Page 27 - The Hunt - Spring 2022

Indians. He lived there until his death in 1767 at age 98. Of Abraham and Mary’s nine children, Humphry was the eighth, born at what the family called Derbydown on Northbrook Road. Today, much of the original acreage is a horse farm known as Castle Rock.
Married twice (first to Sarah Pennock in 1748), Humphry Marshall never had children. Upon his father’s death, he inherited the family estate and later bought his own land, expanding his collection of plantings through personal exploration, transatlantic correspondence and mutually beneficial botanical exchanges. He also commissioned friends and relatives to collect plants and seeds during their travels. For years, Marshall provided seeds and plants to clients
in England, Scotland, France, Italy, Brussels, Holland and Germany, sometimes in exchange for scientific instruments. Plants from his nursery graced the gardens of King George III of England and King Louis XVI of France. He also supplied Chester County neighbors and typically wealthy friends in Lancaster and Philadelphia.
The boom in Marshall’s botanical business owed much to his 1785 work, Arbustum Americanum: The American Grove, or, An Alphabetical Catalogue of Forest Trees and Shrubs, the first American imprint on the topic. Dedicated to Ben Franklin, it was more of a hit internationally, selling only about a dozen
copies here the first three months. Marshall intended it to also serve as a commercial catalogue, noting in its introduction, “The foreigner, curious in American collections, will be hereby better enabled to make a selection suitable to his own particular fancy.”
The book concluded with a full-page ad for Marshall’s “BOXES of SEEDS, and growing PLANTS, of the FOREST TREES, FLOWERING SHRUBS, &c. of the American United States.”
Marshall hoped to spur additional research
here, encouraging the organization of a scientific expedition to the West. Not coincidentally, his live-in nephew and assistant, Moses Marshall, was approached by Caspar Wistar and Thomas Jefferson to undertake a trip to the Pacific. It would’ve been a 20-year precursor to the Lewis and Clark expedition from 1803 to 1805—but it never happened. Moses, a physician, continued to honor requests for plants after his uncle’s death, though he lost interest in maintaining the garden, busying himself as a local justice of the peace. By the time of his death in 1813, the garden was in ruins.
(Above) A low-key memorial to the town’s esteemed founder.
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