Asa Gray, the Sauquoit boy who became the country’s great botanist
Born in Sauquoit in 1810, Gray read his way through the Hamilton College library as a teenager and became Darwin's leading American ally.
By Tom Brezinski
Asa Gray was born in Sauquoit, a few miles south of Clinton, on Nov. 18, 1810.
He went to the Clinton Grammar School from about 1823 to 1825, and in those years he read widely from the library at nearby Hamilton College. He went on to medical school, but plants were what held his attention.
In 1832 he was hired to teach chemistry, mineralogy and botany at Bartlett’s High School in Utica and at Fairfield Medical School. After that he became an assistant to the botanist John Torrey in New York City, and in 1834 he held a temporary teaching post at Hamilton.
Gray spent decades as professor of botany at Harvard and is regarded as the most important American botanist of the 19th century. He corresponded with Charles Darwin, who thought highly of him, and Gray was one of Darwin’s strongest supporters in the United States. His book “Darwiniana” (1876) argued that religion and science did not have to be at odds.
Hamilton gave him an honorary doctor of laws in 1860. He died on Jan. 30, 1888.