Exeter Native, Kate Furbish – The Botanist from Brunswick

by Barbara Rimkunas

This "Historically Speaking" column was published in the Exeter News-Letter on Friday, September 25, 2020.

The Dickey-Lincoln School dam project, first proposed in 1965, seemed like the answer to Maine’s energy needs. Funded by the U.S. government, it would have produced 1.45 million kilowatts of energy annually when at full capacity. The trade-off (because there’s always a trade-off) was the destruction of 88,000 acres of Maine forest, and the removal of several small logging communities. The plan was deauthorized after twenty years of haggling when a small plant, the Furbish lousewort – long thought to be extinct – was discovered to be thriving on the proposed site.

In all fairness, it’s not a particularly appealing little plant. There are numerous members of the lousewort family and all of them suffer from the prejudices of their name. It was believed that sheep grazing on the plants would become infected with vermin, an accusation that is not in any way true. The rediscovery of the furbish lousewort in 1976 by Professor Charles Richards of the University of Maine, who was conducting an environmental impact study, threw light on the botanist who had originally discovered it – Catherine (Kate) Furbish. She came across the odd little plant in 1880 and dubbed it ‘Furbish’s wood betony.’ It was officially recognized as a distinct species several years later and given the name ‘Furbish’s lousewort’ or Pedicularis furbishiae by Harvard botanist Sereno Watson.

Kate Furbish was an unusual botanist for her time. It wasn’t that she lacked a formal education beyond the Brunswick, Maine public schools, lots of amateur scientists in the nineteenth century were self-taught. Many genteel women took to the study of nature. Beatrix Potter, of Peter Rabbit fame, as one example, was considered gifted in her illustrations of fungi. It was Furbish’s insistence on her pursuit, travelling alone when this type of behavior was considered unconventional at best and unsafe at worst. She would later donate four thousand plant specimens to Harvard University’s Gray Herbarium. Sixteen large folios of her exquisite botanical drawings now reside at Bowdoin College. At the time she donated drawings, she wrote to Bowdoin’s president, “It has been accomplished by means of hard work and persistent effort, and without regard to fatigue. I have wandered alone for the most part, on the highways and in the hedges, on foot, in hayracks, on country mail-stages, on improvised rafts, in rowboats, on logs, crawling on hands and knees on the surface of bogs, and backing out, when I dared not walk, in order to procure a coveted treasure. Called ‘crazy,’ a ‘fool’ – and this is the way that my work has been done, the flowers being my only society, and the manuals the only literature for months altogether.” It was said she carried a loaded revolver with her for safety. In 1894, at the age of 60, she founded the Josselyn Botanical Society of Maine, serving as president from 1911-1912.

This remarkable woman lived nearly her entire life in Brunswick, Maine, but every biographical notice written about her begins “born May 19, 1834 in Exeter, New Hampshire.” Her father, Benjamin Furbish, was from Wells, Maine. He was originally a tinsmith, travelling briefly to Nova Scotia before his arrival in Exeter in 1831. He must have intended to set up his business in Exeter. He married Mary Lane, a Hampton Falls woman, and they remained in town long enough for the birth of their first child, Catherine. Then the family packed up and moved to Brunswick. There, Benjamin expanded his business to include hardware. He served in town government and it was noted, “he was one of the earliest and most earnest supporters of the graded school system in Brunswick.” At his death in 1873, he left his remaining children enough money to support themselves comfortably. Kate purchased a small house on Lincoln Street and lived there for the remainder of her life. She lived to be 93 – at the time, the oldest resident of Brunswick.

The Furbish lousewort was only a small part of Kate Furbish’s work. By the mid-1940s, the plant was believed to be extinct. Its rediscovery classified it as a Lazarus taxon, a phrase borrowed from paleontology for a species thought to be extinct that reappears. In a short article in Bowdoin Alumnus, published in 1977, Paul Hazelton and Lyman Page recount the public events that followed:

“At a congressional hearing this spring, a congressman from southern Indiana asked, ‘What is the purpose? What is the function of the lousewort? Does anybody need it?’

‘Sir, I can only suppose that it is part of the grand scheme of things,’ replied the colonel from the Army Corps of Engineers. He added, however, he thought that was probably a weak rejoinder to the congressman’s question.”     

The hydroelectric proposal was decertified. Kate Furbish’s legacy, however, had a resurgence. This summer, the town of Brunswick finished construction on the Kate Furbish Elementary School. Serving the town’s students from kindergarten to 2nd grade, the building’s hallways are decorated with the plants and flowers Furbish rendered in her elegant watercolors. Grappling, as all schools are, with opening during the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been little time for fanfare regarding their namesake. Here in Exeter, New Hampshire, where we can only claim a tiny part of her history, we send our best wishes to the children of Brunswick and to the memory of the woman Harvard professor M.L. Fernald called, “the posy-lady of the Madawaska Acadians.”

Images: Left, photo of Kate Furbish, courtesy of Old Berwick Historical Society; Right, photo of the Furbish lousewort, taken as part of a project by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.