History of a Natural History

Virginia Mars and Artemis Kirk with the restored Catesby Natural History.

Early Georgetown College traditions included a celebration of the Fourth of July, arranged under the auspices of the Philodemic Society. In 1833 a future president of Georgetown and head of the Maryland Province, Charles H. Stonestreet, took the lead student role of reading the Declaration of Independence. Stonestreet would take his undergraduate degree from Georgetown at the end of that month. As always, a distinguished speaker gave an oration. Among those invited to the celebration from outside were a local mover and shaker, General Duff Green, and the playwright owner of Arlington, the mansion just across the Potomac, George Washington Parke Custis.

Custis, the step-grandson of George Washington, brought with him as a gift to the College his family's copy of the first great work on American natural history, English-born Mark Catesby's The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, published in London between 1734 and 1741.

While in America doing research for the History, Catesby had stayed for a time with Custis's great-grandfather, John Custis of Williamsburg, whose name was inscribed on the volume's title page.

The book passed through the hands of various owners--including the master of Mount Vernon,
George Washington--and by the time it came to Georgetown, a series of depredations had cost the book more than 20 of its plates and a few text leaves as well. At the college bindery it suffered yet further, and until restoration this year was bound partially upside down.

Jill Deiss, proprietress of the Cat Tail Run Bookbindery in Winchester, Virginia, performed the restoration. Because of the complexity of the volume's publication history, the first task was to determine the correct order of the text and plates. Once this was done, each leaf was attached to a stub of Japanese paper. Blanks were inserted for missing leaves and the new binding was assembled. The full leather boards were completed in a style wholly sympathetic to that of London binders of the period. The restoration was made possible by the generous gift of Virginia Mars, and we thank her for enabling researchers, after 170 years, to make effective use of Custis' wonderful gift.