American botanist. Louis Williams was born in Jackson, Wyoming, and grew up on a cattle ranch, from which he travelled to school on horseback. His father was always surprised that Louis showed more interest in birds, flowers and small animals than hunting and fishing. He entered the University of Wyoming, majoring in botany, and received his BA in 1932, followed by his master's degree in 1933. All the while his wife-to-be, Terrua Pierson, waited to marry him so that she could continue to teach and Louis could afford to continue studying. They wed in 1934, when Williams went to work towards his PhD at Washington University, St Louis, and Missouri Botanical Garden. He completed a dissertation on North American Mertensia and gained his doctorate in 1936, after which he joined the Ames Orchid Herbarium at Harvard University. For seven years he researched orchids and became editor of the American Orchid Society Bulletin. During his tenure the society's membership boomed, growing from 200 to 3,000.
While at Harvard his interest in tropical and useful plants was nurtured by E.D. Merrill; an interest that soon came to the fore with the outbreak of World War Two. Too old for active military duty, Williams served on a rubber procurement project in Brazil for the U.S. war effort from 1942 to 1945. The work also permitted him to procure 30,000 specimens for Harvard.
After the war and with a taste for tropical climes, he moved to Honduras as a botanist for the Escuela Agricola Panamericana (Pan-American School of Agriculture, founded by the United Fruit Company president, Samuel Zemurray). Williams and his wife spent 11 years in the country, entertaining visiting scientists and amassing a large herbarium. Williams also started a new journal, Ceiba, for the region.
Leaving Honduras in 1957, he spent two years working as an economic botanist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture at the Plant Industry Station in Beltsville, Maryland. His tasks included collecting economic plants in West and southern Africa. He began a career at the Field Museum in Chicago in 1960, as curator of the botany department (chair from 1971-1973, emeritus curator from 1975). His passion for tropical floras led him to revive the museum's floristic programmes and he initiated several collecting expeditions to Central America and Peru, especially involving himself in the work on Guatemala. It was two years after his retirement that his goal of completing the Flora of Guatemala was realised.
He spent his retirement in the Ozark mountains of Arkansas, continuing to build up a herbarium of the local flora and enjoying his hobby, amateur radio. He was also a keen trader of stocks and shares, with a sharp eye that enabled him to leave an endowment for a professorship at the University of Wyoming. His hearing, however, had become far from sharp and, losing this sense, he became less and less involved in meetings of the American Society of Plant Taxonomists and the Society for Economic Botany, in both of which he had been a founding member. His plant collections numbered more than 43,000, mostly from the Rocky Mountains and Central America, while he completed some 300 publications, dealing mainly with orchids, useful plants and Central American floristics.
Sources:
W. Burger, 1991, "Louis Otho Williams (1908-1991)", Taxon, 40(2): 355-356.
