Jessie Peck, Willamette University, 1918. 
Courtesy or Hailie Ford Museum PLS90-A232. 
Morton Peck, Willamette University, 1918. Morton Peck, explorer and naturalist at work. 
Courtesy or Hailie Ford Museum PLS90-A217. 
that Macbride valued highly the work of his colleague, whom 
he had once hoped to hire as a collections assistant. Macbride 
lamented misplacing one of Peck's manuscripts prior to prepar¬ 
ing his treatments of mxyomycetes and even volunteered to pro¬ 
vide the illustrations to get it published as a separate work. 
Macbride also arranged to have Biological Abstracts sent to Peck, 
who had limited access to such resources in Oregon. 
Post-Graduate Years and Early Exploits 
Upon graduation from Cornell College in 1895, Peck's first po¬ 
sition was as an instructor of biology in the Marionville Colle¬ 
giate Institute, Marionville, Missouri. There he began a life¬ 
long career in teaching that continued until his retirement from 
Willamette University In 1897, he accepted a professorship in 
biology at Ellsworth College in Iowa Falls, where his eight-year 
tenure was interrupted twice by adventuresome travels. His first 
excursion (1903-1904) began with a float trip down the Mis¬ 
sissippi River via the Cedar River, included a train trip to New 
Orleans and passage on a United Fruit Company steamer to 
British Honduras, and provided many observations of new birds 
and mammals. He shared the second trip to Belize (1905-1907) 
with his new bride, who had been a student of botany at 
Ellsworth College. Their marriage presumably caused quite a 
stir. The Iowa Sentinel described the bride, Jessie Grant, as an 
"estimable young lady" from "one of the substantial families of 
north Hardin" and the groom as "an exemplary young man" 
and "noble citizen." Although only immediate families and rela¬ 
tives attended the marriage ceremony, students soon discov¬ 
ered their secret, nearly burying the couple under "a shower of 
rice and old shoes" and further decorating the New Orleans- 
bound suitcases with "several styles of appropriate emblems!" 
As for the trip. Peck bemoaned that he had described it to Jessie 
"in I fear too brilliant colors." They had just enough money to 
get started and Jessie had "never been away from home before." 
She further wrestled with at least one bout of malaria! How¬ 
ever, "when that was over we had glorious times, and the trip 
lengthened to two years...." Both grew increasingly fond of 
their wilderness excursions in Belize and only returned to avoid 
becoming "out of step with civilization." Peck conjectured that 
their collections added 50-60 new species to the flora and sev¬ 
eral birds to the fauna of British Honduras. Even the Iowa Sen¬ 
tinel was ready to lay claim in advance to the potential import 
of their exploits, noting that "Prof. Peck will be our foreign 
correspondent, keeping our readers informed of his explorations 
in that Tropical clime." 
Educational Endeavors at Willamette University 
Once back in the United States, Peck accepted a professorship 
in Biology at Iowa Wesleyan University. After only one year, 
however, a "severe attack of rheumatism" led him to emigrate to 
Salem, Oregon in 1908, where his parents were already resid¬ 
ing, and where he became the sole biology faculty member at 
Willamette University. In the College of Liberal Arts, his only 
science colleague was a Professor of Chemistry and Physics, Dr. 
von Eschen, at a time when the student body numbered only 
74. During this period, Willamette University also had a 16- 
member faculty in its Medical School, an entity that, after a 
controversial move to Portland, Oregon ini912, eventually be¬ 
came Oregon Health Sciences University. Fortunately for botany 
and Peck, however, the College of Liberal Arts expanded in 
Salem and began to increasingly value discipline-based teaching 
and research in an atmosphere of scholarly collegiality. By the 
time of Peck's retirement in 1941, the College of Liberal Arts 
had grown to 40 full-time faculty and 809 students. That Peck 
may have tempted to go elsewhere during his tenure is implied 
from archival correspondence from the early 1920's between 
University of Oregon botanist, Albert Sweetser, and President, 
PL. Campbell. Apparently Peck expressed an interest in the in¬ 
vitation for him to join their faculty, but both parties agreed to 
wait a year, reputedly in deference to Willamette President 
Doney, and to allow Peck more time to finish classifying a set 
of plant specimens. The move never transpired, however, and 
later documents, presumed to be written by Jessie G. Peck, sug¬ 
gest that Willamette University was where he "spent the best 
2 
Kalmiopsis Volume 7, 2001 
