John Gill Lemmon

Background

John Gill Lemmon was born at Lima, Michigan, the son of William and Amila (Hudson) Lemmon.

Education

He attended the common schools and, for a time, the University of Michigan.

Career

Enlisting in the Union army in 1862, he was captured in 1864 and held in Andersonville Prison until the end of the war. In 1866, his health broken, he emigrated to Sierra Valley, California. Here, for a period of eight years, he wrote almost weekly letters to California newspapers, detailing in a fluent style his embittered recollections of the Civil War. Then one day a group of native herbs in the dooryard of his cabin attracted his attention and, recalling an early training in botany, he sent specimens of them to Asa Gray. Two of these were new species and one was named for him. He was of a highly enthusiastic temperament, and the incident changed the current of his life.

His health partially restored by the new interest which meant to him undying fame, he eagerly set about the botanical exploration of wide untouched areas in California, Nevada, and finally Arizona, meanwhile keeping up for two decades a spirited correspondence with his botanical patron at Harvard. Highly successful in his herbarizings, he gratified his appetite for publicity by furnishing the newspaper public well-written articles on the wonders of California's vegetation and his own numerous discoveries at almost weekly intervals for a period of over twenty years. More than any other man of his time he acquainted the people of his adopted state with the existence of a science of botany.

Meantime he earned his living by keeping a small private school, and by reason of this occupation, assumed the title, professor. When Asa Gray came to California in 1876, Lemmon, ardent hero-worshiper, went to meet him, thrilled but with a secret fear that Gray would regard his professorship as irregular. The story of their meeting has been preserved: Gray, who was a little man, laid his hand with understanding kindness on the shoulder of the tall ungainly Lemmon and assured him that he was more of a professor than many of greater pretensions. Lemmon, glorified by the benediction, wore proudly to the end of his life the title thus confirmed by the great Harvard botanist.

His lack of money, however, tangled the skein of all his activities and efforts. Income derived from the collection and sale of botanical specimens proved insufficient for his needs, and Lemmon secured appointment to superintend California's exhibit in forestry and botany at the Cotton Centennial Exposition in New Orleans in 1884.

He next promoted the movement to create a state board of forestry and was appointed its botanist in 1888. He made two reports on the forest trees of California "Pines of the Pacific Slope" (1888) and "Conebearers of California" (1890), in the biennial reports of the California State Board of Forestry. As botanist to the state board he served four years. California was still too backward to understand the need of scientific forestry, however, and the political causes which had set up the forestry board soon brought about its end. By way of popular education, Lemmon now issued a number of booklets and pamphlets on the trees, such as Hand-book of West-American Cone-bearers (1892) and How to Tell the Trees; and Forest Endowment of the Pacific Slope (1902), thus diffusing among the people a knowledge of the state's forests and helping to prepare public opinion for the established forestry policy which came after his death.

For the last twenty-eight years of his life he was a resident of Oakland, where he and his wife busied themselves with many civic and reform activities. He died in his seventy-seventh year, survived by the helpmeet who had energized his life.

Achievements

• His reports on the forest trees were the first attempt to undertake an account of the Pacific Coast forests from the standpoint of forestry and had high value and attracted world-wide attention. Though they are now more than forty years old, foresters of the present day recognize the similarity of Lemmon's canons of forest management to those of present-day practice. During his successful career he discovered hundreds of previously unknown plants and establised the Lemmon Herbarium, now part of UC Berkeley's University and Jepson Herbaria. Mount Lemmon, a fine peak in the Tucson Range of Arizona, where he did valuable field work, was named for him.

Connections

In 1880 Lemmon married Sara Allen Plummer. He was gentle and she firm, but the two by their interests and instincts were admirably suited to each other; and they agreed to dedicate their lives to botanical science and to all altruistic movements.

Father:

William Lemmon

Mother:

Amila (Hudson) Lemmon

Spouse:

Sara Allen Plummer