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About Dr. John “the Botanist” Clayton
John Clayton (1694/5–1773) was an Anglican minister in and for decades clerk for Gloucester County in the Colony of Virginia who is today best known as a plant collector and botanist. He may be confused with several distant family members, including Rev. John Clayton who served as minister at Jamestown (1682-1684) and conducted various scientific experiments, before returning to England (although his papers and specimens were lost at sea during that voyage).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Clayton_%28botanist%29
This John Clayton was born in England and is believed to have moved to Virginia around 1715 with his father, also named John Clayton, who later served as one of the Attorneys General for colonial Virginia.[3]
Rev. Clayton married Elizabeth Whiting, granddaughter of Peter Beverley. His final will names three daughters (Mary, Catherine and Lucy) and five sons, as well as granddaughters and grandsons. The most distinguished of them was William Clayton, who served for decades as clerk of the New Kent County court as well as a burgess, the first session of the Virginia House of Delegates and on the Virginia Ratifying Convention.[1] This man's daughter Mary married Patrick Henry and his son Jasper Clayton (d. 1779) died in the American Revolutionary War. His son Robert and another daughter Mary also died before their father. Other brothers were John Clayton (the eldest), and Thomas Clayton.[4] James William Clayton served as the Hanover County clerk from 1720 to 1735.[5]
Family
http://familytreemaker.genealogy.com/users/b/r/o/Stephanie-A-Broyle...
John Clayton (son of John Clayton and Anne Page)994, 994, 994, 994 was born 1685 in Parsons Green, Fulham, Middlesex County, England994, 994, 994, and died 15 Dec 1773 in Ware, Gloucester, VA, USA994, 994, 994. He married Elizabeth Whiting on 22 Jan 1722/23 in Ware, Gloucester, VA, USA994, 994, daughter of Henry Whiting and Anne Beverley. [SIC: Sr Henry Clayton d 1694 & Elizabeth]
More About John Clayton and Elizabeth Whiting:Marriage: 22 Jan 1722/23, Ware, Gloucester, VA, USA.994, 994
Children of John Clayton and Elizabeth Whiting are:
Not a validated list
- +Ann Clayton, b. 1726, Gloucester, VA, USA994, 994, d. 1790, Sumner, TN, USA994, 994.
- John Clayton, b. 1725, Gloucester, VA, USA994, d. 1820, Bedford, VA, USA994.
- Anne Clayton, b. 1749, Charlotte, VA, USA994, 994, d. 23 Aug 1784, Boonesboro, Bedford, VA, USA994, 994.
- Jasper Clayton, b. 1725, Ware, Gloucester, VA, USA994, d. May 1779, Ware, Gloucester, VA, USA994.
- William Clayton, b. 1725, Gloucester, VA, USA994, d. date unknown.
- Lucy Clayton, b. 1725, Gloucester, VA, USA994, d. date unknown.
- Mary Clayton, b. 1725, Gloucester, VA, USA994, d. 1773994.
- Thomas Clayton, b. 1725, Gloucester, VA, USA994, d. date unknown.
- Robert Clayton, b. 1725, Gloucester, VA, USA994, d. 1773994.
- William B Clayton, b. 1746, Gloucester, VA, USA994, d. 14 Dec 1797994.
- Elizabeth Clayton, b. 1705, VA, USA994, d. 1769, Essex, VA, USA994.
- Sarah Clayton, b., Gloucester, VA, USA994, d. date unknown.
- Arthur Clayton, d. date unknown.
http://www.floraofvirginia.org/flclayton.shtml
In Virginia, it doesn’t take long for a budding plant enthusiast to encounter colonial botanist John Clayton. There’s Claytonia virginica, the Virginia spring-beauty; Osmunda claytoniana, the interrupted fern; Lonicera sempervirens “John Clayton,” a cultivar of the trumpet honeysuckle; the John Clayton chapter of the Virginia Native Plant Society.
At the Flora of Virginia Project, Clayton is on our minds for another reason too: the most recent flora for our state, Flora Virginica, was published in the mid-1700s—based on Clayton’s specimens and writings.
