Linnaean Hill
William Beckett’s remarkable life story begins in 1833, on Joshua Peirce’s country estate just outside the nation’s new capital city. Peirce inherited the land from his father, Isaac Peirce, who gave his 28-year-old son 82 acres of land beside Rock Creek. The young man built a home on top of the hill–an imposing stone mansion with sweeping views of Washington. Joshua Peirce named the estate Linnaean Hill, after the Swedish botanist, Carl Linnaeus.
Peirce used his lifelong interest in horticulture to launch a successful business selling plants from his hilltop estate. By 1833, when Beckett was born, Linnaean Hill was the center of a profitable nursery business. Peirce built that business using the labor of enslaved people, including the man now believed to be his son, William.
Joshua Peirce’s nursery offered an astonishing variety of fruit trees, evergreens, vines, and flowering shrubs. His family would later boast that Joshua Peirce’s nursery had filled the landscaped gardens of a growing city.
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An undated portrait of Joshua Peirce (Kiplinger Library, DC History Center)
The view west from Linnaean Hill, painted in 1848, when William Beckett was fifteen. (The George Washington University Museum, Washington, D.C., AS 327, The Albert H. Small Washingtoniana Collection)