dressed people!" Certainly the Garden Club in 1919 found our 
hosts of the James River to come up to Peter 's encomium. 
In 1737 also his "curious letter" contains so many fine 
remarks that it is read before the Royal Society and in 1763 
Peter writes, "Think, my dear John, with what amazement and 
delight I, with Doctor Solander, surveyed the quire of specimens. 
He thinks near half are new genera. This will enrich the 
fountain of knowledge." 
For a hundred .years the Garden was in Bartram hands. 
Later came a period of neglect and the threat that the city 
would encroach upon it to its extinction. Happily the city has 
since purchased it for a public park. What is left in the garden 
now? Some of the finest specimens are dead. The Maple, the 
Pecan, the Christ's thorn and the Cypress, giant of all. It 
grew to be 150 feet high and 27 feet in circumference.* 
Much of charm remains. The Lady Petre pear tree by the 
house bore in its 144th year. John Bartram called it the ' ' finest 
relished fruit. I think a better is not in the world." Of the 
Box trees Mr. Meehan wrote in 1853, "the specimens excel any- 
thing in beauty I have seen in its native Box-hill in England." 
He could not say so now. 
The stone water trough is a tribute to the patient labor of 
those days. As is also the cider press chiseled in the living rock 
on the river's bank. Its circles and grooves recall the Bible 
pictures of our youth. The old house contains eighteen rooms. 
John Bartram added to it at various times and tells us that he 
huilt with his own hands, but the carved stone architraves of 
the four windows in the Georgian style were surely cut by no 
novice. Over one of them is carved his simple creed, "It is 
God alone Almighty Lord, the Holy one by me Ador'ed." On 
the west side are the names John and Ann Bartram, 1731. 
The furniture is none of it the original but is in the 
mahogany designs of the period. Ann at her dough-trough may 
have been thinking of the recipe Peter Collinson had sent for 
an almond pie " the almond makes a fine pie taken whilst 
.a pin can be run through them, for you eat husk, shell and kernel 
altogether. They must be first coddled over a gentle fire and 
then put in crust." 
She must have rejoiced over her numberless closets and may 
have kept the blue china tea-cups that Benjamin Franklin gave 
her in the little mantel closet in the sitting room. Of his 
Franklin stove, only the casting that it stood on remains. 
It is the man himself, what he was, that dominates our 
interest beyond either his house or his garden. Against such 
odds how was it possible to accomplish so much? 
His wheat crops challenge the farmer of today. He fertilized 
liis orchard in an ingenious way that was a miracle of husbandry. 
He delineated a plan for deep sea soundings more than a 
