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Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,333

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This is the grave of E. Lucy Braun.

Born in 1889 in Cincinnati, Emma Lucy Braun grew up pretty well off and had parents who supported her love of the outdoors. Eschewing her given first name pretty quickly, she was an independent young woman who was extremely interested in the study of nature, especially plants. She started collecting plants for study and over time would develop one of the largest collections in the United States. The Smithsonian later acquired it. She attended the University of Cincinnati at a time when this was still fairly uncommon for women. She stayed there for three degrees, culminating in a Ph.D, in botany in 1914.

Now, what’s especially remarkable about Braun is that she actually got hired at the college level to teach botany and biology. It was so, so hard for female scientists to get jobs equivalent to their education and would be for a very long time to come. Some, such as Alice Hamilton, basically created their own fields. Others, such as Rachel Carson some years later, took lower level government jobs and then supported themselves through writing. Perhaps because botany wasn’t seen as an “important” science, Braun was able to succeed in this field. She would teach at Cincinnati for the rest of her life. In fact, she never lived outside the city. She started out at ranks below assistant professor. Whether those were temporary positions or not, I don’t know. Academia was different a century ago. But she ended up as a full professor, though it took her until 1946 to get there.

Working with her sister Annette as her assistant, Braun became a master of American plants. She was mostly concerned with the beloved hardwood forests of her home region, but she took many trips to the West too to study and also probably just to see the beauty of the region. In the east, much of her work was done in Appalachia. This was not such a safe space for people to tramp around (in fact, having once got lost going down the wrong side of a West Virginia hill and confronting some very angry dogs, let’s just say that I wouldn’t be overly comfortable doing so today) due to the region’s rampant moonshining. But she made a deal with the locals. She didn’t care about their shine. It was nothing to her. So she said that she would never report on where any liquor manufacture was taking place and that was good enough for the locals.

It was not until after she retired in 1948 that Braun really became nationally known. Mostly that had to do with her 1950 book Deciduous Forests of Eastern North America, the culmination of her lifetime of study. It was seen as the most complete understanding of these forests ever published. She also worked up the idea of plant variation over time and space and did pioneering work comparing the plants around Cincinnati to what people had cataloged there shortly after white colonization and settlement, showing significant changes in the location of plant communities and species ranges over a century. She discovered several new species as well. Braun was a strong conservationist, involved in many campaigns to preserve areas for the future. Her work was among those that eventually got folded into the foundation of The Nature Conservancy in 1951. She also mentored female graduate students at a time when it was unusual enough for women to be allowed to mentor graduate students at all. Until close to the end of her life, she was still publishing new works, including her 1969 book The Woody Plants of Ohio: Trees, Shrubs, and Woody Climbers, Native, Naturalized, and Escaped. OK, the title is clunky. Whatever.

Braun died in 1971. She was 81 years old.

E. Lucy Braun is buried in Spring Grove Cemetery, Cincinnati, Ohio.

If you would like this series to visit other American botanists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Frederick Coville is in McDonough, New York and Charles Joseph Chamberlain is in Oberlin, Ohio. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.

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