—botanist, conservationist, historical writer, educator, and president of the State University of Iowa—was born Thomas Huston McBride in Rogersville, Tennessee, the oldest of six children of Rev. James Bovard McBride and Sarah (Huston) McBride. (By 1895 McBride had restored the spelling of his last name to its earlier Scottish form, Macbride.) The elder McBride, an ordained Presbyterian minister, served a rural congregation in eastern Tennessee in 1847, but when his antislavery pronouncements from the pulpit drew angry opposition from many parishioners, he moved his family to Iowa. By 1857 Rev. McBride was preaching at New London in southeastern Iowa and, for the remainder of his life, served various churches in the state.

As a child, Thomas Macbride enjoyed reading and took part in the chores of farm work: wood chopping and, later, lathing and carpentry work. While in his teens he attended Lenox College in Hopkinton, Iowa, where he met Samuel Calvin, a natural science instructor at the college who, like Macbride, was destined to later join the faculty at the state's university in Iowa City. In the years to follow, the two collaborated on numerous botanical studies with an emphasis on the prairie. In 1869 Macbride, at age 21, graduated with a B.A. from Monmouth College in Monmouth, Illinois. The following year he joined that school's faculty as an instructor in mathematics and modern languages. In 1874 he received an M.A. from the same institution. On December 31, 1875, he married Harriet Diffenderfer, a student at the college, and they had four children.

Calvin, by that time a professor of natural science at the State University of Iowa, continued to work with Macbride on field studies during the summer months and, in 1878, hired Macbride as an assistant professor of natural science. Macbride rose to the rank of professor by 1883. In 1902 he was named head of the university's Department of Botany and served as secretary of the faculty from 1887 to 1893. In 1914, following the resignation of university president John G. Bowman, Macbride was named acting president, a position that became permanent several months later. He retired from university service in 1916. The Hall of Natural Science, a building constructed in 1904 near Old Capitol on the central campus, was renamed in his honor following his death in 1934.

Macbride's academic interests included languages, mathematics, and the physical sciences, but it was his love for botany that defined his scholarly work. He established himself as an authority on fungi with his 1899 book, North American Slime Moulds, a work that became a standard text in many college classrooms. He also contributed articles to numerous popular and scholarly publications and in 1928 published a personal memoir, In Cabins and Sod-Houses. In addition to his teaching and administrative duties, Macbride was largely responsible for the early development of the university extension program; he lectured in many Iowa towns and promoted the concept of the university as a public service to benefit the citizens of the state.

Outside the university, Macbride contributed to the growing professionalization in the field of botanical studies. He served as vice president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, chairing its botany section, and was president of the Iowa Academy of Science. His other professional memberships included the American Forestry Association, the National Conservation Association, and the Botany Society of America, and he was a fellow of the Geological Society of America. Macbride chaired the Iowa Forestry Commission, served on the State Conservation Commission, and contributed extensively to the Iowa Geological Survey's projects and publications. While working with the Geological Survey, Macbride traveled around the state, notably the Okoboji Lakes region in northwestern Iowa, where in 1909 he established the Iowa Lakeside Laboratory, a five-acre tract on Miller's Bay, West Okoboji Lake. The laboratory, coupled with the campus's facilities in Iowa City, provided an opportunity for scholars to examine botanical issues relating to agriculture and plant diseases, in addition to studies of wetlands and prairie.

Macbride's love for the outdoors and its preservation inspired him to become the first president of the Iowa Park and Forestry Association, organized in 1901. With great passion, he promoted the development of state and local parks, including the lake and park that bear his name in Johnson County, north of Iowa City.

Following his retirement from the university in 1916, Thomas and Harriet Macbride moved to Seattle, where they could be near their son, Philip D. Macbride, and their daughter, Jean Macbride. (Two other daughters–Elizabeth and Ruth–died in infancy.) Harriet Macbride died on May 28, 1927; the following year, Thomas returned to Iowa City to be recognized for his 50 years of service to the university with an honorary LL.D. He died in Seattle at age 85.

