s Monthly and later Meehan’s Monthly. Meehan had also frequently brought local and national visitors to the garden. Beginning in 1881 Meehan and Charles S. Sargent, Professor of Arboriculture at Harvard and Director of the Arnold Arboretum organized a group of Philadelphians to purchase the botanic garden from the Eastwick estate by subscription. But the executors of the Eastwick estate withdrew from negotiations and Meehan turned to a political effort to preserve Bartram’s Garden. Meehan entered Philadelphia politics and was elected to the Common Council in 1883, in part with the goal to preserve Bartram’s Garden under city ownership and establish other small parks throughout Philadelphia. By a series of gradual steps from 1884-1891 Meehan succeeded in passing ordinances that allowed the city to take property for parks, and Bartram’s was one of the first parks protected. There was considerable coverage of the political fight to allow for these new city parks and the Philadelphia newspapers of the 1880s and early 1890s are full of articles for and against. The opening of the Bartram Park to the public in March 1891 saw many long, illustrated articles on the new park. Sargent in the pages of his weekly periodical Garden and Forest, a trade paper published in New York dedicated to the business of horticulture and forestry, and environmental preservation also covered the efforts to protect the old Bartram garden in the 1880s and early 1890s.

As with the 1860 “Bartram Tribute,” the story of the faithful freed slave became one of the standard historic facts recited at the garden. There was little or no public interpretation at the house or garden for the first decade of the city park, and the Bartram house was initially closed to the public. It was only opened to the public for a short while ca. 1899-1905, only to be closed again until 1926. The physical grave site at the riverfront was something to see in the early park. The initial 11-acre park, preserved at Bartram’s Garden in 1891 did not actually include the grave site, which sat in the proposed roadbed location of 54th Street on the city plan. At the end of 1896, following a fire that damaged the Eastwick mansion, the city acquired an additional 16 acres which encompassed all the historic botanic garden and the grave site. Early 20th century maps of the city-owned park at Bartram’s Garden plot a rectangle as the location of “Harvey’s Grave” at the southeast corner of the historic botanic garden. The plotted location appears in maps from the Bureau of Surveys and from the Fairmount Park Commission into the middle of the 20th century.

The earliest printed guides of Bartram’s Garden, issued by the John Bartram Association were published in three slightly different editions in 1904, 1907, and 1915. Two different sketch maps with numbered locations were printed — first a simple plan in 1904 largely confined to the area of the 1891 park with 26 numbered trees or locations. Then a much larger map in 1907 with 48 numbered locations was issued and reprinted in 1915. All three of these early guides used similar and familiar text to recount John Bartram freeing his slaves, paraphrasing Crèvecoeur:

Like a true Quaker, he ‘set his negroes free, paid them eighteen pounds a year wages, taught them to read and write, sat with them at table, and took them with him to Quaker meeting; one of his negroes was his steward and man of business, who went to market, sold the produce, and transacted all the business of the farm and family in Philadelphia.’ This faithful servant’s grave is where it should be, — in his master’s Garden.[10]

And the maps in all three versions list “Harvey’s Grave.” at a marked location at the southeast corner of the plan of the garden. Two later updated version of the guide to the garden by Emily Cheston in 1938 and 1953 included no plan, but mention the grave site as an item of interest near the river. “The grave of Harvey — the negro steward to whom Bartram entrusted much of his business, marked by a wooden sign.” was included in 1938 and in 1953 the mention of a marker was removed.[11]

Aside from maps, plans, and guides to the early park at Bartram’s Garden, fanciful images of faithful slave “Harvey” appeared in newspapers, advertisements, and even a calendar from the 1920s to 1950s.

Media images of “Harvey” included a radio play in 1937, part of the DuPont Cavalcade of America, on the CBS radio network. The third Season, Nov. 10, 1937 included the radio drama, “No. 103: John Bartram’s Garden.” Voice actors and an orchestra recreated John and his wife Ann Bartram, and a particularly horrible racist caricature of “Harvey.” The script for this play relied heavily on Crèvecoeur’s dialogue for Bartram from the 1782 Letters of an American Farmer.[12]

It remains difficult to pull apart fact from fiction in the account of the “excellent young African” and the Bartram family’s relations with slavery. But the limited concrete documents, mainly tax records and census records do record a real, if limited Free Black presence at Bartram’s Garden by the end of the 18th century. That single Black individual recorded in the 1790 census might be “Harvey,” but “Harvey” might also be something of a myth? But again the facts of the U.S. census from 1820-1840 do indicate what looks like a small Free Black family living in the Bartram household with the Bartram family. Continued research and local genealogy may someday track down some names for those individuals. “Harvey’s Grave” has not been marked now for almost 70 years, and perhaps should be. While there is no proof the name or the grave site is accurate, if not mythical, it is a plausible story. And it is a physical place to commemorate the early Black history of Kingessing

