He took botany beyond classroom

LINCOLN — When Charles Bessey set foot on the University of Nebraska campus in 1884, the 15-year-old school had only 373 students.

By the time the Ohio-born botanist and horticulturist died in 1915, he had helped build national and even international respect for the prairie institution.

“In more ways than one, he helped put the University of Nebraska on the academic map,” former NU President Martin Massengale said.

Bessey's contribution will be recognized Friday when he is inducted into the Nebraska Hall of Fame.

He will be the hall's 25th member, joining the likes of frontiersman William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, Boys Town founder Father Flanagan and writer Willa Cather.

The selection of Bessey, known as an outstanding motivator of students and an innovator in the study and application of botany, took root only after the initial nomination of former U.S. Sen. Kenneth Wherry was nullified.

The Nebraska Attorney General's Office ruled in 2004 that the state's Hall of Fame Commission had violated public meetings laws when it used a secret ballot to select Wherry on a 4-3 vote.

When the process started anew, Wherry was not renominated after a controversy erupted over his views on homosexuality back in the McCarthy era of the 1950s.

After a series of hearings, the Hall of Fame Commission voted 5-0 last summer to induct Bessey.

Massengale was among those promoting the induction of Bessey, the namesake of the largest hand-planted forest in the Western Hemisphere, near Halsey, Neb.

Bessey contended that a pine forest once covered Nebraska's treeless Sand Hills and urged the federal government in 1890 to reforest the area. Such a forest, he reasoned, would provide a valuable reserve of wood for the nation.

The work led to the creation of two forests in 1902. They stand as a prime illustration for a state once called “The Tree Planters State.”

But Bessey's impact extends beyond the forest, said Massengale and John Carter, a senior research historian for the Nebraska State Historical Society.

Bessey breathed life into the study of botany, which, in the 1890s, was chiefly focused on reading books and cataloging plants by species, Massengale and Carter said.

His students went into the field and got their hands dirty. They used microscopes and chemistry to learn a plant's structure and function.

Bessey wrote a textbook that became the standard for what was called “new botany.”

“He believed in experimental research and laboratories, as opposed to the old European method of book learning,” Massengale said.

Bessey's biographer, Ronald C. Tobey, wrote that Bessey “transformed the dry, girls' school subject of basic botany into a gospel course for the scientific, laboratory method.”

What was learned, Bessey contended, must be applied and shared with common Nebraskans. He convinced the NU Board of Regents to establish agricultural experimental stations to test crops and share the results with Nebraskans.

He was not an “ivory tower” academic, Carter said.

“Bessey spent a lot of time answering nuts-and-bolts questions that farmers would write in,” he said.

His classes and a botany seminar that became known as “sem bots” inspired an impressive line of students, including another Nebraska Hall of Famer, Roscoe Pound, who later became dean of the Harvard Law School.

The work of another student, Frederic Clements, spawned the term “ecosystem,” Carter said.

Bessey fought proposals in 1889 and 1915 to establish a second state university devoted to agriculture, which many states have. Buildings are named after him at both the University Nebraska-Lincoln and Iowa State University, where he taught before coming to Lincoln.

He also was an early promoter of smoke-free buildings. In 1907, while serving as interim chancellor, he had signs posted around campus to remind male students that smoking was prohibited “in buildings or on campus.”

“It may not hurt a man who has his full growth and whose muscles are toughened,” Bessey told the Nebraska State Journal at the time. “But for a young man to indulge in the practice until it becomes a habit is a plain case of self destruction.”

Smokers, he said, need to be considerate of others and consider that the habit will “influence his offspring” in an adverse way.

Contact the writer:

402-473-9584, paul.hammel@owh.com