A native of England, Clayton came to Williamsburg around 1715 to join his father, who was attorney-general of the colony. Educated in law (presumably, like much of his line, at Cambridge), in 1720 Clayton became clerk of courts for Gloucester County, which included all the Middle Peninsula—some 164,000 acres and the wealthiest county in Virginia. He and wife Elizabeth Whiting set up residence on a 450-acre plantation near the Piankatank River, probably in present-day Mathews County. They had eight children.
Claytonia virginica specimen courtesy of the Natural History Museum, LondonClayton’s interest in natural history probably grew out of his friendship with artist and naturalist Mark Catesby, in Virginia since 1712. Clayton developed a botanical garden, began collecting specimens, and, through introductions by William Byrd II, became well known in America and Europe.
In the early 1730s he began sending specimens to Catesby, once again in England. The specimens reached John Frederick Gronovius in the Netherlands, where they were also studied by Swedish naturalist Carolus Linneaus. In Linnaeus’s groundbreaking Species Plantarum (1753), in which he implemented his binomial nomenclature, much of the science of North American plants came out of Clayton's specimens.
Building on these and a manuscript of Clayton's, Gronovius published Flora Virginica in two volumes, in 1739 and 1742, mentioning Clayton on the title page. Gronovius’s son published the second edition in 1762 in his father’s name, but without mentioning Clayton. Clayton also drafted a second edition, but it was never published. Still clerk of courts, he died in 1773. His manuscript, his specimens, and records that would have shed light on his life were destroyed when the British burned the courthouse in Gloucester.
Some of Clayton’s specimens remain in Linnaeus’s herbarium at the Linnaean Society of London. Gronovius’s lot may now be found in the John Clayton Herbarium of the Natural History Museum in London. (To see a photograph of one of Clayton’s specimens of Claytonia virginica, click the small image, above.)
What little else survived on Clayton was gleaned and fortunately amassed by Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy Smith Berkeley in their biography, John Clayton: Pioneer of American Botany(1963). “The details of Clayton’s life are little known and much of what has been written about him is fragmentary and inaccurate,” they write, adding that errors have been committed by well-known historians and even Thomas Jefferson!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Clayton_(botanist)
https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Clayton_John_1695-1773
John Clayton was a botanist and the clerk of Gloucester County (ca. 1720–1773). Born and educated in England, he first appears in colonial records in 1720 as the Gloucester County clerk, a position he held for more than fifty years. He owned a tobacco plantation and more than thirty slaves, and by 1735 was regularly providing naturalists such as Mark Catesby and John Frederick Gronovius with botanical specimens to be identified. Clayton himself identified and was the first to name the genus Agastache, a group of perennial, flowering herbs. In 1737, the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus named the wildflowers of the genus Claytonia in Clayton's honor. During this same time period, Clayton compiled for Gronovius a Catalogue of Herbs, Fruits, and Trees Native to Virginia, which Gronovius translated into Latin and published as Flora Virginica, without Clayton's permission, in 1739. This and subsequent editions were the first, and until the mid-twentieth century, the only compilations of Virginia's native plants. Clayton was elected to the American Philosophical Society (1743), the Swedish Royal Academy of Science (1747), and the Virginian Society for the Promotion of Usefull Knowledge (1773), of which he was the first president. He died that same year.
References
- https://www.colonial-settlers-md-va.us/getperson.php?personID=I1157...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Clayton_(botanist)
- https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=30123
Dorman, John Frederick. 2004. Adventurers of Purse and Person, Virginia, 1607-1624/5. Genealogical Pub. Co. 4th edition. Vol 1, Page 279, book lookup by Hill, C. [03/05/2024]
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Dr. John “the Botanist” Clayton's Timeline
| 1684 |
1684
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Parsons Green, Fulham, Middlesex, England
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| 1717 |
1717
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Gloucester, Gloucester County, Virginia
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| 1720 |
1720
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Gloucester, Virginia
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| 1722 |
1722
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Gloucester, Virginia
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| 1725 |
1725
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Gloucester County, Province of Virginia, Colonial America
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1725
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Gloucester, Gloucester, Virginia, United States
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1725
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Gloucester County, Province of Virginia
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1725
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Gloucester County, Virginia
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| 1726 |
January 20, 1726
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Gloucester County, Virginia, United States
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