Ernest Palmer

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Biography

Ernest Jesse Palmer was born in Leicester England April 8, 1875. His mother brought him to the tiny dying town of Columbus, Missouri where his father had moved about two years earlier about 1878.

He was the chief support of his parents and sister from about age eleven. At first he worked as a delivery boy with the team and wagon owned by his father. He also worked in a livery stable. The family moved to the larger bustling mining town of Webb City, Missouri in 1891. Later he worked for the Missouri Kansas and Texas Railroad at Webb City, Missouri, the largest tonnage shipping point on that railroad. Still later he taught himself bookkeeping and eventually became chief bookkeeper for the Waters-Pierce Oil Company, ancestor of Cities Service Oil Company.

From an early age he was interested in natural history. Although his early jobs were ten to twelve hours a day six days a week, he found time to collect minerals, fossils, plants and Indian artifacts all of which were in plentiful supply and of considerable interest near Webb City. Before the First World War, when he was doing this, many people collected such specimens and displayed them in "cabinets", which did not necessarily mean a piece of furniture, but a small museum collection. There were magazines in which collectors, such as he, advertised their specimens for sale. Through these magazines and through letters to famous naturalists asking for information, he gradually began to be known to important scientists. He began publishing small papers on the results of his natural history collecting and research as early as 1911.

After he turned forty, he was first hired by the Missouri Botanical Garden, then by them jointly with the Arnold Arboretum associated with Harvard University, and finally by the Arboretum alone to collect plant specimens. He was really more interested in fossils, but for a person without a high school or college degree, any work as a scientist was a real opportunity. At first he was simply a collector sending his specimens for others to study, but after awhile, he was encouraged to, and did, write more and more ambitious scientific papers. Eventually he published more than a hundred articles and became the recognized expert on various groups of North American trees, most notably the hawthorn, Crataegus.

He was also interested in public affairs. He began as an internationally oriented socialist but he was so profoundly disappointed by the European socialist parties' capitulation to nationalism when each one supported its own government in the First World War after pledging not to fight another rich men's war, that he gradually became less committed. He was a pacifist until 1933 when he saw the danger of Naziism so clearly that he began to work for rearmament in the United States and Britain. Immediately after the Second World War he returned to pacifism and worked for the control of nuclear weapons.

After retirement from the Arboretum in 1948 at age 73, he returned to the home of his youth in Webb City, Missouri which he had maintained for his sister. He spent the remaining 14 years of his life studying, and publishing on, the collections of fossils and other materials he had left there as well as botanical specimens sent by many people. After turning 80 he celebrated his birthdays with 20 mile hikes with his collecting pack. He finally succumbed to cancer (twelve years after contracting it) as he finished dictating his last botanical article on his beloved Ozark forest.

• Theodore Palmer, firsthand knowledge. Click the Changes tab for the details of edits by Theodore and others.