By Amy Weiss

Apr 25 2025

This is the second part of  For the Duration. To read about the New York Botanical Garden herbarium’s response to World War II, return to the first part here.

Smithsonian Institution 

The United States National Herbarium, which at the time was the Division of Plants within the Department of Biology at the United States National Museum, was ahead of most American herbaria in preparing for disasters that might occur as a result of World War II. This is likely due to both its location in the nation’s capital and the membership of John E. Graf, associate director of the United States National Museum, in the Committee on Conservation of Cultural Resources (CCCR).

In Graf’s committee records, the first memorandum about disaster preparedness in the herbarium is dated January 6, 1941, nearly a year before the United States entered the war. In it William R. Maxon, curator of the Division of Plants, outlined the irreplaceable material that was part of the herbarium; which included type specimens, accession books, loan & exchange records, and field notebooks (Maxon, 6 Jan 1941). Maxon urges in this memo, and again in June, that a standard herbarium cabinet (containing 24 pigeonholes) was too heavy and unwieldy for fast evacuation or relocation. He suggested replacing the type cabinets with smaller 6 pigeonhole cases which would be much easier to move, and in case of fire, they could be quickly lowered to the ground by using a metal chute placed in a window. If evacuation was needed, these small cases closely matched the dimensions of the storage boxes being used by other divisions, and so the contents of a larger herbarium cabinet would not need to be transferred into storage boxes (Maxon, 6 Jan 1941; Maxon, 9 Jun 1941). It should be noted that the idea of a small herbarium cabinet that could be evacuated quickly by window was part of the disaster plan implemented by Alice Eastwood at the California Academy of Sciences that helped save type specimens from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake (Daniel, 2008).

However, it seems that the smaller cases were never fabricated. In a memo from Ellsworth P. Killip, associate curator of the Division of Plants, he cautions that, prior to any evacuation, the type specimens should be condensed inside the existing herbarium cabinets to both save space and reduce breakage in transit, and that a table top would need to be removed from a block of type cabinets to make them ready for transport (Killip, 10 Sep 1941). In a 1942 memo from Leonhard Stejneger, head curator of the Department of Biology, he states that the plants will be stored in their original cases and no additional ones will be needed (Stejneger, 1942).

The herbarium’s disaster planning went as far as to calculate how many minutes it would take to condense the type material in the 38 herbarium cabinets or to pack a box of records (Killip, 16 Sep 1941). Yet, despite the extensive planning prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the irreplaceable material from the Smithsonian was not evacuated until autumn 1942 (Aikin, 2007). The reason for the delay was finding a suitable place for safe storage since the CCCR’s original plan to build a bomb-resistant shelter near Washington, DC for use by various federal agencies was never built due to a lack of support and funding (Aikin, 2007; Anonymous, 2007; Daniels, 2012). After the United States entered the war, the need to protect collections seemed more urgent, so a warehouse in Shenandoah National Park near Luray, Virginia was deemed suitable for the storage of the United States National Museum’s collections (Anonymous, 2007).

The Smithsonian moved over sixty tons of collections, occupying 21,000 cubic feet, to the warehouse in Luray, Virginia which made it the largest single evacuation from Washington, DC (Aikin, 2007; Anonymous, n.d.). Prior to the move, the buildings that were originally built for the National Park Service were renovated to accommodate the needs of the collections, and in order to keep the conditions safe and stable for the stored collections, custodians managed heating stoves and humidifiers in the warehouses (Anonymous, n.d.).

In addition to the collections deemed irreplaceable by the Department of Biology—which included the herbarium’s type specimens along with thousands of type specimens of birds, fishes, insects, mammals, and other life forms (Anonymous, 2007; Wetmore, 1945)—other items from the Smithsonian collections were stored at Luray. This included a 1838 John Deere steel plow, the First Ladies' dresses, George Washington's uniform and field kit, and the Star-Spangled Banner shipped in a 15-foot-long box (Anonymous, 2007; Wetmore, 1945). The evacuated treasures were placed under 24-hour guard to protect against theft, sabotage, fire, and warehouse-dwelling pigeons until the bombing of the Eastern Seaboard appeared unlikely (Anonymous, 2007; Wetmore, 1945). The last of these materials returned to the National Mall in November of 1944 (Wetmore, 1945).

Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

I have written about the steps taken by the New York Botanical Garden and the Smithsonian, but a third herbarium that took steps to evacuate their collections to a safer location is mentioned by F. R. Fosberg: "the Los Angeles Museum has its types stored in a vault in the interior of the country for the duration of the war" (Fosberg, 1942). This collection is now known as the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHMLAC) and while it had a herbarium during World War II, it no longer holds botanical collections—the vascular plants were transferred to the California Botanic Garden (Claremont, CA) and cryptogams to the University of California, Berkeley. 

