Humphry Marshall, Father of American Dendrology

On West Strasburg Road in Chester County stood the home of Humphry Marshall, a largely self-taught Quaker botanist who became one of the most important naturalists in early American history. In seventeen eighty-five Marshall published Arbustum Americanum: The American Grove, the first book devoted entirely to North American trees and shrubs written by an American author, earning him the title Father of American Dendrology. European horticulture was hungry for knowledge of species from the New World, and Marshall sent plants and seeds to correspondents across Europe, and his book was later translated into French and German. His cousin was the botanist John Bartram, and between them the two men placed Chester County at the center of the eighteenth-century scientific exchange between America and Europe.