Sources Macbride's correspondence and other personal papers are in the University Archives, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City. His memoir On the Campus was published in 1916 and reprinted in 1925; In Cabins and Sod-Houses appeared in 1928. See also Mary Winifred Conklin, "The History of the State University of Iowa: Thomas Huston Macbride" (master's thesis, State University of Iowa, 1945); Mary Winifred Conklin Schertz and Walter L. Myers, Thomas Huston Macbride (1947); and Stow Persons, The University of Iowa in the Twentieth Century: An Institutional History (1990). For Macbride's contributions to the state's conservation movement, see Rebecca Conard, Places of Quiet Beauty: Parks, Preserves, and Environmentalism (1997).

Contributor: David Mccartney

Information Directly From: The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa - University of Iowa Press Digital Editions

—botanist, educator, conservationist, and state parks advocate—was the second of five children born to Louis Carl Pammel and Sophie (Freise) Pammel, Prussian immigrants who settled in LaCrosse, Wisconsin. As the oldest son, Louis was expected to follow in his father's footsteps, so after completing the fifth grade, he spent several years apprenticed to his father, a prosperous farmer and community leader. Louis's natural inquisitiveness, however, propelled him to read widely from the family library and to experiment on his own with bees and honey. Determined to go to college, at age 17 he published a "Letter of Inquiry about Bergamot" (a honey plant) in the American Bee Journal. Persuaded that he had the makings of a scholar, his parents permitted him to leave farming.

Pammel studied botany under William Trelease at the University of Wisconsin, graduating in 1885. He then went to Chicago to study medicine but quickly abandoned that career path when he received an offer to work at Harvard University as an assistant to botanist William G. Farlow. Pammel might have taken up graduate study at Harvard except that, a year later, Trelease moved to St. Louis to become the first director of the Missouri Botanical Garden and asked Pammel to become his assistant. Pammel accepted Trelease's offer and moved to St. Louis, where he began graduate studies at Washington University. In 1887 he married Augusta Marie Emmel, whom he had met during his brief sojourn in Chicago. During the next decade, six children were born to the couple, which undoubtedly contributed to his delay in earning a doctoral degree (1899).

Trelease and Farlow assisted Pammel in securing a post as professor of botany at Iowa Agricultural College, where he began teaching in 1889. Pammel immediately established the pattern of "volcanic, almost furious activity" that biographer Marjorie Pohl observes was the hallmark of his character. He continued to work on his doctorate for the next decade, during which time his family also continued to grow. As a teacher and researcher, he had expansive interests in economic botany, plant pathology, bacteriology, mycology, horticulture, forestry, bees and pollination, seeds and germination, flowers, grasses, climate, ecology, and conservation. Much of his research was carried out under the auspices of the Botanical Seed Laboratory, which he established at Iowa State College in 1906. He often spent summers conducting research for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which enabled him to build the collections of the Iowa State Herbarium. His name lives on in the taxonomy of several plants, including Melica subulata var. pammelii (Scribn.) C. L. Hitch. (Pammel's oniongrass), Hordeum pammelii Scribn. & Ball (a grass), Aecidium pammelii Trelease (a rust), and Senecio pammelii Green-man (a composite). A prolific scholar, Pammel authored or coauthored six scholarly books (a seventh was published posthumously); wrote nearly 700 articles, research notes, reports, educational circulars, and addresses; edited the Major John F. Lacey Memorial Volume for the Iowa Park and Forestry Association; and penned two reminiscences.

Pammel seems never to have erected artificial boundaries between the professional, public, and personal aspects of his life, and the thrust of his scholarship was always directed toward practical applications and public education. Through the Iowa State Extension Service, he made his services, and those of his students, available to municipalities and state agencies. He analyzed public water supplies and sewage disposal systems. For the state legislature, he helped write bills addressing agricultural and horticultural needs. He oversaw the preparation of exhibits and educational pamphlets for the annual Iowa State Fair and established a plant laboratory on the fairgrounds. He directed the preparation of exhibits on crop diseases as part of Iowa's displays at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis. He initiated annual plant disease surveys for the state, public service work that brought national and international recognition–in 1919 he was called upon to serve as one of four distinguished scientists on the American Plant Pest Committee, a joint U.S.Canada initiative. He also served as president of the Iowa Academy of Science (1892-1893, 1923) and the Iowa Park and Forestry Association (1904-1906). Additionally, he served on the State Forestry Commission (1908-1929), the State Geological Board (1918-1929), the Plant Life Commission (1917), and the State Board of Conservation (1918-1927). In great demand as a public speaker, Pammel often spoke before chambers of commerce, men's groups, women's clubs, and campus organizations; at high school and college graduation ceremonies; and at churches.

