JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

I found this unusual heading in a half-page ad in March 1864 issue of American Agriculturalist for the Farm, Garden, and Homestead–as it can well be imagined it stopped me pretty quickly, if for no other reason than to make certain that the heading was correct.  And it was.  The seed manufacturer, James Vick (from Rochester NY) in the midst and throes of other oddness reprinted a letter from a correspondent named George Ford, who was writing from Lawrence, Kansas, about his experience in that town in 1863, and Quantrell, and (maybe bu tmaybe not) Vick’s flowers.  

Capt William Clarke Quantrell–a sociopath who led a group of avengers and bushwhackers and various sorts of murderers and guerrillas in service of the Confederacy–was in Lawrence in 1863 committing acts of vengeance and murder against its citizens.  Mr. Ford expressed his admiration for Vick’s seeds and how lovely they were, and that they were responsible for saving his house from destruction by Quantrell.  It is  a remarkable thing to include in ad advert for flower seeds, closing in on the end of the war–it is also the only mention of the war for this issue and one of the few acknowledgements of it in this entire year.  

Quantrell eventually pissed almost all of his men off, winding up with a dozen die-hards, and then in Kentucky and dead in June 1865, ironically and mortally wounded in a Union ambush.