Kate Furbish, a young botanist from Brunswick, Maine explored the St. John River in the summer of 1880. Scrambling up and down the steep banks, she found a flower that she did not recognize. She sent a plant to Dr. Sereno Watson at Harvard University. He confirmed that it was a new species and named it in Kate's honor. Originally it was known as "Miss Furbish's wood betony". The plant created a lot of excitement at first, but eventually interest in it declined, and in fact it was considered extinct. In 1976 it was rediscovered by Dr. Charles D. Richards...
botanist = a person who studies plants
From North County Press "Furbish Lousewort" September 13, 1999 by Gale Flagg http://www.northcountypress.com/I99-9-13/a0000003.htm
Catherine Furbish, born in Exeter, New Hampshire on 19 May 1834, and
grew up in Brunswick, Maine. She attended a series of lectures on
botany in Boston, and later took courses in drawing in Portland,
Maine. All of this prepared her for her life's avocation,
collecting, painting and classifying the flora of Maine. Kate
discovered the Furbish lousewort in 1880 in a remote area by
the Saint John River. The Furbish lousewort is a member of the
Snapdragon family, of the genus pediculus which means a louse. Years
ago farmers thought that when their cattle fed on these plants they
became infested with lice hence lousewort. She took the plant and
sent it to Harvard, and the botanist there who was in charge decided
it was a new species and named it in her honor.
The St. John River area is still the only place in the world where this particular species of plant grows.
From "Furbish Famly Tidbits"
http://users.abac.cim/elfurb/Tidbits
One woman who did travel from southern Maine to Aroostook County was renowned botanist Kate Furbish. In 1881, she wrote in her diary:
"The country was a vast wilderness. The driver of the stage said that there were probably no houses west of the road until one reached Canada. The road itself was alarming because recent "repair" work had left ditches as deep as ravines on both sides. There were fine views of Mount Katahdin, and long stretches through dense forests where silence itself seemed the only presence."
Source: Excerpt from Furbish diary printed in Kate Furbish and the Flora of Maine, by Ada Graham and Frank Graham, Jr. Gardiner, ME: Tilbury House Publishers. 1995.
Maine Public Broadcasting: The Story of Maine Program 6: "Trails, Rails and Roads" MPBC
Kate Furbish and the Flora of Maine, by Ada Graham and Frank Graham, Jr. Gardiner, ME: Tilbury House Publishers. 1995.
Review by Margaret Todd Maitland
A careully painted violet, roots and all, adorns the cover of this book on the life and work of Kate Furbish, a nineteenth-century amateur botanist and painter who spent her life cataloguing and collecting the wild plants of Maine. Her beautiful watercolors of cow parsnip and twin flower, wild raspberry and sow thistle (there are 32 color plates, 100 black andwhite) have an American straightforwardness (as opposed to the more elegant botanicalillustrations of her European contemporaries). The text gives an account of an unusual, determined woman at a time when it was possible to be simultaneously an artist and a scientist.
Sierra Club History of Women and the Environment -- Slide Show
One of these women [who were important to the environmental movement] was Kate Furbish. She lived most of her life in Brunswick, Maine and was a self-taught botanist and artist. She combined the two interests by collecting and painting what she saw with watercolor. She profiled trees, grasses and flowers in different stages of growth in a collection of albums now preserved at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Kate Furbish's expertise and superior technique granted her entrance into a larger society of university level botanists from Harvard College and around the country. She was a part of a national interest in understanding and exploring native plants and their habitats. The scientific society awarded her when she discovered two rare species of plants, the aster called Aster cordifolius L. var. Furbishiae and a lousewort Pedicularis Furbishiae. Kate Furbish later created the Josselyn Botanical Society of Maine.
http://www.sierraclub.org/chapters/me/slideshow.htm
Also buried in Pine Grove Cemetery in Brunswick, Maine is
Catherine Furbish (1834-1931), a botanist who classified the
flora of northern New England;