Andrew Pierson and the A. N. Pierson nursery

~ genderdesk

Andrew N. Pierson (1 Sep 1850 – 29 Oct 1925) was born Anders Nil Persson in Skane Lan, Sweden. In 1872, he established a small nursery, A.N. Pierson’s, Inc., also known as Cromwell Gardens, in Cromwell Connecticut.  Cromwell Gardens became the largest commercial rose grower in the country.

Family

His parents were Nils Pierson (Sweden — 5 Oct 1906 Cromwell, Connecticut) and Hanna Pierson (29 Oct 1925, Sweden – 10 Jan 1900, Plainville, Connecticut). He had two brothers, Nels Pierson (31 Mar 1849, Sweden – 4 Jul 1931, Pierson, Volusia County, Florida) and Carl Frederick Pierson (24 Oct 1853, Sweden – 13 Nov 1932, Cromwell, Connecticut). There were possibly 3 more brothers who settled in Florida, according to the NYT.

(More about the possible Florida siblings, but the spellings on these are wild and the dates probably wilder yet. There are two Peter Piersons listed, this is the most likely one for starting the first fern ranch, but again, the dates do not really correlate. https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en/MBJH-PSB/peter-pierson-1857-1926:)

He married Margaret S Allison Pierson (5 Apr 1845 – 13 Feb 1923, Cromwell, Connecticut). They had four children, Frank Allison Pierson (1877-1905), Wallace Rogers Pierson (1880-1946). Emily Miller Pierson (1881-1971), and Robert D. Pierson (1884-1885). Wallace was a state senator, Emily was a suffragist.

 

The 1918 catalog boasted that Cromwell Gardens had 500 employees and 5000 plants.  By 1986, the nursery was exporting 6 million roses a year, plus other flowers and “dish gardens and terrarium plants”.  In the 1980s, A. N. Pierson received the distinguished Century Farm Award of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station. https://www.nytimes.com/1986/08/31/nyregion/growing-roses-as-big-buisness.html

Dish gardens, hmm.

From the same NYT archived piece:

“The Pierson family descends from six sons who immigrated to the United States from Sweden in 1869. Although their destination was Vermont, some sons landed in Connecticut. Three sons went to Florida, where the town of Pierson is now known as the ”fern capital” of the world….

“The son who founded the company in Cromwell, Andrew Pierson, became a leader in civic affairs and a gold medal winner at the New York Flower Show. His son, Wallace R., became a four-term state senator and was active in the Society of American Florists.”

The suffragist daughter, Emily, is not mentioned.

The company filed for bankruptcy in 1990 and closed in 1991. https://connecticutmills.org/find/details/a.n.-pierson-inc The nursery is now run by Cromwell Growers.

State senator Pierson

Wallace Rogers Pierson (1880 – 1946)

Andrew Pierson’s son Wallace R. Pierson was a state senator…might this be his obit in this November 6, 1946 special edition of the NYT.  Hard to tell. Yes. https://www.nytimes.com/1946/11/06/archives/wallace-r-pierson-connecticut-florist-exhead-of-american-rose.html

Here is the 1926 election for Connecticut, Wallace R. Pierson Republican, General Election :: State Senator :: District 33 https://electionhistory.ct.gov/eng/contests/view/20813

Here is find-a-grave: Wallace Rogers Pierson (5 May 1880, Connecticut – [probably November 5 or 6] 1946, Cromwell, Connecticut). https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/13265690/wallace-rogers-pierson

The Florida Piersons

Pierson, Florida, fern capital of the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierson,_Florida

It’s on Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Seal_of_Pierson,_Florida.png

 

You can find statements that the inhabitants are descended from the original settlers, but no one seems concerned about who they might have been. Only the New York Times. There certainly seem to be a lot of Swedish names in the town website.

Oh wait, here is the Pierson family after all. The first fernery was in 1904 by Peter Pierson whose brother sent him some ferns –like, 10,000 ferns — from Connecticut after the orange trees froze. Left, the first fernery; right, Peter Pierson. This is from the Voluspa Historical Society, Voluspa being a county in Florida, and also the name of a Viking saga. https://www.delandhouse.com/article_ferneries  None of this is in the town’s Wikipedia article.

 Catalogs and handbooks

There are some price lists too, that you can google, more recent ones.

For some examples of their vintage pottery, see the post on “Vintage Pierson jardinières“.

Any women?

Where are the women, you may ask.

Good question.

Emily Miller Pierson

Emily Pierson Handing out Leaflets in New York State Suffrage Campaign, ca. 1915 from LOC https://www.loc.gov/resource/mnwp.276011/

Andrew Nils Pierson’s daughter is in the Connecticut hall of fame.  She was suffragist and labor organizer Emily Pierson (1881-1971):

“…inspired by a speech she heard in 1909 by the British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst, Pierson joined the leaders of the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association and soon became its state organizer.”

She also led the “Trolley Campaign” of 1912, where she once encouraged Underwood Typewriter employees to consider organized labor.

This is the same one who was sister to the state senator, according to the NYT. Are state senators “notable”? I don’t remember.

But Emily is probably the most “notable” member of the family.

Her full name though was Emily Miller Pierson, which is probably why Wikipedia is missing her obituary in the New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1971/01/26/archives/dr-l-pierson-early-suffragette.html

This is probably also why you can’t find her Wikipedia article if you google “Emily Miller Pierson”.

They also missed her gravestone: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/13695547/emily-miller-pierson

Her papers are preserved at the University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections
Seattle, WA. They were donated by her daughter Anne Pierson Tobey (September 12, 1925 – November 29, 2016). https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:80444/xv26162

“Her daughter”?

Well.

Ooops, maybe not. The 1840 census says she was living with her 14 year old “adopted daughter” Anne Abbot Pierson. https://www.ancestry.com/1940-census/usa/Connecticut/Emily-Pierson_4jl9sh

Emily Miller Pierson also traveled to China to visit her friend Anna Louise Strong, although that is not reflected in either Wikipedia article. Emily’s correspondence, travel diary, and some photos of her with Strong are in her personal papers.

Tactics

Emily was an English teacher, and when she became chief organizer for the Connecticut Women’s Suffrage Association (CWSA) from 1917-1920, she took their tactics in a new direction, using educational theatrics to teach the message about women’s rights.  One of her strategies that was adopted by suffragist organizations across the country was “voiceless speech”. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44370195

They also used tableaux, and textual banners carried by activists who called themselves “silent sentinels” to create a spectacle, which became a modernist suffrage print culture.

“…rather than insert themselves unproblematically into a male oratorical tradition that risked “masculinizing” them, some middle- and upper-class U.S. suffragists deployed silent stunts that strategically drew on familiar, and therefore nonthreatening, bodily rhetorical traditions of nineteenth-century women’s culture. These modern silent spectacles found their origins in a nineteenth-century domestic ideology that defined Woman as a silent moral influence and, more specifically, in the nineteenth-century sentimental theatrical tradition that used immobile and silent women to model and inspire virtuous behavior.” https://academic.oup.com/book/12231/chapter-abstract/161703463?redirectedFrom=fulltext

This should probably be a whole new post: https://genderdesk.wordpress.com/2023/04/10/anna-constable-and-voiceless-speech/

Published by genderdesk

Tracking Wikipedia … so the barbarians don't win.

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