Edward Lewis Sturtevant
| E. Lewis Sturtevant | |
|---|---|
| Born |
January 23, 1842 Boston, Massachusetts |
| Died | July 30, 1898 (aged 56) South Framingham, Massachusetts |
| Nationality | United States |
| Fields | agronomy, botany |
| Author abbrev. (botany) | Sturtev. |
| Spouses | Mary Elizabeth (Mann) Sturtevant Hattie (Mann) Sturtevant |
| Children | Grace, Robert, 3 others |
Edward Lewis Sturtevant (January 23, 1842 – July 30, 1898) was an American agronomist and botanist who wrote Sturtevant's Edible Plants of the World. An enormously prolific author, he was considered one of the giants of American agricultural science in his own time.
E. Lewis Sturtevant was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 23, 1842, to Lewis W. Sturtevant (descendant of a family of Puritan ancestry) and Mary Haight (Legett) Sturtevant. Through a common ancestor, Samuel Sturtevant, who emigrated from England to America in the 1640s, he is a distant cousin of the geneticist Alfred Henry Sturtevant. While still a youth, his parents died, and Lewis was raised by an aunt. In 1859 he entered Bowdoin College but left before completing his degree to join the Union Army when the American Civil War broke out in 1861. He served in the 74th Regiment of Maine Volunteers as a captain but was invalided out due to a combined attack of typhoid and malaria in 1863. He afterwards received both a B.A. and an M.A. from Bowdoin, where he had developed good fluency in Greek, Latin, French, and German. He went on to Harvard Medical School, from which he graduated in 1866, though he never actually followed the profession of medecine.
In 1864 he married Mary Elizabeth Mann, with whom he had four children, Harriett (also known as Hattie), Edward, Thomas, and Grace, who went on to become a noted iris breeder. Both Grace and her mother had artistic talent and illustrated some of Lewis's scientific papers on corn (Mary Elizabeth) and peppers and sweet potatoes (Grace). Mary Elizabeth died in 1875 and Lewis married again, to her sister Hattie. The son from this second marriage, Robert Sturtevant, was a landscape architect who was close to his half-sister Grace and worked with her on plant breeding.
In 1867, with his brothers Thomas and Joseph, Sturtevant founded "Waushakum Farm" in South Framingham, Massachusetts. The farm was used for various agricultural experiments; one of the first enterprises of the Sturtevant brothers was the development of a model dairy farm featuring Ayrshire cattle. The monograph they published on this work in 1875 led to the establishment of a regular publication, the North American Ayrshire Register, a work that was still being consulted by Ayrshire breeders at least a generation after Lewis's death.
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