Charles Eliot Ware

Charles Eliot Ware (May 7, 1814 – September 3, 1887) was a prominent Boston physician and the husband of Elizabeth Cabot Lee, their daughter being Mary Lee Ware. It is to him that the Harvard Museum of Natural History's famous Glass Flowers exhibit is dedicated to as a memorial, his wife and daughter being the sponsors of the project. Dr. Ware was also a close friend of John Holmes, the younger brother of Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Son of Henry Ware (1764–1845), Dr. Charles Eliot Ware married the wealthy Elizabeth Cabot Lee (from then on Elizabeth C. Ware) on November 20, 1854; and, in 1858, their daughter Mary was born in the town of Rindge, New Hampshire (reports/sources vary regarding the existence, with the bare majority suggesting it, of Dr. Charles Eliot Ware having an older son named Charles Jr). While not a botanist himself, Dr. Ware and his wife raised Mary to love botany with a passion and live according to the precept "It is more blessed to give than to receive," taking her to Italy as young girl and nurturing her love of beauty both natural and human made (i.e. picturesque landscape and the arts). Then, in 1868, Charles E. Ware bought what would become the Ware Farm in Ware Farm from a Joseph Davis and Dorestos Armory for $3000 – the place having 450 total acres, 21.5 dedicated to pasture land with another 56.5 for cultivation. This farm would serve as his wife and daughter's later home and would always stand out happily among Mary's childhood memories.

Seasonal residents (and farmers) of Rindge, Charles Eliot Ware and his family also kept a home at Boston, 41 Brimmer Street (Back Bay) and, eventually, they would send their daughter to Radcliffe College where she learned under Professor George Lincoln Goodale - who would become the first director of the Harvard Botanical Museum. In fact, "Mary Ware, an especially fascinating character, became in many respects a professional naturalist," a role which she was later able to utilize by being the patron sponsor of the Glass Flowers, her purpose being to advance the education of women.

Harvard class of 1834, Charles Eliot Ware received a Doctor of Medicine degree three years later in 1837 and founded a large private practice which he actively maintained for years until his health began to fail him. For the next decade Dr. Ware served as "one of the visiting physicians to the Massachusetts General Hospital, and on his resignation, in 1867, was appointed on the Consulting Staff." In 1842, Ware, along with Dr. Samuel Parkman, founded the New England Quarterly Journal of Medicine, but the journal was canceled due to lack of support after a single year.

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