Pammel made his most enduring contributions to the state of Iowa as chairman of the Board of Conservation, precursor of the State Conservation Commission and today's Department of Natural Resources. Under his direction, Iowa became a leader in the development of state parks. The National Conference on State Parks (NCSP) held its 1921 organizational meeting in Des Moines, and when the NCSP made its first national assessment of state parks in 1925, Iowa ranked fourth in terms of the number of parks established. The park acquisition list he developed, published in 1919 as Iowa Parks: Conservation of Iowa Historic, Scenic and Scientific Areas, set resource conservation above recreation and determined the course of park development throughout his lifetime. When the Devil's Backbone area of Madison County was renamed and dedicated as Pammel State Park in 1930, the Board of Conservation cited his work "for the cause of conservation" as "the most valuable single influence in this movement" in the state of Iowa. Deteriorating health prompted Pammel to relinquish his chairmanship in 1927, although he continued to be a forceful advocate. When he died in 1931, Iowa had 40 designated state parks and preserves, and the Board of Conservation had jurisdiction over 7,500 acres of land, 41,000 acres of lake waters, 800 miles of rivers, and 4,200 acres of drained lake beds.

Sources Pammel's papers (ca. 24 linear feet) and collected works are located in the Iowa State University Library, Ames. Marjorie Con-ley Pohl's lengthy biographical article is essential reading; see "Louis H. Pammel: Pioneer Botanist, A Biography," Proceedings of the Iowa Academy of Science 92 (1985), 1–50. Pammel's authoritative role in creating the Iowa state park system is detailed in Rebecca Conard, Places of Quiet Beauty: Parks, Preserves, and Environmentalism (1997).

Contributor: Rebecca Conard

Information Directly From: The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa - University of Iowa Press Digital Editions

–natural scientist, civil engineer, educator, conservationist, and political activist—was the son of Maria Theresa (Tit) Shimek and Francis Joseph Shimek, "freethinkers" from Bohemia (now the Czech Republic) who emigrated to the United States in 1848 and settled on a small farm near Shueyville, north of Iowa City. Of eight children born to Frank and Maria, Bohumil was one of only three who survived to adulthood. After his mother died in 1866, his father sold the farm and moved to Iowa City, where he worked as a cobbler. Throughout much of Shimek's childhood and youth, the family lived in poverty. He claimed to have begun earning his own keep at age 11, and he worked his way through college as a collector for botany, taxidermy, and zoology classes at the State University of Iowa (UI). He studied civil engineering at the UI, receiving a C.E. degree in 1883.

From 1883 to 1885 Shimek worked as a surveyor (often pro bono for Johnson County), and from 1885 to 1888 he taught sciences at Iowa City High School and Iowa City Academy, a college preparatory school. In 1887 he married Anna Elizabeth Konvalinka, and over the years the couple had five children. From 1888 to 1890 Shimek taught zoology at the University of Nebraska. Although he had no formal training in zoology, Shimek had picked up knowledge about the natural sciences from his father, a florist in his native country, and from his own specimen collecting. In 1890 the Shimeks returned to Iowa City when he received an appointment as instructor of botany at the UI. He taught botany from 1890 to 1931, serving as chair of the department from 1914 to 1919. Along the way, he took his graduate degree. Inasmuch as he could not be instructor and student in the same department at the same time, he earned his M.S. in civil engineering (1902). In 1895 he became curator of the herbarium, a post he held until his death in 1937. Fluent in Czech, he went to Czechoslovakia in 1914 as an exchange professor at Charles University in Prague, which also awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1919. After Anna died in 1922, Shimek married Marjorie Meerdink in 1924. No children were born of this union.

