William Bartram was born in 1739 at the Schylkill River near Philadelphia, where he spent much of his time in the beloved gardens started by his father, Royal botanist John Bartram.

In 1765, William accompanied his father on explorations of Florida’s St. Johns River. Bartram and his father discovered hundreds of plant specimens, and he returned to a quiet life in Philadelphia.

For a more in-depth look at John and William Bartram's 1765 visit to northeast Florida, be sure to visit Dr. Dan Schafer's Florida History Online.

In 1766, William Bartram wrote his father with plans to start an indigo plantation along the St. Johns River near Picolata. Although his father objected, he acquired six slaves for William. The plantation was abandoned in the fall of the same year.

When noted English botanist, Dr. John Fotergill viewed some of William Bartram’s drawings, he was impressed. Fotergill financed a major exploration for Bartram that began in 1773 on the eve of the American Revolution. The young Quaker left his home and embarked on a journey over a four year period that took him from the foothills of the Appalachian mountains to the Mississippi River and all the way to the wilds of the St. Johns River in the British colony of Florida.

In the spring of 1774, Bartram recorded his trip through the Cowford (the site of what would later become Jacksonville). He headed south along the St. Johns River toward the Marshall Plantation where he hoped to spend the evening, but encountered a violent storm and camped for the night under a fallen tree.

William Bartram published an account of his adventure in 1791. It quickly became an American classic, and Bartram's Travels has been described by one scholar as the most astounding verbal artifact of the early republic. His work provides descriptions of the natural, relatively pristine eighteenth-century environment of exotic sub-tropical Florida as well as the relatively unexplored southeastern interior.

Bartram was the first author in the modern genre of writers who portrayed nature through personal experience as well as scientific observation. His writings inspired a list of notable authors including Henry David Thoreau, William Wordsworth, and Sierra Club founder John Muir. His writings reached far beyond the aspects of scientific evaluation and ignited a romance for nature and especially for Florida.