Unprecedented Activity 
Following his return from the west, Sargent 
met with Jesup and Bickmore in New York in 
the first week of November 1880. In response to 
the proposed project, he sent a seven-page letter 
describing his “suggestions” for the wood col- 
lection and its exhibition, which in effect were 
stipulations to guarantee his participation. Sar- 
gent believed that the collection should incor- 
porate every tree species that grew naturally in 
the United States, even those that were of lim- 
ited distribution or held little economic value. 
As a reflection of his recent and ongoing work 
on the forest census, he argued that only this 
approach would allow the collection’s impor- 
tance to be realized by both the public and sci- 
entists, who, he would later assert, “will value 
it in proportion to its completeness.”’ Further, 
Sargent insisted that the exhibit be arranged 
according to the botanical relationships of the 
species, following the organization of his report 
for the forest census, and that the labels should 
incorporate the data from his investigations as 
to each species’ geographic distribution and the 
properties of its wood. He shared Jesup’s inter- 
est in including foliage and fruit to illustrate the 
aspect of the living trees, as well as the products 
derived from the trees that were important to 
commerce and the trades.® In essence, it would 
be a full-scale adjunct to his census report, 
one that Jesup hoped would also have popular 
appeal and that all concerned believed would be 
an asset to the museum.’ 
Sargent’s primary role in the project was to 
direct and coordinate the field efforts and, later, 
to provide interpretation for the resulting speci- 
mens. By mid-December 1880, once a general 
plan for the collection was understood, he was 
becoming impatient to send collectors into the 
field.!° The first to be recruited were alumni of 
the forest census who were familiar with both 
the terrain and tree species they were to locate, 
as well as the rigors and routine of moving logs 
from the forests to the railroads for shipping. 
Some were in the field as early as January, and 
specimens began arriving at the museum in 
early March 1881. 
Charles Mohr, a physician and botanist who 
lived in Mobile, Alabama, was charged with 
finding trees in the Gulf Coast states. (Records 
Jesup Collection 27 
show that the first specimen to be received may 
have been Yucca treculeana, or Spanish dagger, 
an arborescent species, if not precisely a tree, 
sent from Texas by Mohr.!!) Samuel B. Buckley, 
a botanist and long-time resident near Austin, 
Texas, began collecting nearby and at points 
across the southern interior of the state. Allen 
H. Curtiss, a naturalist living in Jacksonville, 
Florida, was sent to explore southern Florida, 
the Florida Keys, and the interior Southeast, in 
his first season, Curtiss sent more than forty 
specimens, and he ultimately contributed more 
than any other collector. 
George W. Letterman, a schoolteacher and 
amateur botanist in Allenton, Missouri, began 
his work that spring in Arkansas, made numer- 
ous collections in southern and central Mis- 
souri, and later ventured as far as northeastern 
Texas and Louisiana. Henry W. Ravenel, an 
accomplished botanist of Aiken, South Caro- 
lina, sent specimens from the Piedmont and 
coast of South Carolina and Georgia that year. 
Starting in the fall of 1881, John H. Sears, a 
naturalist in Salem, Massachusetts, explored 
the “Atlantic forests” of northern New York 
state and eastern Massachusetts. For the first 
two years, Vermont botanist Cyrus G. Pringle 
traveled well beyond his home state to collect 
in Arizona, California, and the Pacific North- 
west, and later sent logs of several species from 
Texas and northern Mexico, as well; second 
only to Curtiss in number of specimens sent, 
Pringle certainly traveled more extensively for 
the project than anyone else. 
The collecting corps came to include physi- 
cians, veterans of state geological surveys and 
departments of agriculture, itinerant botanists, 
horticulturists, foresters, several of Sargent’s 
professional acquaintances in the lumbering 
and milling industries, Sargent himself, and 
even the collection’s caretaker, Samuel D. Dill, 
at the museum. The majority of specimens 
were collected by a handful of men, but over 
time more than fifty individuals contributed 
material to the Jesup Collection. 
Sargent initially envisioned an ambitious 
schedule, entailing just one or two years to 
complete the explorations necessary to find and 
acquire the specimens.!* That, like the costs 
involved, turned out to be underestimated—not 
