Minot Pratt (1805-1878) was a founder, a director and head farmer of the Brook Farm experimental community, a printer, a friend of noted Concord, Massachusetts, writers, Henry David Thoreau, Amos Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and a naturalist in Concord, Massachusetts.
Thoreau was a ‘poet-naturalist,’ Minot Pratt was a farmer-naturalist, -- but in both the love of nature was far stronger than the mere scientific thirst for knowledge.
[8] In 1841 Minot Pratt and his wife Maria joined George Ripley, Nathaniel Hawthorne and others to form the experimental community in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, called Brook Farm.
[24] Richard J. Eaton in his A Flora of Concord (1974) summarizes Minot's life and evaluates his botanical expertise, noting that he “played an important role in stimulating his more scientifically minded contemporaries and successors” and that his extensive floral list contained only “a few mistakes.”[25] On October 30, 1859 Henry Thoreau gave an impassioned speech to the town of Concord defending John Brown which Minot reported vividly the same night in a letter to his wife (who was visiting her parents) and which Walter Harding reproduced in part in his The Days of Henry Thoreau (1982).
[31] At the time of his death an obituary appeared not only in The Concord Freeman[32] but also in the regional newspapers, The Springfield Daily Republican[33] and The New England Farmer, and Horticultural Register[34]