Background
Charles Wright was born on October 29, 1811, in Wethersfield, Connecticut, the son of James Wright and Mary Goodrich, and a descendant of Thomas Wright, who emigrated from England in 1635 and later settled in Wethersfield.
Charles Wright was born on October 29, 1811, in Wethersfield, Connecticut, the son of James Wright and Mary Goodrich, and a descendant of Thomas Wright, who emigrated from England in 1635 and later settled in Wethersfield.
After attending the Wethersfield grammar school, he entered Yale College, from which he graduated, with Phi Beta Kappa honors, in 1835. Interested in botany from early youth, he cultivated his favorite science during his college days; he seems never to have had a teacher in the subject.
Almost immediately after his graduation from Yale, he accepted a position as tutor to the children of a wealthy planter at Natchez, Mississippi, a position lost a year later as the result of the ruin of his employer in the financial stringencies of 1836-1837. Like many others Wright fled to Texas from the panic of 1837. From 1837 to 1845 he followed the practice of surveying and of teaching school at various places in eastern Texas, and explored the hitherto unknown botany of that region. A collection of dried plants he sent to Prof. Asa Gray of Harvard College in the spring of 1844 opened a correspondence destined to have important results for American botany. He moved in 1845 from eastern to central Texas, and taught school for a number of years there, for one year at the short-lived Rutersville College, and for longer periods as private tutor or schoolmaster. He continued, meanwhile, his botanical study and correspondence with Gray. In the summer of 1849, he accompanied a battalion of United States troops from San Antonio to El Paso, collecting plants all the way. The collections proved to be rich in new species; many of these were published in Part I of Gray's "Plantæ Wrightianæ" (Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, vol. III, 1852). After another year of teaching in central Texas, Wright was associated, from the spring of 1851 to the summer of 1852, with the United States and Mexican boundary survey as botanist. His extensive collections, made this time largely in New Mexico and Arizona, were studied by Gray, and the new species described in Part II of the "Plantæ Wrightianæ" (Ibid. , vol. V, 1853), and in the Botany of the Mexican Boundary Survey (1859). In the summer of 1852 Wright left Texas never to return. He received appointment, shortly, as botanist to the North Pacific Exploring and Surveying Expedition under John Rodgers and Cadwalader Ringgold, and accompanied the expedition from June 1853 to the spring of 1856. He made notable collections of plants at the Cape of Good Hope, Hongkong, the Loo Choo Islands, and in Japan. Returning to America in the fall of 1856, he began the botanical exploration of the isle of Cuba, a task that continued, with interruptions, until July 1867. His Cuban collections, with their numerous new species in all classes of plants, were described in various works by A. H. R. Grisebach, W. S. Sullivant, D. C. Eaton, P. F. Müller, M. J. Berkeley, and M. A. Curtis. With the completion of this notable work Wright's active career as an explorer may be said to have come to an end. During Gray's absence in Europe in 1868, Wright acted as curator of the herbarium at Cambridge, and for six months during the winter of 1875-1876 he was librarian of the Bussey Institution. The last ten years of Wright's life were spent in quiet retirement at Wethersfield. In this locality he collected so assiduously that it is now extremely difficult for botanists to collect plant species not previously reported by him.
Charles Wright died on August 11, 1885, at Wethersfield, of heart failure.
Quotes from others about the person
Charles Wright was a "person of low stature and well-knit frame, hardy rather than strong, scrupulously temperate, a man of simple ways, always modest and unpretending, but direct and downright in expression, most amiable, trusty and religious" (Asa Gray).
Charles Wright never married and did not have children.