As a requirement of graduation, students in the elementary course had to take one term of botany under the guidance of Professor Joseph F. Barton. At the end of the class, they had to produce an herbarium of at least 40 species of plants. Shippensburg University Archives & Special Collections has six herbaria produced by Dr. Barton's students.
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| An herbarium by R.H. Cunningham includes an ornate cover lettered in gold ink. |
What's an herbarium? In the case of CVSNS, it was a scrapbook of dried plants and specimens, and their descriptions. Descriptions included common and botanical names, and in some cases, where and when the students collected the plants. The projects were small-scale siblings to larger herbaria collected by scientists and large universities.
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| In this herbarium Dill Stevens, Class of 1899, arrayed Judas Tree specimens in the shape of a cross. |
According to the CVSNS catalog, botany students were tasked with learning how to observe plant life in order to make identification on sight. To do this, botany classes took at least one exploratory excursion a week for field work.
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| Mary Kerr Hays Main's herbarium includes botanical information about the blood root. |
Several of the herbaria in the archives include listings of where the students found the plants. Locations listed include "Old Main Veranda," "C.V.R.R. tracks" or local farm fields identified by farmer.
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| Wild carrot specimens included in Fannie Geiger's herbarium include the name of the field where she collected the specimen and the date of the collection. |
Other herbaria include general habitat information where plants could be found. Although students were only required to include 40 specimens in their books, the Class of 1897 was reported to include between 60 and 70 in their collections.
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| Pampas Grass collected by Nellie Geiger specified the plant could be found in lowlands. |
Each of the books is tied together with ribbon or cord, and includes dried, pressed specimens mounted on thick pages. The six books in the archives date from 1892 to 1899 and at 120-125 years old, many of them are in great shape, offering a fascinating look at class projects in the 1890s. In 2017, scientists are using historic herbaria to study the history of plants and how ecosystems have evolved or survived over time.
You can see herbaria as well as other scrapbooks from students of the past at Archives & Special Collections. Just make an appointment by emailing specialcollections@ship.edu.
Sources:
Cumberland Valley Normal School Catalog, 1888-1889.
Cumberland Valley Normal School Catalog, 1893-1894, 41.
Normal School Herald, Shippensburg, PA, July 1897, 28-29.
Fascinating!
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