Background
William Harris Ashmead was born on September 19, 1855 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States to Capt. Albert and Elizabeth (Graham) Ashmead, and came of excellent colonial ancestry on both sides.
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William Harris Ashmead was born on September 19, 1855 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States to Capt. Albert and Elizabeth (Graham) Ashmead, and came of excellent colonial ancestry on both sides.
He attended public and private schools in Philadelphia.
Early in life Ashmead entered the publishing house of J. B. Lippincott Company, of that city, and as soon as he felt that he had had sufficient experience went to Jacksonville, Florida, and, with a brother, founded a printing house for the publication of agricultural and other books. He established an agricultural daily and weekly newspaper, the Florida Dispatch, in which he soon started a scientific department and was drawn to the study of injurious insects. His earlier articles in the Dispatch were rather crude, but he was a far-sighted young man and a great worker.
He began to contribute to the scientific journals in 1879, and these contributions increased rapidly in number and importance so that at the time of his death his bibliography comprised more than 250 titles.
In 1887 he was appointed special field agent of the United States Department of Agriculture, and the following year was made entomologist to the State Agricultural Experiment Station at Lake City, Florida, publishing in this capacity one of the first entomological bulletins issued by any of the state agricultural experiment stations under the so-called Hatch Act.
In 1889 he was made an assistant in the Division of Entomology of the Department of Agriculture at Washington. The winter of 1890-1891 he spent as a student in Berlin. In 1895 he was made assistant curator of the Division of Insects in the United States National Museum, and held this position until shortly before his death. His large private collection was donated to the Museum in 1898.
When he came to Washington in 1889 he was a wealthy man, but a disastrous fire in Jacksonville destroyed the bulk of his property. The great majority of his published papers were of taxonomic character. His two great works were his Monograph of the North American Proctotrypidae, published as Bulletin 45 of the United States National Museum (1893), and his Classification of the Chalcid Flies or the Superfamily Chalcidoidea, published by the Carnegie Museum of Pittsburgh in 1904.
The preparation of these two volumes would have been enough to have monopolized the working lifetime of any ordinary man, but in addition to these he described many hundreds of new genera and species (607 genera and 3, 100 species) and published a number of papers of a broad classificatory nature, several of which revolutionized the views then accepted.
The greater part of his work dealt with North American insects, but he studied and described many forms from South America and Japan and, after the Spanish War, very many from the Philippines.
He held many offices in scientific societies. There was much in his work of lasting value. He had a keen eye and remarkable judgment in estimating the relative value of structural characters. It was fortunate that his principal interest lay in the parasitic Hymenoptera, since the value of that group in the practical control of insect pests has become more and more evident. It is probable that his admirers did not overestimate the value of his work when they called him "a genius in taxonomy. "
Throughout his life Ashmead described 3, 100 new species of insects and 607 new genera. He published over 250 papers. William was one of the most enthusiastic members of the Entomological Society. He often presented material and contributed papers to the group. He also was a committed member of the Cosmos Club.
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Member of the Cosmos Club, member of the Washington Biologists’ Field Club (1901).
Personally Ashmead was of genial temperament.
He was remembered as needing only three or four hours of sleep each night, outlasting everyone when Cosmos members got together to play cards, and as using money and checks as bookmarks. He also would not file anything, but kept it all in piles on his desk, and yet somehow knew exactly where everything was.
In 1878 he married Harriet Holmes, they had one daughter.
