\tBrowse the article Charles Edwin Bessey\tCharles Edwin Bessey
Bessey, Charles Edwin (1845-1915), an American botanist and administrator, developed world-class botanical programs in the United States. In addition to his own research, he focused on training the next generation of scientists. An impressive number of his nearly 4,000 students went on to become prominent botanists themselves.
Bessey's scientific and administrative contributions were diverse and exceptional. He was founder and director of two leading university botany programs. He also wrote two botany textbooks. He devised a classification system for flowering plants that has become, with minor revisions, a standard. He directed a tree-planting experiment that eventually led to the formation of the Nebraska National Forest, the first artificial national forest in the world. He helped establish the federal program to fund state agricultural experiment stations. He also used his influence to promote a number of far-sighted causes, including the preservation of wildflowers and legal protection of California's sequoia trees.
In 1841, Bessey's father, Adnah Bessey, a schoolteacher and farmer, married one of his pupils, Margaret Ellenberger. Four years later, Bessey was born in Wayne County, Ohio. In addition to home schooling, Bessey attended rural schools and an academy in Seville, Ohio. In 1866, he enrolled at Michigan Agricultural College (now Michigan State University) in East Lansing. Three years later, he received a B.S. in botany. In 1870, he left Michigan to become the first instructor of botany and horticulture at Iowa State College of Agriculture in Ames. For three years, Bessey's one-room apartment served as both his living area and a makeshift office. In 1871, Bessey began to incorporate laboratory work to his undergraduate botany course. The following year, he was promoted to professor.
Starting in 1871, Bessey took part in meetings between Iowa farmers and faculty members as part of the Farmers' Institutes. For three months in 1872 and 1873, he studied at Harvard College Botanical Garden with Asa Gray, a leading botanist of the day. While there, he learned the role that morphology and cell structure play in the classification of plants. In 1875. Bessey was one of the founders of the Iowa Academy of Sciences and gave a series of lectures on botany at the University of California at Berkeley. He also returned to Harvard in 1875 to study
[1] 