Collecting area: Botany & horticulture

A druggist by training, William Denslow became interested in botany as a means of combating tuberculosis through outdoor exercise. As his interests developed, Denslow amassed an herbarium that included between 11,000 and 15,000 specimens, including both American and European species.

The Denslow collection consists of a single volume of manuscripts, chiefly letters, collected from significant botanists and other individuals, including William Henry Brewer, Mordecai Cubitt Cooke, Asa Gray, Isaac Hollister Hall, Thomas P. James, Horace Mann, Edward Sylvester Morse, Charles Horton Peck, George Edward Post, Frederick Ward Putnam, George Thurber, and John Torrey.

Foresty and lumbering have been substantial sectors of the Massachusetts economy for more than 300 years. This collection includes photographs of forests throughout New England and New York, lumbering and related occupations, tools of forestry, and distinguished foresters. Together these images capture the history and traditions of forestry and lumbering in Massachusetts from mill work to Christmas trees.

H.J. Franklin was an expert cranberry grower and a trained entomologist, whose research centered on the bumble bee. Franklin would wed these two interests in his career at the University, where he studied the cranberry pollination habits of the bumble bee and oversaw the cultivation of cranberries at the University’s Cranberry Experiment Station at Wareham, which Franklin founded and directed from 1909 until he retired in 1953. Born in Guildford, Vermont in 1883, Franklin moved to Bernardston, Mass. when he was eleven, eventually attending the University of Massachusetts, where he earned his B.S in 1903, and Ph.D in 1912. Franklin spent his career and life with cranberries, owning and managing his own bogs in three eastern Massachusetts counties and working with cranberry producers to develop the industry. Franklin died in 1958 in Wareham, Mass.

The H.J. Franklin Papers document his research on the bumble bee as well as his work with cranberry producers. In the collection are reports from the cranberry grower’s association, published articles by Franklin on cranberries and the Bombidae, and reports from the State Agricultural Board on cranberry production.

Corn sample, Herbarium of Walt C. Galinat, 1971

Born in 1923 in Manchester, Connecticut, Walton Clarence Galinat was a corn enthusiast for almost his entire life. He worked with various aspects of corn in high school, as an undergraduate student assistant at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, as a research associate at Harvard University, and finally, as a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he worked at the Waltham Field Station as a plant geneticist from 1964 until his retirement in 1990. A contributing author to more than 300 published papers, Galinat spent significant parts of his research career in Mexico studying ancient maize, but was also deeply embedded in New England farming and corn production and sustainability. In addition to his world-renowned research on corn evolution, morphology, and diversity, he is credited with the development of many varieties of corn, including Candy Stick, “airplane corn,” and a red, white, and blue kernel variety. His skill as an artist was also recognized across his field and beyond, with his articles often accompanied by beautifully detailed illustrations of corn samples, his widely distributed and used teaching illustrations, and with a few of his hand-drawn corn diagrams permanently displayed in the National Academies Building in Washington D.C. The Waltham Experiment Station building retains several of Galinat’s oversized 3D art models of corn plant migrations and lifecycles to this day. Amongst many honors, Galinat was awarded the prestigious Distinguished Economic Botanist Award from the Society for Economic Botany in 1994.

The Walton C. Galinat Papers document Galinat’s academic, service, research, and artistic work during his time at the Waltham Experiment Station while employed as a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Roughly half the collection is administrative and professional materials, including correspondence; research files and journals, with numerous detailed hand-drawn illustrations; Experiment Station and Hatch annual reports and grants; UMass administrative memos, reports, and files; and photographs of corn samples as well as individuals from Experiment Station, Home Economics, and 4H clubs. The other half of the collection consists of three-dimensional corn display samples and pressed corn and grass from Galinat’s personal herbarium.

The great botanist and early supporter of evolutionary theory, Asa Gray, toured the Florida Panhandle during the spring of 1875, making “a pious pilgrimage to the secluded native haunts of that rarest of trees, the Torreya taxifolia.” His journey took him along the Apalachicola River in search of Torreya, an native yew prized by horticulturists.

This slender manuscript account was prepared by Gray for publication in the American Agriculturist (vol. 43). In a light and graceful way, his “pilgrimage” describes the difficulties of travel in the deep south during the post-Civil War years and his exploits while botanizing. The text is edited in Gray’s hand and varies slightly from the published version.

The horticulturist Tom S. Hamilton was a member of the faculty at UMass Amherst in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning. A specialist in ornamental plants, Hamilton worked at UMass from prior to 1950 until his retirement in 1986.

The Hamilton Papers contain three works on ornamental plants published by the Dept. of Landscape Architecture, along with a mimeographed laboratory manual that Hamilton used in his courses on landscape operations in 1979.

Shortly after earning his doctorate in plant pathology from Cornell in 1954, the internationally known phytopathologist, Francis W. Holmes began his career at UMass Amherst. Working in the Department of Plant Pathology (1954-1991) and later as Director of the Shade Tree Laboratories, Holmes became a leader in the study of Dutch elm disease, and he conducted important research on injury to trees from road salt and the relationship between salt injury and Verticillium wilt disease. During Holmes’s tenure, the Shade Tree Labs tested nearly 250,000 elm samples for Dutch elm disease and diagnosed a great variety of other diseases on more than 150 other types of trees. While on a Fulbright fellowship in the Netherlands, he devoted his free time to preparing a monograph on six Dutch women scientists who discovered the source of Dutch elm disease in the 1920s and 1930s. Holmes retired from the University in 1991 and remained in Amherst until his death in 2007.

The papers document Holmes’s research on shade trees and his tenure as a professor of microbiology. The collection includes some professional correspondence (1954-1977), awards, research notes and publications, and memorabilia. Holmes’s translations of phytopathological works from Dutch to English may be of interest to scholars of Dutch elm disease.

During the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Samuel Kramsh worked as a collector and supplier of native plants for horticulturists and botanists, including Humphry and Moses Marshall and Benjamin Smith Barton.

This manuscript includes an exhaustive record of plant species collected in Pennsylvania and North Carolina during the years 1787-1789.

Susie D. Livers arrived at Massachusetts Agricultural College in 1903 as a member of one of the college’s first co-ed classes. After graduating in 1907, Livers worked at Ginn & Company Publishers in Boston and then as a Detail Officer at the State School for Girls in Lancaster, Massachusetts.

Included in the scrapbook are handwritten personal correspondence in the form of letters, postcards, holiday cards, and telegrams; unidentified photographs; MAC report cards dated 1904 and 1907; class papers and a class notebook; and programs and tickets for sporting events, weddings, and campus socials. In the back of the scrapbook are 35 herbarium samples which include dried plants with notations of plant names as well as dates and locations indicating where the plants were found.

Forest pathologist and arboriculturist Malcolm Arthur McKenzie was born in Providence, Rhode Island in April 1903. After attending Brown University (PhD Forest Pathology, 1935), he worked successively as a field assistant for the United States Forest Service forest products lab, as an instructor at the University of North Carolina, and finally with the University of Massachusetts Shade Tree Laboratory. He conducted important research on the diseases of shade trees, including Dutch elm disease, wood decay, and tree pests, as well as related issues in tree hazards in public utility work and municipal tree maintenance.

The McKenzie Papers document McKenzie’s association with the UMass Shade Tree Lab, along with some professional correspondence, research notes and publications, and McKenzie’s dissertation on willows.