William Bartram
is known by many as the first American Naturalist and is
responsible for cataloging most of the native flora in the
Southeastern United States. It is his legacy that inspired the
dedication to conservation exhibited in the Bartram Trail golf
course, which endeavors to embrace its relationship to the
environment of the lower piedmont and upper sand hills through
its development and maintenance standards, as set forth by
Audubon International.
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"When I am
travelling...I chiefly search out, not that I naturally
delight in such solitudes, but entirely to observe the
wonderful production in nature of the transformations
and transmutations."
- William Bartram
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He was born April 7, 1739, in
Kingsessing (now Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) and died there in
1822. He was the fifth son of Royal Botanist John Bartram.
Joining his father to explore the Southeast (1765-66), the
Bartrams discovered hundreds of specimens including the Venus
Fly Trap. They also found a previously undiscovered tree and
named it for Benjamin Franklin (Franklin tree or Franklinia
alatamatha). The tree is now extinct in the wild and the only
known specimens come from trees the Bartrams brought back with
them.
Among the people Bartram called friend were Benjamin Franklin,
Thomas Jefferson, and John Fothergill, an English surgeon whose
greatest contributions were in the field of botany. Fothergill,
a major inspiration for William's second trip, encouraged young
Bartram to return to the remote areas to find new specimens.
William's solo journey spanned four years beginning in 1773 and
covered parts of present-day Florida, Georgia, South Carolina
and North Carolina. Sailing to Charles Town (now Charleston)
South Carolina, he used this city as base for the next four
years. In April of 1775 he left Charleston for Augusta and
continued north from Augusta into Cherokee country. He reached
the village of Cowee Watauga (in present-day North Carolina) in
May, 1775, and returned to Savannah. In November, 1776, he
received an urgent appeal from his ailing father to return to
Philadelphia. The elder Bartram died shortly after William's
return.
During his "walk in the woods" Bartram recorded many
observations in his personal journals, diaries of a sort that
inspired many noted authors including Henry David Thoreau,
William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Brockden
Brown, James Fenimore Cooper and John Muir, founder of the
Sierra Club. He is one of the first people to whom the term
"naturalist" is applied.
In addition to the scientific aspects of the journals, William
Bartram's writing also serves as some of the earliest
descriptions of the culture of both the Cherokee and Creek
Indians. He also expresses beliefs, unusual for the time, about
man's interrelation with nature, believing that man shares
certain emotional and intellectual bonds with all living things.
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