Clarence McKenzie Lewis papers

Clarence McKenzie Lewis (1877-1959) graduated in 1898 from Columbia College with a degree in engineering. After practicing as a civil engineer with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, he joined the investment banking house of William Salomon and Company and later Blair and Company. In 1922 Lewis bought Skylands, a thousand acre estate in the highlands of northern New Jersey, from the prominent attorney, Francis Stetson. He replaced Stetson's Victorian house with a 45-room Tudor manor, designed by the distinguished architect, John Russell Pope, and transformed the property into a botanical showplace. The most prominent landscape architects of the day, Feruccio Vitale and Alfred Geiffert, designed the gardens.

For thirty years Lewis collected plants from around the world, resulting in one of the finest collections of plants in New Jersey. In 1966 the state of New Jersey purchased the estate and in 1984 the 96 acres surrounding the house was designated as the New Jersey's official botanic garden, and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1991.

Lewis was a trustee of the New York Botanical Garden and in 1953 donated to the Library a collection of 1177 bound volumes, 439 unbound, over 1000 periodicals and the same number of reprints and bulletins.