Graceanna Lewis, Naturalist and Abolitionist

Graceanna Lewis was born in eighteen twenty-one near Kimberton and became one of the most accomplished female naturalists of nineteenth-century America. Self-taught in botany and zoology, she produced an intricate Chart of the Animal Kingdom that she exhibited at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in eighteen seventy-six and later won a medal at the Columbian Exposition and showed her work at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition.

She was also a Quaker abolitionist who did not keep her convictions at arm's length. Her family's farm near here served as a station on the Underground Railroad, sheltering freedom seekers traveling north through Chester County. Lewis showed that science and moral courage could occupy the same life, decades before most institutions would accept women in either role. She continued her research and writing well into her eighties, dying in nineteen twelve.