Edward Lewis Sturtevant

Edward Lewis Sturtevant (1842 to 1898) was an American agronomist and botanist, born in Boston and considered in his own time one of the giants of American agricultural science. He served as a captain in the 74th Maine Volunteers in the Civil War, graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1866 without ever practicing medicine, and in 1867 founded Waushakum Farm at South Framingham, Massachusetts with his brothers, where they built a model dairy farm of Ayrshire cattle. He studied beans, peppers, sweet potatoes and corn, developed a productive yellow flint corn named Waushakum, and wrote Varieties of Corn, a landmark United States Department of Agriculture bulletin. He also wrote Sturtevant's Edible Plants of the World and assembled a large agricultural and botanical library that went to the Missouri Botanical Garden.