Theodora Stanwell-Fletcher
Theodora Stanwell-Fletcher, born Theodora Morris Cope on January 4, 1906, was an American naturalist and writer. She is best known for Driftwood Valley (1946), a nature book that won the John Burroughs Medal in 1948. She was named a Distinguished Daughter of Pennsylvania and was elected to the Society of Woman Geographers.
She grew up in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and spent much of her childhood near Dimock at the family home Woodbourne. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1929 with a double major in Economic Geography and English Literature. After college she and her father traveled around the world for a year. She earned a Master of Science in 1931 and a PhD in vertebrate ecology in 1936 from Cornell University. Her theses described wildlife on a Pennsylvania family farm and in Pennsylvania virgin forests, written under her maiden name, Theodora M. Cope.
In the 1930s she studied in Churchill, Manitoba, where she met her future husband, John Stanwell-Fletcher. They married in 1937 and began a long, challenging expedition in British Columbia to Tetana Lake, building a cabin in a remote, unsurveyed area. They faced brutal winters, deep snow, and lived with nearby natives while collecting plants and animal specimens. They left for Pennsylvania in January 1939, and Teddy gave birth to their child while continuing to write about their life there.
The couple returned to Driftwood Valley in 1941 to continue their work, cataloging hundreds of plants and animals for the British Columbia Provincial Museum. Their official report was Some Accounts of the Flora and Fauna of the Driftwood Valley Region of North Central British Columbia. Driftwood Valley, published in 1946, is written as a journal and shows her love of remote places, careful natural observations, and reflections on life in the wilderness. It earned the John Burroughs Medal in 1948 and remains her best-known book.
She published The Tundra World (1952), a fictionalized account of her Churchill experiences, and Clear Lands and Icy Seas: A Voyage to the Eastern Arctic (1956), based on Arctic trips. After divorcing John Stanwell-Fletcher, she married Lowell Sumner and later Dr. Philip Hayward Gray. She continued to travel but never returned to Driftwood Valley, eventually living again at Woodbourne. She died there on January 15, 2000, and the family land near Dimock was donated to the Nature Conservancy as the Woodbourne Forest Preserve.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 12:33 (CET).