Background
Gotthilf Heinrich Ernst Mühlenberg was born on November 17, 1753, at Trappe, Pennsylvania, the fifth child and third son of Henry Melchior Mühlenberg and Anna Maria Weiser.
Gotthilf Heinrich Ernst Mühlenberg was born on November 17, 1753, at Trappe, Pennsylvania, the fifth child and third son of Henry Melchior Mühlenberg and Anna Maria Weiser.
Accompanied by his brothers, John Peter Gabriel and Frederick Augustus Conrad Mühlenberg, he was sent to Germany in April 1763 to be educated at Halle. There he spent six years in the Waisenhaus, mastering Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and French, and exhibiting at times a spirit as fiery as that of his brother Peter.
In September 1769 Mühlenberg matriculated at the University, and a year later, with Frederick and their future brother-in-law, John Christopher Kunze, he returned to Philadelphia.
Though Mühlenberg was still a stripling, the members of the Lutheran Ministerium of Pennsylvania were so impressed by his scholarship and had such faith in the Mühlenberg name that they ordained him at Reading, October 25, 1770, with but slight misgiving.
For the next few years he was his father's assistant at Philadelphia and in the Raritan Valley in New Jersey, and in April 1774 he was elected third pastor at Philadelphia.
As the British forces approached Philadelphia, he sent his family to his father's house at New Providence (Trappe), and on September 22, 1777, four days before the occupation, he himself retired thither. After the British withdrawal in June 1778 he returned. In April 1779, as the upshot of a misunderstanding with Kunze, he resigned abruptly.
The next year Mühlenberg succeeded J. H. C. Helmuth as pastor of Holy Trinity, Lancaster, where he remained till his death thirty-five years later. He was secretary of the Ministerium of Pennsylvania for six terms and president for eleven. He was the first president (1787) of Franklin College.
Mühlenberg began the study of botany in the spring of 1778 during his enforced rustication and was an accomplished botanist when Johann David Schöpf visited him in 1783. Schöpf gave him confidence in the soundness and value of his work and brought him into correspondence with various European botanists. Thereafter Mühlenberg exchanged letters and specimens with scientists in England, France, Switzerland, Germany, and Sweden, and was elected to honorary membership in several learned societies. In his own country he was even better known.
Mühlenberg did as much field work as his arduous professional duties would permit, kept a calendar of the flowering plants of his neighborhood, and by 1791 had listed more than 1, 100 plants growing within three miles of Lancaster. In the precision and accuracy of his descriptions, his scrupulous regard for correct nomenclature, his aversion to splitting species into numerous varieties on the basis of minute variations, and his recognition of the necessity for collaborative effort in compiling a complete flora of North America, he was a true forerunner of Torrey and Gray. He also gave much attention to the economic and medicinal uses of plants.
His total contribution to descriptive botany - some hundred species and varieties - is the more remarkable because of the restricted area that he explored personally.
In later life Mühlenberg suffered repeated apoplectic attacks, to which he finally succumbed on May 23, 1815. He was buried in his churchyard at Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
A representative both of the later phase of German Pietism and of the Enlightenment, Gotthilf Mühlenberg was a man of exemplary character and great personal charm. In his prime he had a strong body and enjoyed traveling on foot between Lancaster and Philadelphia, a distance of more than sixty miles.
On July 26. 1774, Gotthilf Heinrich Ernst Mühlenberg married Mary Catharine Hall of Philadelphia, who bore him four sons and four daughters.