Howell was born near Pisgah, Cooper County, Mo. , in 1842, the fifth child of Benjamin Howell, a physician, and his second wife, Elizabeth (Matthews) Howell. Dr. Howell with his family journeyed by ox-team to Oregon in 1850 and established a farm on a United States donation grant near Portland. Traditionally descended from Howel, King of South Wales, his great-great-grandfather was Job Howell, born in that country about 1650. He emigrated to America and settled near Germantown, Pa. Joseph Howell, the grandfather of Thomas, married Sarah Rittenhouse.
Education
Thomas went to school not more than six months, but his father had a good education, including some knowledge of mineralogy, and the boy, partly by the aid of his father but more by self-instruction, acquired a little knowledge of English and, later in life, a scanty bit of Latin.
Career
His occupation was that of a farmer and stockraiser. In the course of the years his interest in the indigenous flora matured into a systematic study. By 1877 he had begun to build up an herbarium; and for a long period, especially from 1885 to 1895, the specimens of his collections, validated by a printed list, were made into sets and distributed to the important botanical centers of the eastern United States and Europe. Over fifty species were new to science and prove the success of Howell as a collector.
Led untiringly by his quest for new forms into the remote parts of the broken Siskiyou Mountains, he was the first to discover one of the most remarkable of all the coniferous trees of the earth, the weeping spruce. This remarkable find should have been named Picea Howellii, but the rather dull Sereno Watson, to whom the material was sent, described it as Picea Breweriana, though W. H. Brewer's connection with it was purely fanciful.
By 1881 Howell had carried his task forward sufficiently to issue a list of all the flowering plants of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, expanded by 1887 into A Catalogue of the Known Plants (Phaenogamia and Pteridophyta) of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, enumerating 2, 152 species and 227 varieties. There existed however, no descriptive account of the vegetation of this region, and Howell set about the preparation of a flora. Lacking the means to employ a compositor for his manuscript when it was finished, but possessing abundantly independence and reliance, he at once undertook the task or learning the typesetter's art. He was so illiterate that printers taught him how to divide words into syllables. The hand-set pages of type were carried, a few at a time, from his little village of Clackamas into Portland and put upon a power press; and thus was slowly and painfully finished, from 1897 to 1903, his Flora of Northwest America. Woodsman and mountaineer that he was and lacking scholarly facility with a pen, he wrote few of the descriptions, so that the work unfortunately contains too little of his own field knowledge. He was indeed almost unlearned in English spelling though he erred less frequently in Latin words.
Although thus handicapped, he had a sound and just comprehension of what was needed, and he organized diagnoses of genera and species scattered in the works of many writers into a pioneer flora, which, considering the circumstances of its production, is balanced, judicious, and highly useful. Even after more than a quarter of a century it remains the only flora for the three states which it covers. In the woods and fields Howell was entirely at home, but his nature did not protect him from city sharpers, who robbed him of his inheritance.
His death occurred at Portland, Ore.
Achievements
Howell is considered one of the top three self-taught botanists of his era for the Pacific Northwest; the other two being Wilhelm Nikolaus Suksdorf and William Conklin Cusick.
Over 30 species of plants are named howellii. Howell donated his collection of approximately 10, 000 plant specimens to the University of Oregon. He spent the 1903-1904 academic year cataloging the collection for the university.
Thomas J. Howell is one of the 158 names of people who are notable in the early history of Oregon painted in the friezes of the House and Senate chambers of the Oregon State Capitol. Howell's name is in the House side.
His family's home, the Bybee–Howell House, is on the National Register of Historic Places. It was purchased by Howell's brothers Joseph and John in 1873 from James and Julia Bybee and was adjacent to their parents' home.
Personality
Simple in manner, unaffected in speech, of few wants, but of great capacity for fortitude, he asked little of the world.
Connections
It was not until he was fifty that he married Effie (Hudson) McIlwane, a widow.
