On Their Shoulders: Grace Brown Gardner, 1880 – 1973

Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • March 29, 2021

March is Women’s History Month. While we perpetuate and promote the legacy of Maria Mitchell, our namesake, the Nantucket Maria Mitchell Association has been built upon the shoulders of some incredible women. I hope to continue to highlight them as I continue with this blog. Grace Brown Gardner, who I have mentioned before, is one of those women.


Grace Brown Gardner, educated in Nantucket public schools, earned a bachelor’s degree in botany from Cornell University and a master’s degree from Brown University. She taught first in the ’Sconset School, and then in New Bedford, Fall River, and at Framingham Normal School before returning to the island in 1942 after approximately forty years of teaching. She was an active member and a member of the boards of the Maria Mitchell Association, the Nantucket Atheneum, and the Nantucket Historical Association.


Grace Brown Gardner is renowned for her compilation of scrapbooks chronicling island life, history, and people – a lifelong occupation that began in her father’s newspaper office – and for her love of the island’s natural history. Today, the fifty-two scrapbooks are an important resource for anyone doing Nantucket research; they are housed in the Nantucket Historical Association’s Research Library. Other of her books and some ephemera are located at the Maria Mitchell Association’s Archives and Special Collections. Natural science specimens that she collected for the MMA reside in the MMA’s natural science collections in the Herbarium collection. This collection pre-dates the founding of the MMA in 1902 and is an important resource for MMA scientists, as well as Nantucket and off-island scientists. It is an extensive collection of dried, pressed plants which notes the locations and dates of their collections. It can also be used for sampling and for recreating the strain/variety of the plant – especially if it is endangered. I can open a folder with say, a sample of solidago (sorry, I picked a “boring” one, and find where it was picked from. I can go back to that site and see if it still exists there. That’s sort of a mundane example but I think it makes the point.


Gardner lived in her family home at 33 Milk Street – once known as the Big Shop – and the building that played host to the second anti-slavery meeting on Nantucket. It still exists today as a year-round home.


JNLF

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