
          DEBORAH GRISC0M PASSMORE,
Botanical Artist.
Born, 1840 - Died, 1911.

In Delaware County, Pennsylvania, on an ancestral homestead called Edgemont, in a big stone house of local quarry,
there came on a radiant summer day when the brambles were loaded with fruit and the harvest was golden—to be exact, on July
17, 1840—a daughter with strong, snapping black eyes, the fifth and last child of Everett Griscom and Elizabeth Knight
Passmore.

Tradition says that one of her ancestors, an admiral, came to England with William the Conqueror in 1066, and there
is a folk-lore story in the family that the name of Passmore originated when a member of his family was cup-bearer to the King,
and being a jolly, good fellow was called "Pass more".

Records show that Thomas Passmore, in 1610, had a son, William, who married Margery Bell and whose son, John, came to
America in 1715.  He married Mary Buxey, and was Miss Passmore’s great grandfather.

Augustine Passmore married Hannah Howard, a great granddaughter of John Sharpless of Blackinhall, Cheshire, England;
the wife died in 1774.  Some of the Howard silver is still in the Passmore family.  Their son, Richard, married Deborah
Griscom, the grandmother for whom Miss Passmore was named. The Passmores were blond, fair-haired Normans; it was from the
"black Griscoms" that Deborah inherited her keen eyes, raven hair, dark complexion, force of character, and intensity of
purpose.

She was much younger than her sisters, two boys coming between. Her brother, Thomas Knight, was her playmate, and,
although trained with a boy, she was a most sensitive child. One day, unfortunately, she overheard her sisters discussing the
traits and personal appearances of different members of the family and heard them say "Deborah will be the plainest one in the
entire family." This so impressed the high-spirited child that, until the day of her death, nothing could make Miss Passmore
believe she was not painfully plain. Again and again have I heard her say it was nothing short of cruel to tell a child that
it was ugly, for it left a rigid scar on its memory.  As regards her plainness, she was wrong, for her personality had a
distinction unusual and more attractive than mere good looks. She admired blondes extravagantly, and never saw rosy cheeks
without enthusiasm.

When Deborah was a mere baby, about the time Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her colleagues called that first convention for
woman’s freedom in America, even before the Fugitive Slave Law had passed, when all was peace and quiet on the Potomac and elsewhere, she pulled over her sister Mary’s paint box and getting the brushes, put them into her mouth; this was the beginning of
her interest in materials artistic.

Her mother was carried away by typhoid fever when Deborah was a tiny tot, and blue-eyed, gentle, artistic, and poetic
sister Mary gave up her career and took the place of mother to the little highstrung Deborah, who often sat in the very wide
window sills of the old stone house trying to draw and paint flowers with their own juices, which she extracted by chewing.

Thus she grew into a strong healthy girl in the freedom and sunshine of the country, an asset and not a liability for her family,
helping her father gain the reputation of selling the best butter in Philadelphia.  She always felt a sort of pity for a girl
not born and raised on a farm, who did not know the joy of going to a picturesque springhouse for cold milk.

The family always belonged to the orthodox branch of the Society of Friends, and Deborah’s mother was, before her
marriage, a teacher at Westtown Boarding School, and later she became a preacher for the orthodox Friends. Deborah was always
intensely religious, and was deeply grieved if she saw any woman do so unholy a thing as to sew on Sunday.

Edgemont lay on the road between Philadelphia and Westtown, and parents and pupils coming to and from the academy found
a welcome resting place with their sometime teacher and preacher; therefore, Deborah’s mind turned naturally toward teaching as
a profession.
        