Edwin Seabury Lawrence was born in 1842 and spent his life in Flushing, Long Island. He worked as a farmer and market gardener, continuing the longstanding Lawrence involvement in agriculture and nursery cultivation around Flushing. He lived in an old Lawrence family house dating to the seventeenth century, preserving an earlier mode of life even as Flushing began to suburbanize in the late nineteenth century. He died in 1900.