Elmer Ivan Applegate

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Elmer Ivan Applegate (born March 31, 1867 near Ashland , Oregon , † November 18, 1949 in Williams near Klamath Falls , Oregon) was an American botanist . He mainly studied the flora of his homeland in the state of Oregon and that of California . Applegate wrote a monograph on the plant genus of dog teeth or tooth lilies ( Erythronium ) and gave the first description of several species of this genus. Its botanical author abbreviation is " Applegate ".

Live and act

childhood and education

Elmer Ivan Applegate was born on March 31, 1867 near Ashland , southern Oregon; According to the Family Bible, he was born on the property of his maternal grandfather, Sam Grubb. His parents were Lucien Applegate and Margaret Grubb. His paternal grandfather, Lindsey Applegate, had been a driver on the Applegate Wagon Train on the 1843 Great Migration; Elmer's father Lucien was there when he was one year old. Elmer Ivan Applegate was the oldest of six children, two boys and four girls. His siblings were Minnie (1869–1951), Fred (1871–1953), Evelyn (also called Eva, 1875–1965), Bessie (1879–1918) and Elsie (1881–1965). When Elmer was two years old, the family moved to Brookside Ranch in the Upper Swan Lake Valley, east of Klamath Falls . Father Lucien began in 1869, separated from the family, the management of the 5,000 acres (about 20 km²) ranch. A year later, his wife Margaret moved to him with three-year-old Elmer and his little sister Minnie.

The family spent many winters in California , where the children attended high school and university and received musical training. For example, Elmer was in Santa Barbara in 1884 ; the following year, 1885, his father built a house in Ontario, California . In 1891 Elmer resided in Ontario, and the following year, 1892, he completed a shorthand course at Woodbury Business College in Los Angeles . Elmer learned ranching while spending the summer at the Oregon family ranch . He showed an early botanical interest and collected large numbers of unnamed plants in his childhood.

He received his official botanical training no later than 1894 at the California State Normal School of San Jose . With his already good botanical knowledge he impressed his botany teacher Volney Rattan, who was a botany teacher at this school from 1889 until his retirement in 1906 and who wrote the popular Flora of California .

From spring 1895 Elmer attended Stanford University , where he probably studied botany for a semester with Professor William Russel Dudley . Elmer never graduated from Stanford University. A message of the Oregon Daily Journal of 24 November 1949 according to which he received an honorary degree from Stanford, is not true. Elmer did not graduate from Stanford University due to poor eyesight; the eye disease plagued him for most of his life.

From 1895 to 1896, Applegate was very successful in collecting plants, as evidenced by its collections at the Oregon State University herbarium . From 1896 and 1898 he spent five months of the year with Frederick Vernon Coville (1867-1937) at the United States Department of Agriculture ( US Department of Agriculture , abbreviated USDA ). Coville was the chief botanist and curator of the National Herbarium ; under him Applegate made plant observations and collections in the Cascade Mountains from Klamath Falls to Portland . In between - secured in the winter of 1896/1897 - he had to look after his father's farm. In the winter of 1898/1899 he worked in Washington, DC , where he organized Coville's plant collections. The collections are kept in the National Herbarium.

Wedding and time together with his wife Esther

Elmer married Esther Emily Ogden on July 5, 1899, who came from a family of settlers in Grass Valley, California. Her father Robert Ogden came to the gold deposits from Illinois in 1849 . Born near Nevada City, California, Esther grew up in California and completed her education at the University of California at Berkeley . Prior to marriage, she taught at Miss Head's Finishing School for Girls in Oakland for 16 years . For a while she did nature and geography studies for the San Bernardino Schools, and it is reasonable to assume that Elmer and Esther met in San Bernardino when Elmer was living there. Esther was a niece of the explorer Peter Skene Ogden , who as a mountain guide led a delegation of the Hudson's Bay Company from Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River to southern Oregon from 1826 to 1827 and thus became famous. For the wedding in Nevada City , California , Elmer was 32 and Esther was 34 years old. The marriage remained childless. The couple lived in Klamath Falls and owned a small farm there.

Applegate's wife, Esther, was a talented painter who worked in watercolors, pastels, and oils. She drew the plant specimens her husband had collected while he was botanizing them. She initially carried out her painting work on Empire bond paper as line drawings and then reworked them with watercolors. She also accompanied Elmer on excursions to collect plants along the Pacific coast and inland to the Rocky Mountains.

Elmer Applegate participated in the organization of the Klamath irrigation project from around 1905 and was at times first secretary of the project. He was a driving force behind the formation of the Western Reclamation Association ( National Federation of Irrigation Associations ).

