On Shaw Boulevard in south St. Louis, the Missouri Botanical Garden is both a landscaped place to spend a day and a scientific institution whose story reaches back to the city’s nineteenth-century growth. English-born merchant Henry Shaw opened the Garden to the public in 1859, seeking to create a horticultural and educational gift for his adopted city. Its early purpose was broader than displaying flowers: botanists around Shaw encouraged him to establish a herbarium and library so the new institution could support research as well as public enjoyment. That combination still defines the visitor experience. Paths lead through designed gardens, while the institution behind them studies and documents plant life.
The origin story deserves more than a celebratory plaque. The Garden’s own archival project records that Shaw enslaved people and says surviving documents show, among other episodes, that he hired a bounty hunter in 1855 to pursue four people who sought freedom through the Underground Railroad. Its researchers also stress that the surviving record is incomplete: names, work and individual life histories cannot all be reconstructed with certainty. The institution now shares archival material and says it is working to make these histories more visible in its interpretation. For a visitor, acknowledging this record does not erase the Garden’s scientific and horticultural achievements; it gives the landscape a fuller and more honest context.