Henry Shaw (July 24, 1800 – August 25, 1889) was a businessman, amateur botanist, and slave owner[1] in St. Louis, Missouri when it was a gateway city to the West.

He is best known as the founder of the Missouri Botanical Garden, but he also donated the land to the city for Tower Grove Park and oversaw its development.

Henry’s father, Joseph Shaw, had moved to Sheffield as a young man to open his own iron factory, along with a partner.

More importantly, he acquired the attitudes and outlook of an English gentleman, and a polish he would continue to have even after decades of life in the United States.

With the business acumen and entrepreneurial spirit that was to mark his adult life, Shaw was determined to find a market for the goods in the interior of the country.

Vast territories of the American Midwest had been opened up in the previous decade by the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the United States.

On May 3, 1819, Shaw landed in a small French village on the west side of the Mississippi called St. Louis.

Shaw set up a hardware store in St. Louis, selling high quality cutlery and other metal products.

Missouri was a slave state, and Shaw acquired enslaved African Americans as workers by 1828 for his working farm land.

Esther and her children were trying to get to the free state of Illinois where they hoped to connect with helpers to travel further north on the Underground Railroad.

Working with leading botanists, Shaw planned, funded and built what would become the Missouri Botanical Garden on the land around his home.

Shaw donated additional land adjoining the garden to the city of St. Louis for Tower Grove Park.

He endowed Washington University in St. Louis School of Botany, and helped found the Missouri Historical Society.

Shaw died in 1889 and is buried in a mausoleum surrounded by a grove of trees on the grounds of the gardens he founded.