Bouvé also served on the Boston Vigilance Committee (1). This committee was dedicated to assisting escaping enslaved people on the Underground Railroad, protecting them from the Fugitive Slave laws, and other abolitionist activities. 

Today, Bouvé is memorialized at several sites around Boston, including Faneuil Hall, Boston National Historic Park, Boston African American Historic Site. 

Bouvé’s herbarium consists of 1321 plant specimens of exceptional quality, that he collected, preserved and identified. The collection serves as a historic record of the plants of Hingham Massachusetts and other locations in New England in the 1800’s. Bouvé compiled The Botany of Hingham section of the History of Hingham 2. In the preface he acknowledged the help of prominent botanist Charles J. Sprague, without whose assistance “many plants would be unknown, and certainly no attempt would have been made to include the grasses and carices.” Bouvé generously included mention of “the Misses Ellen and Isabel Lincoln, by whose zeal…a considerable number of plants were enumerated and discovered within the town limits.” The

Botany of Hingham includes scientific names, common names, habitat information and medicinal or other uses of many of the species found there. Bouvé also wrote the Geology, Minerology and Animals sections in the History of Hingham.

The Bouvé herbarium is aesthetically beautiful, mounted on archival paper and carefully preserved. It provides a historical snapshot of the flora of Hingham and other locations in New England that contributes to an understanding of our changing environment.

“That nature thus varies her gifts of beauty adds much to the charm of botanical research in Hingham, diversified as its surface is with hills and dales, with marshes and swamps, with extensive woods and rocky elevations; for who can wander over its high lands and its low lands, along its water-courses, and into the romantic recesses of its forest glens, without being impressed by, and gladdened with, the beauty spread before him everywhere?” --Thomas T. Bouvé (2)

1 - Boston businessman and scientist Thomas Tracy Bouvé served on the Boston Vigilance Committee, an organization dedicated to assisting those escaping slavery on the Underground Railroad. Boston African American Historic Site. https://www.nps.gov/people/thomas-bouve.htm

2 - History of the Town of Hingham, Massachusetts. [Hingham]: Pub. by the town of Hingham,1893. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/16763

Further reading:

W. O. Crosby (1897) Thomas Tracy Bouvé. Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 32, No. 17, pp. 340-344, Published by: American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Historical sketch of the Boston Society of Natural history; with a notice of the Linnaean Society which preceded it. Bouve, Thomas T; Boston Society of Natural History. Anniversary memoirs, 1880.

Specimens can also be searched on the Consortium of Northeastern Herbaria portal https://neherbaria.org/portal/index.php#