Graceanna Lewis was an American naturalist, illustrator, and social reformer.
31 Facts About Graceanna Lewis
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An expert in the field of ornithology, Lewis is remembered as a pioneer female American scientist as well as an activist in the anti-slavery, temperance, and women's suffrage movements.
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Graceanna Lewis was born on August 3,1821, on a farm near West Vincent Township in Chester County, Pennsylvania.
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Graceanna Lewis was the second of four daughters of a Quaker farmer named John Lewis and his wife, the former Esther Fussell.
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Graceanna Lewis's ancestors included a friend of William Penn who had emigrated to the new Province of Pennsylvania from South Wales in 1682.
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Graceanna Lewis' father died when she was only three years old, leaving her mother to raise her alone.
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Graceanna Lewis's mother had been a school teacher prior to marriage and was instrumental in developing a keen affection for science learning in Graceanna.
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Esther Fussell Graceanna Lewis made astronomy and weather observations as well as plant flowering times.
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Graceanna Lewis serving as a role model in social activism by housing fugitive slaves as part of the Underground Railroad to freedom in Canada.
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Graceanna Lewis attended Kimberton Boarding School for Girls in neighboring Kimberton, Pennsylvania, at which she received instruction in many of the natural sciences, including astronomy, botany, chemistry, and zoology.
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Graceanna Lewis showed great aptitude as a painter of natural subjects.
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Mary had written a book on insects and Graceanna Lewis expressed a wish to emulate her.
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Graceanna Lewis met one of America's leading ornithologists, John Cassin of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, in 1862 and studied ornithology at an advanced level under his tutorship for the next half decade.
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In 1868 Graceanna Lewis published the book The Natural History of Birds, the first of an anticipated multi-part magnum opus.
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Only in the 1890s did Graceanna Lewis come to accept some evolutionary ideas, still seeing the process as part and parcel of a grand theist system.
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Graceanna Lewis particularly rejected Darwin's idea that random variation was part of the process behind natural selection, arguing instead that evolution was a divinely directed process for the perfection of supernaturally created species.
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On May 31,1870, Lewis was elected to the Academy of Natural Sciences, after having garnered the support of two renowned local scientists: Joseph Leidy and George Washington Tryon, along with the Academy librarian Edward J Nolan.
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In 1871 Graceanna Lewis sold family land and used the proceeds to finance her further research.
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Graceanna Lewis envisioned a set of illustrative charts demonstrating the relationship of the plant and animal kingdoms, but she was unable to keep pace with the rapid influx of new information and was unwilling to publish her charts in an incomplete form, so the projects went unrealized.
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Graceanna Lewis twice lectured at Vassar College, in 1874 and 1879.
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Graceanna Lewis instead returned to lower level teaching, working at the Foster School for Girls of Clifton Springs, New York, from 1883 to 1885.
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In 1893 Graceanna Lewis received a commission from the Pennsylvania Forestry Commission to paint a set of 50 watercolor illustrations of representative leaves of trees for display at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
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Graceanna Lewis's work was regarded as a success, having won her a medal and a diploma, and the set of paintings was publicly displayed again at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, as well as the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St Louis.
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Graceanna Lewis was a member of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and the Delaware County Institute of Science.
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Graceanna Lewis was an activist in the movement for the prohibition of alcohol in the United States serving as Secretary of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union of Media, Pennsylvania, and as that organization's superintendent of scientific temperance instruction for Delaware County.
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Graceanna Lewis was active in the movement for the granting of the right to vote to women.
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Graceanna Lewis presented a paper on "Science for Women" at the Third Congress of Women in Syracuse, New York in October 1875.
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Graceanna Lewis spent the final decades of her life in her hometown of Media, Pennsylvania, with her nephew, artist Charles Graceanna Lewis Fussell.
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Graceanna Lewis died there on February 25,1912, at the age of 90, following a stroke, and was interred at the Providence Friends Meetinghouse Burying Grounds in Media.
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Graceanna Lewis's papers are part of the Graceanna Lewis-Fussell Family Papers collection at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.
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In 2014, a Commonwealth of Pennsylvania roadside historical marker honoring Graceanna Lewis was erected in East Pikeland Township at 2123 Kimberton Road, Phoenixville, near the site of her family's farm.