Background
Thomas Walter was born in Hampshire, England, around 1740. Little is known of his family background or early life.
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Thomas Walter
Edit ProfileEducation
He evidently received a good education but no details are available.
Career
He emigrated to eastern South Carolina as a young man, acquired a plantation on the banks of the Santee River, and there passed the remainder of his life. Presumably he devoted much of his time to agriculture, though certainly also, as an avocation, to a laborious study of the vegetation of that then little-known region, a task for which he appears to have been exceedingly well equipped by temperament and liberal education. Here, completely isolated from the scientific world, he prepared in Latin a succinct descriptive treatise summarizing his studies of the flowering plants found within a radius of fifty miles of his home. The manuscript, dated December 30, 1787, was taken to England early in 1788 by his intimate friend John Fraser, on the latter's return from a long botanical tour in Georgia and the Carolinas, and was published in London that year at Fraser's expense. This book, Flora Caroliniana, is the sole record of Walter's work. It is classical not only in text but in importance, and is the first tolerably complete account of the flora of any definite portion of eastern North America in which an author used the so-called binomial system of nomenclature. In it Walter described upward of one thousand species of flowering plants from specimens collected by Fraser and himself, these representing some 435 genera. Of the former more than two hundred are described as new; of the genera thirty-two are so indicated, though only four of these are given distinctive names. Walter's herbarium, which is said to have contained originally all the species treated in the Flora, was taken to England with the manuscript and remained in the possession of the Fraser family until 1849, when it was presented to the Linnean Society of London. During the interval it had suffered serious injury and loss. It was acquired by the British Museum (Natural History) in 1863 and has since been studied by many American botanists as an aid in interpreting Walter's brief descriptions. Walter is known otherwise chiefly from his joint effort with Fraser to introduce into general cultivation in England a native Carolina grass, Agrostis perennans, from which extraordinary results were expected. This venture, interestingly set forth in a rare folio by Fraser (A Short History of the Agrostis Cornucopia: or the New American Grass, 1789), ended in dismal failure. He was buried, at his own request, in a small botanical garden which he had established on his plantation. The much-quoted inscription upon his tombstone gives the year of his death erroneously as 1788. Concerning Walter's extraction, early life, and education, and his motive in emigrating to South Carolina, nothing is known, though a good deal may be inferred.
Achievements
Works
book
Personality
He was unquestionably a sound, conservative scholar, indefatigable, modest, and of discriminating judgment, who, though living in the very midst of a singularly bitter local warfare during the Revolutionary period, was able nevertheless to produce a remarkable work of lasting scientific importance.
Connections
Walter was married three times: on March 26, 1769, to Anne Lesesne, of Daniels Island, who died September 11, 1769; on March 20, 1777, to Ann Peyre, who died in December 1780; and later, to Dorothy Cooper. Two of three daughters by his second marriage and one by his third married and left numerous descendants.
