Description:
Manuscript - Botanical description and medical, culinary and other uses of the plants in the first volume of my American Herbarium principally compiled from the latest & most approved writers on botany and materia medica by Stephen W. Williams, Deerfield, 1817. The entire herbarium is available online, see Biodiversity Heritage Library, https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/120146
The Stephen West Williams Herbarium, an important early collection of plants from western Massachusetts, is located in the Henry N. Flynt Library of Historic Deerfield. Most of the plants in the herbarium were collected between 1816 and 1818 in Deerfield, Franklin County, Massachusetts. The 390-page herbarium contains 556 specimens representing 453 species, 74% of which are native and 26% introduced. Eight of the native species in the herbarium are now considered rare in Massachusetts. Reflecting Williams' interest, about half the specimens in the collection had a medicinal use. Intensive floristic surveys in Deerfield between 1944 and 2015 failed to find 64 (14%) of the species collected by Williams, including about 4% of the native and 42% of the introduced species. The specimens establish a pre-1820 date for the presence of at least 90 introduced species that are currently considered naturalized in Massachusetts. The collection also provides documentation for 34% of the vascular plants in Edward Hitchcock's 1829 “Catalog of Plants Growing without Cultivation in the Vicinity of Amherst College,” the first flora for the Connecticut River Valley of Massachusetts. The accompanying manuscript contains paintings and calligraphic lettering done by Stephen West Williams' wife, Harriet Goodhue Williams. More information on the herbarium and manuscript can be found in an article by Jeanne Solensky, "Medical Botany in the Connecticut River Valley," Historic Deerfield Magazine, August 2021, 14-19.
Subjects:
Watercolor painting Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+59.153 |
