MORTON EATON PECK: Field Botanist, Poet, 
and Author of A Manual of the Higher Plants of Oregon 
Susan R. Kephart 
Department of Biology, Willamette University, Salem, OR 97301 
(Adapted from an essay that will appear in Plant Hunters of the Pacific Northwest, 
edited by A Kruckeberg & R. Love) 
] n January 1955, Nancy Stuart of The Oregonian closed her 
feature article on Morton Peck, the 'Dean of Oregon Bota¬ 
nists," with excerpts from the inscription of his award from 
the national research honorary society, Sigma Xi: "To Morton 
Eaton Peck in recognition of his accomplishment in the field of 
botany; of his labors as an inspiring teacher; of his years of pa¬ 
tient research and extensive knowledge of Oregon plant life... 
[and] of his service to the people of Oregon and the Pacific 
Northwest..." This inscription is perhaps the most fitting sum¬ 
mary of the professional life and accomplishments of a man 
whose work and personage touched many lives, culminating in 
the legacy he left among botanists and friends. 
Synopsis. MORTON EATON PECK (1871-1959). 
Morton Peck was bom and educated in Iowa, earning an AB. 
degree (1895) arid AM. degree (1911) from Cornell College in 
Mt. Vernon, Iowa. He was awarded honorary doctorates from 
Cornell College in science (1940) and from Willamette Univer¬ 
sity in literature (1955) for his extensive systematic and floristic 
studies and his accomplishments in poetry, respectively. After 
receiving the bachelor's degree, he taught for one year as an in¬ 
structor of biology in Marionville, Missouri, prior to serving 
positions on the faculty of Ellsworth College (1897-1905), Iowa 
Wesleyan College (1907-1908), and W illamette University (1908- 
1941), where he continued as an emeritus professor in Salem, 
Oregon, following a 33-year tenure as chair of the biology de¬ 
partment. He received numerous honors including election to 
the American Ornithological Union (1909) and citations as 
Outstanding Scientist for the State of Oregon by Phi Beta Kappa 
and Sigma Xi in 1943 and as a distinguished researcher in hor¬ 
ticulture by the Oregon Federation of Garden Clubs (1958). 
Other professional societies with which he was affiliated included 
the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the 
American Society of Plant Taxonomists, the Botanical Society of 
America, the California Botanical and Ornithological Societies, 
and the California, Iowa, and Oregon Academies of Science. 
Peck traveled and collected extensively throughout the Pacific 
Northwest and in Central and South America, amassing notable 
collections of myxomycetes (slime molds), vascular plants, and 
birds. His first edition of A Manual of the Higher Plants of Or¬ 
egon appeared in 1941. His wife, Jessie Grant Peck, accompa¬ 
nied him on collecting trips and was an instructor of biology and 
herbarium assistant at Willamette University. Morton Peck is 
credited with discovering and naming over 50 species; he 
authored numerous publications, pursuing his research at insti¬ 
tutions as distant as the British Museum of Natural History, 
Kew Gardens, and the University of Edinburgh. Duplicate speci¬ 
mens and types are housed in most major U. S. herbaria, and 
correspondence from other scientists reside with the Peck Her¬ 
barium (WILLU). Some archival field reports of biological sur¬ 
veys exist at the Smithsonian. Peck completed a revised manual 
of Oregon plants prior to his death in 1959; a grant from Na¬ 
tional Science Foundation and the cooperation of the Oregon 
State College Press permitted its final publication in 1961. 
Early Childhood and Education 
A native of La Porte, Iowa, Morton Peck was bom on 12 March 
1871 to Clara Eaton and George D. Peck at a time when, ac¬ 
cording to Peck, Iowa still had "much uncultivated land and a 
good deal of timber." In an unpublished, handwritten autobi¬ 
ography that was probably solicited by Albert Sweetser, Peck 
connects his earliest interest in the out-of-doors to "birds, in¬ 
sects, and fishing" and to his father. Helen Cilkey, a professor at 
Oregon State College with whom Peck corresponded in later 
years, learned that as a young lad Morton was often carried into 
the field on his father's back. According to Peck, his father pre¬ 
ferred living on the outskirts of civilization unlike his mother 
who "liked neighborhoods instead!" Thus, in compromise, his 
childhood home and birthplace was a log-cabin somewhat dis¬ 
tant from town, where he attended a country school. He first 
collected organisms at age 11, and his literary aspirations began 
before he left the country school at 16 to attend La Porte City 
High School. Peck reflects that his first attempts yielded "abun¬ 
dant and very bad verses." He left high school without graduat¬ 
ing, but authored his first published work, Webster's Ghosts and 
Other Verses, prior to his junior year. 
After high school. Peck taught in country schools for sev¬ 
eral years before entering Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa. 
Initially in college he "gravitated naturally to the classics and to 
literature," but when he began to study plants more intimately 
his junior year, "he knew he had found his field." At this time, 
the slime molds Peck collected were members of the Kingdom 
Plantae, and his work led to an enduring friendship with Tho¬ 
mas Macbride, a professor of Botany at the University of Iowa 
whom Peck describes in 1936 as "the finest and most cultured 
man I have ever known." Peck initiated their correspondence 
to obtain identification of his specimens, but later his wife Jessie 
describes many hours where the two of them "met and worked 
together with these tiny, beautiful plants." Peck gathered over 
1000 myxomycetes in Iowa and Oregon, and his collections are 
still housed on the campus of Willamette University in Salem, 
Oregon. Many of Macbride's personal and professional letters 
to Peck, from 1927 until Macbride's death in Seattle in 1934, 
exist in notebooks at the Oregon State University Herbarium 
(OSC), where the vascular plant collections of Peck (WILLU) 
now reside on permanent loan. From the letters, it is evident 
Kalmiopsis Volume 7, 2001 
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