Shimek's interest in the natural sciences was both broad and deep. He conducted scientific fieldwork throughout the Midwest, Southeast, and Southwest as well as in Nicaragua. His personal research collections included 2.4 million shell specimens, which, following his instructions, were sold to the Smithsonian Institution after he died. Behind the Shimek home in Iowa City (on the National Register of Historic Places) stands a concrete block building he erected to hold his own collections of native and exotic flora. He served as president of the Iowa Academy of Science in 1904-1905, assisted the Iowa State Geological Survey from 1907 to 1929, and from time to time served as director of Iowa Lakeside Laboratory at Lake Okoboji. He was a charter member of the Iowa Park and Forestry Association as well as its successor, the Iowa Conservation Association. In 1919, along with Louis Pammel, Thomas Macbride, and others, he helped to organize the American School of Wildlife Protection, an annual summer field school at McGregor Heights that thrived until World War II. He also was active in the Izaak Walton League, but in 1927, while he was president of the Iowa Ikes, he broke with the organization over wildlife resource issues along the Mississippi River and helped to form the rival Will H. Dilg League. Among Shimek's wide-ranging interests, he is most remembered for his study of loess fossils and plant ecology. Although he never finished an intended book on the plant geography of Iowa, Shimek published more than 200 notes and articles on scientific topics and conservation issues.

During his lifetime, Shimek was equally well known for his support of public education and his work on behalf of the Czech nationalist movement. He was active in many cultural, fraternal, and civic organizations, serving multiple terms as an Iowa City alderman as well as on the boards of the Iowa City Public Library and Iowa City schools. During World War I, he traveled throughout the United States giving more than 200 public addresses on behalf of Czech freedom. It has been said that he was the "most distinguished, best known and most influential Czech in America [ from] 1910 to 1920."

Shimek State Forest in southeast Iowa was named in his honor. Two Iowa City schools also werenamed for him, and the library at Iowa Lakeside Laboratory bears his name.

Sources Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, holds a small collection of Shimek's papers, including "Notes for a Biography of Bohumil Shimek," compiled by botanist Henry S. Conard in 1945– 1946 but never published. The University of Iowa Paleontology Repository holds a collection of Shimek's field photographs. The Smithsonian Institution Archives holds his shell collection and related correspondence as well as field notes, diaries, photographs, and a variety of other materials documenting his scientific explorations. Walter Loehwing's Bohumil Shimek (1947) is a brief biography.

Contributor: Rebecca Conard

Information Directly From: The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa - University of Iowa Press Digital Editions

–renowned geologist and State University of Iowa professor—was born in Wigtonshire, Scotland. In 1851 the family moved to a farm near Saratoga, New York, then within a few years to Buchanan County, Iowa. An excellent student, Samuel taught school in nearby Quasqueton at age 16. On the Iowa frontier, he reveled in exploring the vanishing native prairie landscape.

Calvin attended Lenox Collegiate Institute near Hopkinton, interrupted by a short Civil War stint in the Federal army in 1864. Calvin returned to Lenox as both student and teacher of natural sciences and mathematics, also serving briefly as the college's acting president and as Delaware County Superintendent of Schools. Calvin married Mary Louise Jackson, a Lenox student and daughter of one of the college's founders, in 1865. The couple had two children, Alice and William John.

While teaching at Lenox, Calvin forged a strong friendship with a student, Thomas Macbride. The two took regular field trips to explore the flora and geology of the surrounding prairies. Calvin left Lenox in 1869 to be a school principal in Dubuque, but he and Macbride continued their field trips, which soon ranged across the state of Iowa and throughout the United States and into Canada.

As Calvin's teaching reputation grew, the State University of Iowa invited him to deliver a series of lectures. They were so well received that in 1873 the university invited Calvin to serve on the faculty in natural sciences and as curator of the University Cabinet, the school's collection of geological specimens, fossils, and mounted animals and birds. Calvin combined lectures with laboratory and fieldwork, the latter two applied elements controversial among professors at the time. Calvin also employed photography in his teaching, becoming a renowned photographer and amassing a collection of 7,000 photos. As his lectures earned a stellar reputation, many students attended to observe their rhetorical and literary craft. Calvin's published writing also became known for its aesthetic eloquence as well as its scientific precision. Calvin took seriously his role as public scholar, seeing geology as both a scientific and cultural pursuit, a subject for specialization as well as general education. He became well known across the state for his public "illustrated talks" (with slides) given before all manner of clubs and schools, predating the university's development of a formal extension program.

