Victoria Johnson

Victoria Johnson’s Research Takes Her to the LuEsther T. Mertz Library

Posted in Humanities Institute on May 31 2019, by Plant Talk

Victoria Johnson, Associate Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at Hunter College, studied at The New York Botanical Garden’s Humanities Institute during the summer of 2016 as a Mellon Visiting Scholar, sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Dr. Johnson conducted research for her biography of David Hosack (1769-1835), an American doctor best known today as the attending physician at the July 1804 duel between his friends Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. In 1801, Hosack founded the Elgin Botanic Garden, a pioneering medical research garden where he amassed thousands of native and non-native species and trained a generation of doctors and botanists. His former land is now the site of Rockefeller Center.

In her research at the LuEsther T. Mertz Library and Archives, Dr. Johnson drew on primary sources connected with Hosack’s life and work, including plant catalogues from the Elgin Botanic Garden and botanical treatises Hosack had brought back from his studies in Britain as a young doctor. She also studied archival sources connected with Hosack’s botany students as well as dried plant specimens collected for the Elgin Botanic Garden by Hosack and his students (held today by the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium).

Dr. Johnson’s work was published in 2018 as American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic (Liveright/W. W. Norton, 2018). The book was named a Notable Book of 2018 by the New York Times and was one of five finalists for the 2018 National Book Award in Nonfiction. For more information, see americaneden.org.

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Eden of the Republic: The Rise, Fall, and Legacy of David Hosack’s Elgin Botanic Garden

Posted in From the Library on April 26 2016, by Samantha D’Acunto

In January of this year, Victoria Johnson began a talk in the Library by taking us back in time to the shores of the New Jersey Palisades, where Alexander Hamilton fatally dueled with Aaron Burr in the year 1804. Johnson used the duel to set the stage for another interesting historical figure: Dr. David Hosack (1769–1835). A physician to both Burr and Hamilton, as it happened, Hosack was involved in the infamous duel, but his role in history goes beyond this one dramatic moment. Johnson shared her historical research to paint a passionate personal account of who Dr. David Hosack was, and to elaborate on his impact in the botanical and medical world of the early Republic.

Hosack was the founder of the first medical botanical garden in the American Republic, known as the Elgin Botanic Garden. Erected on 5th Avenue between 47th and 51st street in the year 1801, it roughly spanned the area where Rockefeller Center stands today. After a decade of effort, Hosack assembled a collection containing more than 1,500 species of plants, among which were materials collected from the Louisiana Purchase during the famous Lewis and Clark expedition. Plants from all over the world were represented at Hosack’s garden. Young medical students from Columbia College were able to study the garden’s resources for a hands-on understanding of the plants’ healing properties. Though short-lived, the research done at this garden would pave the way for famous 19th-century botanists such as Amos Eaton, John Torrey, and Asa Gray.

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