Edward Lewis Sturtevant

Who was Edward Lewis Sturtevant?

Edward Lewis Sturtevant was an American agronomist and botanist who wrote Sturtevant's Edible Plants of the World.

E. Lewis Sturtevant was born in Massachusetts in 1842 to a family of Puritan ancestry. While still a youth his parents died, and Lewis was raised by an aunt. From 1859 to 1861 he attended Bowdoin College and then served in Army during the American Civil War from 1861 to 1863. In 1866 Sturtevant graduated from Harvard Medical School.

In 1867, with his two brothers, Sturtevant founded "Waushakum Farm" in South Framingham, Massachusetts. The farm was used for various agricultural experiments, and Sturtevant wrote extensively for various publications, often using the nom de plume of Zelco. In 1887, he was elected President of the Society for Promoting Agriculture Science. He also studied the history of beans, and is known for building the first lysimeter in America.

Sturtevant assembled voluminous notes on the various species of edible plants of the world, which were posthumously edited and published as Notes on Edible Plants, reissued in 1972 as Sturtevant's Edible Plants of the World.