📍Marshfield, Missouri, USA
1889 – 1906“I was born in Marshfield, Missouri in 1889, a small town in the Ozark foothills, and I grew up there as an ordinary Midwestern boy who happened to be fascinated by the night sky. My father John was a lawyer and my mother Virginia encouraged my reading, and the town's remoteness from city light pollution meant that the Missouri sky was dark and full of stars. I studied law briefly before switching to astronomy, and it was only after returning from the First World War that I completed my doctorate and began the work at Mount Wilson Observatory that would establish that the universe extended far beyond the Milky Way and that it was expanding. The Marshfield boy who lay in the grass watching the Missouri sky could not have imagined the scale of what that sky contained, but the habit of looking up — patiently, persistently, with attention — was formed there.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today
Sources: Christianson, G. Edwin Hubble: Mariner of the Nebulae (1995), Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Hubble, E. The Realm of the Nebulae (1936), Yale University Press; Overbye, D. Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos (1991), HarperCollins