A little about us—we collect USDA materials, heavily leaning toward research and history.

And sometimes other stuff. We are reasonable staffed, with 5 professional FTEs and one

almost-FT technician. I have no idea how many rare books we have, but the oldest is an

Herbal from 1509.

We have both the manuscript and published volumes of James Bolton’s History of Fungeses.

We also have his unpublished manuscript for Icones Fungorum Spontenascentium, with

select images from that work shown beside the bound volumes. This Brit loved his

mushrooms. With the History manuscript, we have 3 specimens from volume 1—the Kew

Gardens have others. Most of the collections I’m going to talk about have samples or

specimens in them, because I suspect that’s something that makes us unique.

This appears to be a 3-volume set of rare books.

…but it is, in fact, a 3-box set of botanical specimens.

There are dozens of specimens between the pages

Some better preserved and with more text than others.

Romeyn Beck Hough was an American botanist so enamored of wood that he invented a

machine for slicing it. Unsurprisingly, he also liked forestry and natural history in general,

and we have a number of journals chronicling his journey across the states in search of

trees.

These journals surprised us with some leaves between its leaves! My coworker carefully put

them in a sleeve of Mylar to keep them from crumbling. Sometimes specimens require

more careful care—we’ve sent grape leaves from our Presetele watercollection to CCAHA to

be carefully pieced back together and conserved.

The final result of hough’s journey and invention was a 14-volume bound set of American

wood samples, with a separate volume of explanatory text. We have several editions—

Volume 7 from the 1890s and 19502 are shown here.

Here are the wood samples beneath the covers, sliced with his invention. For reasons we’ve

not yet discerned, the order of samples was re-arranged in the 1957 edition.

Charles Valentine Riley brought his talent for natural history drawing and description to the

USDA in 1878, as the 2nd chief entomologist. Shown here are two pages from his Natural

History of Insects, which he put together in 1858 at the tender age of 15. This collection also

includes some samples in insect, rather than plant, form, which I haven’t included because

yuck.

I love this collection, because of the many “Tramps” journals contained within. Charles C.

Plitt taught botany in Maryland from 1891 to 1932, and he records his tramps through the

woods of MD, DE, and NY in great detail..

With the occasional sample. I also greatly enjoy his notes about experimental camp

cooking.

The USDA Fiber Collection includes hundreds of samples and documents related to fibrous

plants other than cotton.

Our favorite is a jar of colorful milkweed threads, which contained a note that it should be

refrigerated, but not why.

Abraham Stoesz was a soil conservationist at the USDA from the late 1920s to the early

1960s. This collection is composed entirely of 35mm slides and small books of field notes.

The last are divided between green memo books and simpler card stock field notepads. He

clearly preferred the memo books, as the notepads are each about one quarter full to the 3

quarter full memo books.

As part of his job, he looked at plants which help prevent erosion, leading to this sample

between pages of notes. He’s also one of the few doodlers in evidence in our collections.

The Forest Service History Collection contains the things you’d expect—oral histories,

photos of parks,

Photos of people enjoying the parks, etc. It also mysteriously contains a thick binder titled

“Forestry and Outerspace.”

This was apparently some sort of diplomatic/publicity stunt, were seeds were taken into

space on one of the Apollo missions, and gifted to other nations. Who wouldn’t want their

very own “moon tree?”

Finally, I wanted to end with the message that only YOU can prevent forest fires. We have

two Smokey Bear—no definite articles here!—collections, which between them have

hundreds of photos,

Paintings,

..and photos of people holding those paintings. In this photo, Rudy Wendelin and his wife

are holding the painting featured on the previous slide. Wendelin was not the first Smokey

artist, but he is the most well known.

That’s it! I am indebted to my colleagues for their help in this presentation, because they

know far more about our collections than this computer nerd. My thanks especially go to

Sara Lee, who IS our collections database.