Intermountain Herbarium

In the 1930s, Bassett Maguire began a personal project of gathering local plants and publishing the findings. Maguire brought the collection to Utah State University in 1939 and created the Intermountain Herbarium. His collection grew to be the second-largest herbarium in the Intermountain Region and the largest public herbarium in the region.

The Intermountain Herbarium is at Utah State University (USU) in Logan, Utah. It began with Dr. Bassett Maguire, a botanist, who initiated a project exploring the local flora in the early 1930s. He recorded and published his findings as the Intermountain Flora project, eventually publishing seven volumes. In 1939, Maguire joined USU as a Professor of Botany and used his project findings to establish the Intermountain Herbarium that same year, becoming its first collector and curator. Maguire remained active in his project and curator role,  often working on both simultaneously. He would travel to various locations to continue his studies and enlarge the herbarium collections, often accompanied by a selection of students and USU Professor of Biology Arthur H. Holmgren. However, in 1942, he left to become the New York Botanical Garden curator.

Upon Maguire's departure, Professor Arthur H. Holmgren assumed the role of curator and remained in that position until 1978. Over the thirty-plus years, the herbarium flourished under Holmgren's leadership. Then, by 1963, he had collected over 110,000 specimens. Years later, in 1976, he had grown the herbarium to 150,000 specimens, and it became a popular research source for academic students and government agencies. International organizations also requested samples from the Intermountain Herbarium to study the Utah flora. International organizations also requested samples from the Intermountain Herbarium to study the Utah flora. Most of the collection originated from the West, including Utah, southern Idaho, most of Nevada, a small portion of California (including the Great Basin), and southwest Oregon. The rest of the collection resulted from exchange transactions with global institutions.

After Holmgren's retirement, Dr. Mary Barkworth assumed the role of herbarium director until 2012. When she took over in 1979, the herbarium collection included 172,000 specimen samples and additional folders that were not officially part of the herbarium due to being unidentifiable plant samples. Under her leadership, the herbarium became part of a loaning system that allowed the Intermountain Herbarium to borrow files from other herbariums when specific information was unavailable at USU. The loan could last as long as someone needed the information or until they published their paper. Additionally, the herbarium had a policy that if it achieved new flora identification and had extra samples of the new specimen, it would send the additional specimen to other collection centers. In 1986, Barkworth moved the herbarium to the fourth floor of the Utah State University Plant Industry building. The work of the curators and collectors to grow the collection and researchers began to recognize the Intermountain Herbarium as a major regional herbarium.

Location

Metadata