The Burpee Seed Company: Planting U.S. History Since the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This book intertwines two stories. The first is a century-long history of the mail-order seed company W. Atlee Burpee Co., founded in 1878 by W. Atlee Burpee and carried forward by his son and successor, David, until it was sold in 1970, along with insight into the people behind it. The second is a story of the tangible material that embodies Burpee and enables its story to be told—letters, crop and animal records, seed catalogs, photographs, legal files, notebooks, diaries, memos, and much more—all created and collected by Burpee Co. principals, employees, and others close to the firm and family. After a Burpee family member donated a voluminous batch of these records to the Smithsonian Institution in 2016, work was undertaken by archivists to arrange, describe, organize, and help preserve roughly 200 bankers boxes worth of historical material—crumbling letters begrimed by decades of dirt, boxes of scattered pages, and thousands of files. Today, the W. Atlee Burpee Co. Records at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Gardens provide a firsthand, dynamic, and fruitful link between an enterprising family and several major subjects in U.S. history, ranging from agriculture, plant science, and the development of the mail-order trade to labor and advertising and marketing. The story of this nation’s archives, as illustrated through the Burpee Co. Records and the wide-ranging project to organize and comprehend them, is one of massive value to a collective understanding and better appreciation of U.S. history and culture; it’s a story that this book aims to shed light on through a blend of history, storytelling, and archival science.