In 1908 Elmer and Esther built a bungalow in Klamath Falls, on the corner of Eberlein Street and Austin Street. The main irrigation canal formed the boundary of the property. The house is still surrounded by a grove of trees that Elmer had planted.

After years in which the couple had concentrated more on running the farm and local issues, Applegate turned back to botany in 1923. From 1928 to 1934 and again from 1934 to 1938 he was Acting Director of the Dudley Herbarium at Stanford University.

Age

Applegate's wife, Esther, died of a stroke on August 9, 1931 . The loss hit Elmer hard, which is also evident from the following words he wrote to Roxana Stinchfield Ferris († 1978). Ferris was employed at Stanford University's Dudley Herbarium for 47 years , and Elmer was in contact with her on botanical subjects.

“During all the years we were together, I was rarely away from Esther, even for a day. In all my undertakings, her help and sympathey [sic] and encouragement were my inspiration. Added to this was a rare comradeship that made life very beautiful. And so I find it most difficult [sic] to bear up under the great sense of loss. Her wish has always been that I carry on no matter what happened. "

“During all of our years together, I was seldom separated from Esther, even for a single day. In all of my endeavors, I have been inspired by their help, compassion, and encouragement. In addition, she was a real comrade who made my life very beautiful. It is now extremely difficult for me to maintain my composure in the face of the severe loss. It was always her wish that I carry on, no matter what. "

Oregon dog tooth ( Erythronium oregonum )

After this decisive event, Elmer immersed himself in botany with all his might; his most important botanical contributions were made in this phase. He wrote his monograph on the genus Erythronium and a flora of the Crater Lake National Park in Oregon and one of the Northern California Lava Beds National Monument . At the age of 67, he took a position as a "Park Ranger (naturalist)" at Crater Lake National Park in 1934, which he held until 1939.

The unofficial custodian of Elmer's father Lucien Applegate's family history, Cressa Vineup (Grubb) Tennant , shared the following story about Elmer when he worked for the National Park Service at Crater Lake National Park:

“Elmer was a very slight man about 5 feet 10 inches tall who wore thick heavy glasses and couldn't see well even with those. One time, he was up at Crater Lake. They always wanted him to have somebody to go with him. He told me, 'I don't want anybody with me. They hold me back. ' Well one day he went alone and got down in Annie Creek Canyon and he got into a hornet's nest. He knocked off his glasses and they fell down into the water, clear down the mountain. He was there all night. He couldn't find his way out. Then they told him he had to have someone with him. They wouldn't let him go alone after that. Elmer, who was in his sixties at the time, said 'They just hold me back. I don't like to work with them. '”

“Elmer was a very slight man, about 1.75 meters tall, who wore thick glasses and couldn't see well even with them. One incident occurred while he was up on Crater Lake. They [meaning the other members of the park ranger staff] always urged him to take someone with him as a companion. He said to me, 'I don't want anyone with me. You're just stopping me. ' One day he was traveling alone and climbed into Annie Creek Canyon, where he found himself in a hornet's nest. He knocked off his glasses, which fell down the mountain and into the water. He stayed there all night and couldn't find the way out. They then told him that he always had to take a companion with him and have not left him alone since then. Elmer, who was in his 60s at the time, said 'You're just stopping me. I don't like working with them. '"

Until 1938 Applegate remained Honorary Acting Curator of the Dudley Herbarium at Stanford University. After that, he significantly reduced his botanical activities. In 1939 he published his most extensive work, the approximately 90-page Plants of Crater Lake National Park . It is often called the "first flora of Crater Lake", but Frederick Lyle Wynd came before it, who published a flora of Crater Lake national park in the American Midland Naturalist in 1936 .

In September 1939, Elmer sold most of his Klamath Falls property and moved to Williams in Josephine County , Oregon. There he lived near his sisters Evelyn and Elsie on Williams Creek; later his sister Minnie also lived there. The Applegate siblings were self-sufficient and therefore survived the restrictions of the Second World War without any problems. In 1946 they had good supplies of meat, fruit and vegetables, and dairy products were also available to them. Sugar, on the other hand, was scarce.

Elmer Ivan Applegate died on November 16, 1949 in his sisters' house. He was buried in Linkville Cemetery in Klamath Falls, where his wife and other relatives are also buried.

Its plant collections are in today California Academy of Sciences of Oregon State University and at Crater Lake National Park located.

research

Star dog tooth ( Erythronium tuolumnense )

Applegate did research on native plants in the western United States from California to Oregon. His most popular research area was the plant genus of dog teeth or tooth lilies ( Erythronium ), on which he wrote a monograph that was published in 1935 in the Madroño , the journal of the California Botanical Society . As a child he had already collected specimens of a species of this genus that was not yet named at the time. In 1941, together with the botanist Morton Peck from Willamette University, he described the plant species Frasera umpquaensis from the gentian family .