Unable to find annual reports for the NHMLAC that would have given a glimpse into their activities during the war, I reached out to the museum. The registrar could not find a record of any movement transactions during World War II and all files in their archives are scant from this time period (Y. Bustos, pers. comm., 2019). But, there was one piece of paper found titled "Administration 1941-45, WWII - Air Raid preparation" that states the "type specimens were moved to Denver and plans were made to move everything else if it became necessary" (Y. Bustos, pers. comm., 2018).

I also reached out to the California Botanic Garden, that now holds the NHMLAC vascular plant specimens, and they were not able to find or recall anything related to the herbarium during World War II except that Fosberg had worked at the NHMLAC from 1930-1932, so would have known the curator of botany there, Bonnie C. Templeton (G. Wallace, pers. comm., 2018; Mueller-Dombois, 1992). The Autry Museum of the American West holds the archives of the Committee for the Conservation of Cultural Resources for Southern California Collections, however an archivist there confirmed that while NHMLAC staff were part of the committee, there is no information on individual institutions’ plans for evacuating or otherwise safeguarding collections during the war (C. Hummel-Colla, pers. comm., 2018).

So, it is possible that type collections from NHMLAC were evacuated to Denver, Colorado, which is “in the interior of the country” (Fosberg, 1942), but I was unable to confirm any details. The investigation into this herbarium collection in particular reinforced the importance of archives and keeping a record of the work we do in collections care. Who knows what aspect of our jobs will be interesting to people in the future and, since most communication is now done digitally and not on paper, who knows what information will be lost. 

California Academy of Sciences

Alice Eastwood, the forward-thinking botanist of the California Academy of Sciences who saved the herbarium type collection during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire (Anonymous, 1906; Daniel, 2008), was still at her post as curator of botany during World War II. According to John Thomas Howell (1971), associate curator of the herbarium at the time, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor “was spent storing Academy records and types in the vault in the Fish Department.” When describing the location of the ichthyology department’s vault, Howell uses the term “ground floor” (Howell, 1971) and Thomas F. Daniel uses the term “basement” (Daniel, 2008)—the northern end of the department was underground and the vault itself was beneath the Simpson African Hall (T. Daniel, pers. comm., 2018). Sheltering in place of important collections was a strategy employed by the Academy and many American art museums (Nicholas, 1994). It is also what saved some herbarium specimens at Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem; only the collections moved and stored in the basement and west wing of the museum survived (Hiepko, 1987). That the Academy could shelter their herbarium types so quickly was because their type collections were already filed separately.
 
Along with the Academy’s types and records were a collection of oil paintings of California wildflowers done by the artist Alice B. Chittenden, a close friend of Alice Eastwood and member of the California Botanical Club (Howell, 1971; Larribeau n.d.). Howell, when recalling the events in 1971, could not remember who was responsible for bringing the paintings to the Academy, but two wooden boxes containing Chittenden’s wildflower paintings were in the vault by the evening of December 8, 1941. It was Eastwood’s hope that eventually this collection of oil paintings would become part of the Academy’s holdings (Howell, 1971), but that was not to be. The paintings remained in the vault for many years, Chittenden died, and the paintings became part of her estate. The cost to purchase the collection was considerable, and the needs of the herbarium seemed a more urgent place to invest the Academy’s resources (Howell, 1971), so Chittenden’s family arranged an exhibit in 1965 and the paintings were sold to Elizabeth Hay Bechtel (Larribeau, n.d.).

Harvard University

Despite the fact that art from the Fogg Art Museum was sent inland for safekeeping at Harvard Forest (Forbes, 1944; Lambert, 2014), and despite Elmer D. Merrill’s scolding of the herbarium in Berlin for not taking adequate steps to safeguard their specimens (Merrill, 1943); there is no evidence, in either Harvard University’s annual reports or in Merrill’s archived papers, that the Arnold Arboretum herbarium took any steps to protect their specimens during World War II (L. Pearson, pers. comm., 2018). The only mention of disaster preparedness was at the Gray Herbarium, where in the annual report from 1941-42, Merritt L. Fernald notes that Charles A. Weatherby & Frances Welles Hunnewell volunteered their time to find and segregate type specimens throughout 1941 and 1942; pulling out thousands of types. These type specimens were placed in fire- and dust-proof metal cases on the ground floor, where in the event of emergency, they could be evacuated outside of the city (Fernald, 1944).

In the same report Fernald also laments the lack of enough metal cases to house the expanding herbarium and the need to use temporary pasteboard cartons; noting that these were both an invitation to pests and a fire hazard in an otherwise non-combustible building (Fernald, 1944). These growing pains and paucity of steel cabinets were also complaints at the New York Botanical Garden at the time, who were also using pasteboard boxes for storing parts of their herbarium collection (Robbins, 1941). Similarly, the lack of space and cabinets were a challenge at the herbarium of the California Academy of Sciences. Eastwood reported that lack of space in cabinets meant that unmounted specimens had to be stacked in bundles on tops of the cases, and it wasn’t until a 1948 insect infestation in these bundled specimens that the Board of Directors appropriated funds for 50 new cases (Daniel, 2008).

The story continues, follow the link below to read more about the segregation and annotation of type specimens.