William Robert Prince

William Robert Prince (November 6, 1795 in Flushing, Long Island – March 28, 1869 in Flushing) was a United States horticulture pioneer.

Biography

He was the son of horticulturist William Prince and Mary Stratton.[1] He was educated at Jamaica Academy, Long Island, and at Boucherville, Canada. He imported the first merino sheep into the United States in 1816, continued the “Linnaean nurseries” of his father, and was the first to introduce silk culture and the Morus multicaulis for silk worms in 1837, but lost a large fortune by this enterprise, owing to the change in the tariff, which destroyed this industry for several years.

The troubles of the business obligated him to mortgage the Linnaean nurseries, and for a time control of them passed to Gabriel Winter, his brother-in-law. There was a printed dispute with the new owner to which the family attributed the death of his father. Prince eventually regained control of the nurseries.[1][2] In 1849 he went to California, was a founder of Sacramento, and in 1851 traveled through Mexico. He introduced the culture of osiers and sorghum in 1854/5, and the Chinese yam in 1854.

Just before the American Civil War, he passed control of the nurseries on to his sons. They finally elected not to continue in it, and the nurseries were sold at the end of the war. Spiritualism and the preparation of patent medicines were major occupations of his after he retired from the nursery business.[1]

Works
  • History of the Vine, with his father (New York, 1830)
  • Pomological Manual, with his father[1] (2 vols., 1832)
  • Manual of Roses (1846)

He wrote numerous pamphlets on the mulberry, the strawberry, Dioscorea, medical botany, etc., and about two hundred descriptive catalogues of trees, shrubs, vines, plants, bulbs, etc. Many of his articles were published in Gardener's Monthly.[1]

Family

He married Charlotte Goodwin Collins in 1826.[1] They were the parents of New Mexico Territorial governor L. Bradford Prince.

Notes
  1. Sudds, R. H. (1935). "Prince, William Robert". Dictionary of American Biography. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
  2. Sudds, R. H. (1935). "Prince, William". Dictionary of American Biography. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
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gollark: Say most/many people like a thing, but the unfathomable mechanisms of culture™ have decided that it's bad/shameful/whatever. In our society, as long as it isn't something which a plurality of people *really* dislike, you can probably get it anyway since you don't need everyone's buy-in. And over time the thing might become more widely accepted by unfathomable mechanisms of culture™.
gollark: I also think that if you decide what to produce via social things instead of the current financial mechanisms, you would probably have less innovation (if you have a cool new thing™, you have to convince a lot of people it's a good idea, rather than just convincing a few specialized people that it's good enough to get some investment) and could get stuck in weird signalling loops.
gollark: So it's possible to be somewhat insulated from whatever bizarre trends are sweeping things.

References
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