Julia Morton - Early Life

Early Life

Morton was born Julia Francis McHugh, on April 25, 1912 in Middlebury, Vermont, and grew up on a 100-acre (0.40 km2) farm in rural Vermont where she was interested in agriculture, the outdoors, and natural resources. At the age of 15, her mother and sister died, and she went to New York City to live with her brother. She worked as a commercial artist for several years and married Kendal Paul Morton (1897–1964), a Canadian. By 1933 they had begun work on collating information on food, medicinal, and other useful plants. They assembled copies or clippings of existing material and filed it away in file cabinets. They housed this compilation in an office near the New York Public Library, and it soon became known as The Morton Collectanea in academia.

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