The Pomology Prof

By Eilene Lyon

I’ve been renewing my interest in botany lately. You may recall this subject is one of my connections to my great-grandmother, Clara Ransom Davis. I recently received communication from the University of Idaho and learned their herbarium contains 144 valuable specimens that Clara collected in her undergraduate years in the 1890s. (She later went on to receive a master’s degree in botany.)

There is a lovely flower, a native, that grows in my yard that has led me to another family botanist. The plant is Crandall’s penstemon (Penstemon crandallii), named for the professor who first collected a type specimen near Como, Colorado, in 1897: Charles Spenser Crandall.¹

My Crandall family line goes back to our common ancestor, Elder John Crandall. Elder John immigrated from England in 1635 and settled in Rhode Island. This makes me a rather distant cousin to Prof. Crandall—7^th cousins 3x removed. But, hey…works for me!

Charles S. Crandall was born in New York state and grew up in La Porte, Indiana. He graduated from the Michigan Agriculture College (now Michigan State) in Lansing in November 1873.² He married Rebecca Adaline “Lina” Ocobock in Little Traverse, Michigan, in April 1879.³ They had a daughter who died as an infant and another daughter, Lineta L. Crandall.

Charles obtained advanced degrees from Harvard and Amherst.⁴ In 1890, he went to Colorado Agricultural College in Fort Collins (now Colorado State University, the state’s first agricultural college).⁵ There he was a Professor of Botany and Horticulture and the herbarium curator.⁶

Lina died in Fort Collins in 1891, but I have not found a record to provide insight into why she only lived to age 40. Maud Bell, a language professor at the college, still single at 37, became Charles’s second wife, and they had three children together.

In 1900, Charles accepted a position in Washington, DC, in the forestry division of the Department of Agriculture.⁷ Then he spent the remainder of his career at the University of Illinois in Urbana, beginning in 1902.

He became a specialist in pomology, which refers to fruits that are pomes. I could give you a technical definition, but let’s just say he studied apples. He became quite the expert and wrote many technical manuals on just about every aspect of growing apples. As a horticultural consultant, he regularly answered question from orchardists in the newspaper.

Maud contracted tuberculosis and died in Arizona in 1915, age 55.⁸ Charles had a stroke in 1927 and went to California to live with his oldest daughter, Lineta (Mrs. George E. Toomey). He died in Hollywood in 1929. I don’t know if there are other plants besides this penstemon that carry his name, but I’ll be keeping an eye out.

In one of his obituaries, Prof. J.C. Blair said, “Prof. Crandall was a rare character. He knew more about plants in general than anyone else that I’ve ever known. His quiet, studious, hard-working methods in [his] field of research were a source of great stimulus and inspiration to all in the department of horticulture. In addition to his scientific attainments, he was always a wise councellor [sic] and a true friend.”⁹

Feature image: Crandall’s penstemon in my yard.