Notes

[1] The primary editions of the Bartram correspondence are: The Correspondence of John Bartram 1734- 1777, edited by Edmund Berkeley, and Dorothy Smith Berkeley (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992); and William Bartram, The Search for Nature’s Design: Selected Art, Letters, and Unpublished Writings, edited by Thomas Hallock and Nancy E. Hoffmann (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010).

[2] William Bartram’ anonymous account of his father, “BARTRAM, (JOHN),” in Supplement to the Encylcopædia, or Dictionary of Art, Sciences, and Miscellaneous Literature. vol. 1, Printed by Budd and Bartram for Thomas Dobson, Philadelphia 1800, p. 91-92. While only a single burial was every noted at the site, it is possible a small group or family plot for burials was located there. Late-19th c. photos of the site show a single marked burial.

[3] John Bartram only reconnected in 1760 with his half-brother William Bartram (1711-1770) and family of Ashwood plantation on the Cape Fear River in NC, after a long period of no contact. In 1761 the two half-brothers John and William exchanged sons (both also named William) for education and experience. William Bartram of Philadelphia went south to live with his uncle on the Cape Fear and William Bartram (d. 1770) of Ashwood, NC came north to study medicine and the apothecary business in Philadelphia.

[4] Tenth 18 d provincial tax (1767); twelfth 18d provincial tax (1769), and seventeenth 18d provincial tax (1774). In 1767, George Gray who owned the Lower Ferry property just north of the Bartram farms was taxed for “1 Servant” and “6 Negroes” and his father-in-law James Coultas of Whitby Hall in Kingsessing owned “4 Negros” and “2 Servants.”

[5] The name “Harvey” first appeared in an eight-page newspaper printed for a fundraising event at the St. James Kingsessing church in 1860, on a list of “Garden Relics and Reminiscences” at the end of the paper. There were Bartram descendants (4th or 5th generation from John Bartram) in the neighborhood, but there is no evidence who provided the name. The Bartram Tribute. Published as an Auxiliary Aid to the purposes of the festival given by the Ladies of St. James Episcopal Church, “Bartram Garden,” Kingsessing, June 13 & 14, 1860. Philadelphia.

[6] The major 19th century source for the biography of John and William Bartram and history of Bartram’s Garden was William Darlington’s Memorials of John Bartram and Humphry Marshall, Philadelphia: 1849. Darlington edited a selection of the letters of the Bartrams and Marshall and included a “Biographical Sketch of John Bartram” which largely quoted from and enlarged William Bartram’s 1804 account of his father, including the mention of John Bartram freeing a slave. Darlington also reprinted the text of the full text of Crèvecoeur’s 1782 “Letter IX, From Iwan Alexiowitz…,” Letters from an American Farmer (London, 1782).

[7] Howard Pyle, “Bartram and His Garden.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, vol. 60, no. 357 (Feb. 1880), p. 321-330. This was one of Pyle’s first nationally distributed pieces and Pyle used himself as the model for John Bartram in his drawings.

[8] Pyle, p. 326

[9] Pyle, p. 329. There is a dark face with a kerchief in the center rear of this illustration as well, which could be taken for a stereotyped “mammy” character as well, although not mentioned in any of Pyle’s text. The fact that Pyle mentions the marked grave site, but no name, suggests there was no name or the name was illegible on the small marble headstone and footstone at the grave site.

[10] Elisabeth O. Abbot, Bartram’s Garden, Philadelphia, Pa. John Bartram. The John Bartram Association, Philadelphia: (March 1904); Re-issued with New Plan (August 1907); Third edition (1915). The quote is from the first edition (March 1904), p. 12.

[11] Emily Read Cheston, John Bartram, 1699-1777, His Garden and House William Bartram 1739-1823. The John Bartram Association, Philadelphia: 1938; 2nd edition, revised 1953. The last wooden marker for the grave site seems to have vanished in the 1940s

[12] The Nov. 10, 1937 radio play has been digitized and is available at this link: No. 103 –https://archive.org/details/OTRR_Cavalcade_of_America_Singles/CALV_371110_108_John_Bartra ms_Garden.mp3.

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