Alvan W. Chapman
Chapman was born in 1809 in Southampton, Massachusetts. He attended Amherst College, graduating with honors in 1830 and later moving on to study medicine in 1833 and moving to Florida two years later. He studied botany in the South and is renowned for his work, The Flora of the Southern United States, published in 1865 and co-written with Daniel Cady Eaton. He died in 1899.
Chapman was grouped with other “Pioneer Botanists of the Deep South” by Ivey Lewis, and was on the original list of Twenty Early Southern Scientists that Lewis made to name the cabins. Florida’s designated cabin was named after Chapman, and he is described by Lewis and Young in an article in the Virginia Journal of Education as a “friend of Gray and Torrey, collector of the largest herbarium in the South, for fifty years the leading southern botanist, author of the first real botany text for the entire South, most distinguished of all Florida biologists.”
Eliza Brodie