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tion, the School of Pharmacy, and the Department of Zoology. 
Historical Notes: Dr. H. H. Bartlett has kindly supplied the fol- 
lowing historical information: 
The earliest intimation that there was to be a Botanical Garden 
dates from the reorganization of the University in Ann Arbor 
just a hundred years ago, when Asa Gray, the first professor to 
be appointed, made a plan for the development of the campus, 
which showed the eastern half of the original forty acres as 
“The Botanical Garden.” Gray was sent to Europe to buy books, 
and because of his appointment at Harvard he never returned to 
Ann Arbor, and this plan remained unrealized. 
A small Botanical Garden on the campus was ultimately estab- 
lished by Volney Morgan Spalding, professor of botany, 1885- 
1904. The first notice of it in the University Calendar appears 
in the volume for 1901-1902. It was under the direction of 
Julius Otto Schlotterbeck, then Assistant Professor of Pharma- 
cognosy and Botany in the School of Pharmacy, and occupied an 
area in front of and extending to the westward of the General 
Library. The only recognizable trace of it that now remains is 
a tree of Fraxinus Ornus near the northwest corner of the Library. 
The space on the campus for the Garden was too small. The 
City of Ann Arbor owned thirty acres of land along the Huron 
River which it was willing to use as the nucleus of a new Botanical 
Garden. Additions were made to it by gifts to the University 
from Dr. Walter H. Nichols and his wife and from Professor 
F. C. Newcombe of the Department of Botany. 
The development of the Huron River site was begun in 1906, 
and in the Calendar for 1906-1907 Assistant Professor George 
Plumer Burns, of the Department of Botany, is listed as Di- 
rector of the Botanical Gardens. This position he held from 
1907 to 1910, being succeeded by Charles H. Otis as “ Curator of 
the Botanic Garden and Arboretum” (1910-1912). The De- 
partment of Botany continued the administration until 1915, The 
land was hilly and although admirably suited for permanent dis- 
play plantings of woody species and for landscape effects, it of- 
fered no sufficient flat area for a large greenhouse plant and ex- 
perimental fields, in which the Department of Botany was espe- 
cially interested. 