Here is a list of the taxa named by Applegate with an indication of the place and year of publication:

He was also active in the field of palaeobotany . He had a collection of fossil plants from near Ashland, Oregon, which he bequeathed to paleobotanist CH Knowlton . He published two new species from Applegate's collection, which he named Quercus applegatei and Ficus andersonii ; the type epithet andersonii honors Elmer's cousin Frank Anderson, who was a geologist and who discovered the LaBrea tar pits.

Honors

Castilleja applegatei

The kind epithets of the following plant species have been named in his honor:

In 1940 Applegate received an honorary doctorate from Oregon State College .

Fonts

Applegate's largest fonts are the following three:

  • The genus Erythronium: a taxonomic and distributional study of western North American species . In: Madroño . tape 3 , 1935, pp. 58-113 .
  • Plants of Lava Beds National Monument, California . In: American Midland Naturalist . tape 19 , 1938, pp. 334-367 .
  • Plants of Crater Lake National Park . In: American Midland Naturalist . tape 22 , 1939, pp. 225-314 .

His other published contributions are:

  • Two new Downingias from Oregon . In: Contrib. Dudley Herb., Stanford Univ. tape 1 , 1929, p. 97-98 .
  • Some undescribed plants form the Pacific states . In: Contrib. Dudley Herb., Stanford Univ. tape 1 , 1930, p. 151-154 .
  • New western Erythroniums . In: Contrib. Dudley Herb., Stanford Univ. tape 1 , 1933, pp. 188-190 .
  • The flora of Wizard Island . In: Nature Notes from Crater Lake National Park . tape 7 , no. 1 , 1934, p. 7–8 ( HTML version ).
  • Applegate's paint-brush on Applegate Peak . In: Nature Notes from Crater Lake National Park . tape 7 , no. 3 , 1934, pp. 10 ( HTML version ).
  • Monkey-flowers of Crater Lake . In: Nature Notes from Crater Lake National Park . tape 8 (1) , 1935, pp. 9-10 ( HTML version ).
  • Latest flowering plants in Crater Lake National Park . In: Nature Notes from Crater Lake National Park . tape 7 , no. 2 , 1935, p. 9-10 ( HTML version ).
  • Some fruits of Crater Lake plants . In: Nature Notes from Crater Lake National Park . tape 7 , no. 3 , 1935, pp. 6-9 ( HTML version ).
  • Report of Botanical Activities for 1936 . Crater Lake National Park, 1936.
  • Some plants common to Crater Lake National Park and the Lava Beds National Monument . In: Nature Notes from Crater Lake National Park . tape 9 , 1936, pp. 3–4 ( HTML version ).
  • The Flowering Seasons of Crater Lake Plants . In: Nature Notes from Crater Lake National Park . tape 11 , no. 1 , 1938 ( HTML version ).
  • Information Bulletin - EAR 7/10/37 . Crater Lake National Park, 1937.

Applegate was also the co-author of a Provisional Manual for Crater Lake National Park:

  • Provisional Manual of Information . Ed .: Crater Lake National Park. 1934 ( PDF, 2.9 MB ).

Some other Applegate fonts have survived but not published.

swell

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Frank A. Lang. In the case of Zander, Jackson City is given as the place of birth.
  2. ↑ See Oregon Trail # The Great Migration of 1843 on Wikipedia.
  3. ^ Quoted from Frank A. Lang: " Elmer's letter to his sister Minnie gives the first indication of Elmer's formal botanical education at the California State Normal School (at San Jose) ".
  4. ↑ Quotation from Frank A. Lang: “ Elmer attended Stanford University in the spring of 1895, when he probably took a botany course from Professor Dudley for a semester. ".
  5. ↑ Frank A. Lang formulates this assumption.
  6. ↑ See Klamath Reclamation Project in the English language Wikipedia.
  7. ^ According to the statement by Frank A. Lang (p. 7): At JH Barnhart: Biographical Notes upon Botanists . New York Botanical Garden, 1965. Deviating from this, 1927 is named as his inaugural year.
  8. ↑ Quoted in Frank A. Lang, p. 7.
  9. ↑ Quoted in Frank A. Lang, there p. 3. Lang calls it “ the unofficial keeper of the Lucien Applegate family history ”.
  10. ↑ See Applegate's list of publications in Frank A. Lang.

Web links
personal data
SURNAME Applegate, Elmer Ivan
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American botanist
DATE OF BIRTH March 31, 1867
PLACE OF BIRTH near Ashland , Oregon
DATE OF DEATH November 18, 1949
Place of death Williams at Klamath Falls , Oregon