One of Calvin's perennial complaints was about the governing board's unwillingness to enhance the paltry Cabinet collection. He made his personal specimens available to his students, but the maintenance and continued enlargement of that collection were costly. Eventually, the board appropriated $150 for a field trip. An extensive excavation trip yielded many geological and fossil specimens, although the expenses exceeded the board's modest allocation.

As the science program grew, Thomas Macbride was hired as Calvin's teaching assistant in 1878. Their personal and professional friendship only deepened over the next 30 years as Macbride developed into a highly respected professor of botany, allowing Calvin to specialize in zoology and geology. The pair continued their field collections, developing a renowned herbarium and transforming the Cabinet into the Museum of Natural History.

As teaching and curatorial duties became more demanding, the natural history staff grew to include such notables as Gilbert Houser, Charles Nutting, George Kay, and Bohumil Shimek. So, too, grew the need for larger facilities. In 1885 a new science building was opened, which was famously moved across the street in 1905, where it continues to stand as Calvin Hall on the University of Iowa campus. Eventually, new facilities were needed again, and the construction of what is now called Macbride Hall was authorized in 1904.

Although Calvin's knowledge was mostly self-acquired, Cornell College (Iowa) conferred a Master of Arts degree on him in 1874, and his alma mater awarded him a Ph.D. in 1888, followed by an LL.D. from Cornell in 1904. Over time, Calvin gave up many of his duties and narrowed his academic focus to geology and paleontology. His stellar reputation led to his appointment in 1892 as Iowa's State Geologist. In that position he led the third–and most complete–State Geological Survey. Calvin was formally installed as head of the Department of Geology in 1902. Within a quarter century, he had developed his lone professorship into three separate, highly respected departments staffed by eight professors and numerous assistants, giving the sciences a vibrant presence on the State University of Iowa campus.

Calvin also garnered a national reputation as one of the preeminent paleontologists of his day. He became especially well known for his discovery of Devonian fish fossils in the local area and did foundational work in the area of Pleistocene fauna. Calvin contributed more than 70 scholarly articles, reports, and other writings to the annual Iowa Geological Survey reports, the natural history bulletin he established at Iowa, and numerous scientific journals. He founded and edited the American Geologist, and he filled leadership roles in the geological section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Geological Society of America. Calvin ascended to the presidency of the latter in 1908, the same year he advanced to the presidency of the Iowa Academy of Science and was invited by President Theodore Roosevelt to the White House to participate in one of the first national conferences on conservation.

In 1904 the State University of Iowa threw a gala celebration for Calvin's 30 years at Iowa, and it was the august professor's wish to go on to complete four decades of service. He developed heart disease, however, and his health gradually failed. He died at age 71 on April 17, 1911. University classes were canceled on the day of his funeral at the Presbyterian church, of which Calvin was a devout member. He was buried in Iowa City's Oakland Cemetery. Although his wife Mary's health was poor throughout much of her adult life, she outlived Samuel by 11 years.

Sources A file of Calvin materials is at the State Historical Society of Iowa, Iowa City. A collection of 4,000 of Calvin's photographs is in the University Archives, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City. An online collection is maintained by the University of Iowa Department of Geoscience at www.uiowa.edu/~calvin/calvin.htm. Biographies of Samuel Calvin are H. Foster Bain, Samuel Calvin (1911); and Harrison John Thornton, "Samuel Calvin," in Centennial Memories (1947). Additional information can be found in Stow Persons, The University of Iowa in the Twentieth Century: An Institutional History (1990); and John C. Gerber, A Pictorial History of the University of Iowa, expanded ed. (2005).

Contributor: Thomas K. Dean

Information Directly From: The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa - University of Iowa Press Digital Editions