Martha Daniell Logan

Martha Daniell Logan (December 29, 1704-June 28, 1779) was an American-born horticulturalist, educator, and writer in Charleston, South Carolina. She operated a commercial business importing and exporting seeds and nursery plants, wrote a popular gardening advice column.

History

Financial necessity compelled Martha Daniell Logan to pursue commercial opportunities unusual for a woman of her time and social station. Her father, Robert Daniell (1646-1718), a British merchant engaged in maritime trade with Barbados and Bermuda, had immigrated to the Carolinas in 1679. Through his political and military service to the Lords Proprietor and the Crown, he became one of the largest landowners in the colony, receiving an initial grant of 48,000 acres in 1698 and an additional 48,000 acres in 1713. The terms of an early will, dating from 1709, indicate Daniell’s concern with the education of his daughters (as well as his sons), making provisions for their “schooling, and all other things necessary for [their] education.” A year after Daniell’s death in May 1718, his widow married the planter Col. George Logan, Sr. (1669-1721), and in July 1719 his daughter, fourteen-year-old Martha, married her stepbrother, George Logan, Jr. (1695-1765). They moved to a house on the Wando River, ten miles from Charleston, where Martha began her entreprenueiral activities a few years after the birth of her eighth child in 1738. On March 20, 1742, she advertised her services as a teacher of reading, writing, and embroidery, and opened her home as a boarding school. Following her family’s relocation to Charleston in about 1749, she advertised plans to open a boarding school at her house on the green near Trotts Point.

In addition to teaching, Logan was establishing herself as an authority on horticulture. She is presumed to have been the author of the gardening section of John Tobler’s South Carolina Almanack for 1752, advertised in the South Carolina Gazette on December 6, 1751 as a “Gardners Kalander [‘’sic’’], done by a Lady of this Province, and esteemed a very good one.” It was reprinted several times, and appeared under her name in annual editions of the Palladium of Knowledge: or, The Carolina and Georgia Almanac from 1798 to 1800. She was also reputed to have written a treatise on gardening at the age of seventy. She based her advice on practical experience gained not only as a gardener, but also as a purveyor of botanical goods. The South Carolina Gazette carried the first advertisements for the commercial business she established selling seeds and plants, initially under her son’s name. A notice published in the Gazette on November 12, 1753 announced the availability of a parcel of very good seeds, flower roots, and fruit stones of several kinds” which were “just imported from London.”(view text). She briefly met the Philadelphia botanist and nurseryman John Bartram on his visit to Charleston in 1760. “I was with her about five minutes, in much company,” Bartram informed his London agent, Peter Collinson, in 1762, “Yet we contracted such a mutual correspondence, that one silk bag of seed hath passed and repassed full of seeds three times since last fall.” Her neighbor in Charleston, Ann Manigault, recorded in her diary that on November 25, 1763 she “went to Mrs. Logan’s to buy roots.” The Charleston artist Charles Fraser later recalled that "Logan’s garden...occupied a large space of ground on the north of Tradd-street, including a portion of what is now called Logan-street," with a "vacant lot or green, on the south side of Tradd-street."

--Robyn Asleson

Texts

• South Carolina Gazette, November 12, 1753 (quoted in Manigault and Webber, July 1919, 205, n.9) back up to History

”Just imported from London and to be sold by Daniel Logan, at his Mother’s house on the Green, near Trotts point, a parcel of very good seeds, flower roots, and fruit stones of several kinds.”

• Bartram, John to Peter Collinson, May 7 1761 (Bartram, 1992, 517)

"fine bearing trees which I hope to have by ye favour of an elderly widow Lady which spared no pains or cost to oblige me[.] her garden is her delight & she hath a fine [one.] I was with her about 5 minits in much company yet we contracted much mutual Correspondence that one silk bag hath past & repast full of seeds several times last fall...."

• Logan, Martha, February 15, 1768, describing in the South Carolina Gazette a sale in Charleston, S.C. (quoted in Julia Cherry Spruill, Women’s Life and Work in the Southern Colonies (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1972), 278, view on Zotero

”Just imported in Capt. Lloyd from London and to be sold very reasonably by Martha Logan at her house in Meeting-street, three doors without the gate:

“A fresh assortment of very good garden seeds and flower roots, also many other sorts of flower shrubs and box for edging beds, now growing in her garden.”