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Cage 319
Harold St. John
Papers, 1912-1957

The papers of Harold St. John, b. 1895, were donated to the Washington State University Herbarium in 1958 by Dr. St. John.

BIOGRAPHY

Harold St. John was born in 1895 and attended Harvard University, graduating in 1914. Graduate education, work with a Canadian botanical survey and service in the United States army occupied him until 1920, when he received the Ph. D. from Harvard and accepted a teaching position at the State College of Washington, now Washington State University.

St. John had been a student of Merritt L. Fernald and Benjamin Robinson, the successors of Asa Gray at Harvard and the leaders of the International Rule school among American botanists. His early experience also placed considerable emphasis on field botany. Not surprisingly he became close associated of Wilhelm Suksdorf, of whom he wrote a biography.

In conjunction with such Washington botanists as Suksdorf, he began planning for a revised survey of the state’s plants in the early 1920s. Originally he had intended to produce an updated edition of Piper and Beattie’s Flora of Southeast Washington. Piper encouraged the project but died shortly after it began. St. John accordingly began to work on lines of his own, preparing a new work which ultimately appeared in 1936, by which time St. John had moved to a position at the University of Hawaii.

The 1936 Flora of Southeast Washington quickly became the standard field and herbarium guide to the vegetation of the inland Northwest and a later edition remains in wide use in the mid-1970s. The guide was characterized by what the author saw as a rigid application of the International Rule, although it also documents the extent to which the nomenclature dispute had been resolved by the mid-1930s. It also contains many references to regional and ecological variations among species, and other such ideas, which began to supersede the nomenclature dispute as one of the main development in botany. The impact of genetics, however, was little noted in the book.

As with R. Kent Beattie, St. John saw himself as a direct successor of C. V. Piper, although he took the opposite direction of Beattie in the nomenclature dispute. Consequently he remained more of a describer of an guide to plants than did Beattie who essentially became a botanical historian. As Piper’s successor, St. John was quite successful, being the most prominent certain amount of criticism for certain philosophic stands. His major failure occurred when the attempted to inspire a second generation Flora of Western Washington and could not induce anyone to complete it.

St. John remained at the University of Hawaii until retirement in 1958, after which he held various visiting assignments.

DESCRIPTION OF THE PAPERS

The papers of Harold St. John consist of his correspondence, both incoming and outgoing, relative to taxonomic studies of Northwest vegetation. The major portion dates from his years at Washington State University although a large number of items date from his years at the University of Hawaii and document his continued interest in Northwest botany. A few notes are included with the papers.

ARRANGEMENT OF THE PAPERS

The papers are arranged with the correspondence in a chronological sequence, and notes separated into a short second series. An index for this collection is available in Manuscripts Archives and Special Collections. Additional Botanical manuscripts in MASC may be found in the following collections:

Cage 53 Botanical Papers, 1881-1973
Cage 318 Beattie, Rolla Kent Papers, 1899-1956
Cage 316 Cusick, William Conklin Papers, 1906-1924
Cage 317 Piper, Charles Vancouver Papers, 1888-1926
Cage 315 Suksdorf, Wilhelm Nicolaus Papers, 1867-1935

CONTAINER LIST

Box	Folder	Dates	Approx. No. of Items
1	1	1912-1920	30
	2	1921	200
	3	1922	200
	4	1923	210
	5	1924	210
2	6	1925	285
	7	1926	200
	8	Jan-June 1927	220
	9	July-Dec 1927	240
3	10	Jan-Mar 1928	200
	11	Apr-June 1928	250
	12	July-Sept 1928	250
	13	Oct-Dec 1928	230
	14	Jan-June 1929	290
4	15	July-Dec 1929	200
	16	1930	300
	17	1931	230
	18	1933-1935	125
	19	1933-1935	125
5	20	1935-1936	150
	21	1937	130
	22	1938-1939	120
	23	1940-1943	160
	24	1944-1957	130
	25	Notes, ca. 1920-1930	50