American missionary and professor of botany who worked in China for many years. Albert Steward was born near Fullerton in California and graduated from Oregon Agricultural College with a bachelor's degree in botany in 1921. He married Celia Speak in 1918, with whom he would have six children.

In 1921 the couple left the U.S. for China as educational missionaries with the Methodist Board of Missions. Albert Steward taught botany at the University of Nanking until 1926, when he took three years of furlough in the U.S., during which time he gained his PhD in Biology from Harvard University. He returned to Nanking in 1930, where he would work for the next two decades, both teaching and collecting plants and botanical data. This was a time of upheaval, however, and in 1937 the Stewards were evacuated as the Japanese occupation took hold. While his family stayed in California, Albert Steward came back to work in Nanking in 1938. He was joined once more by his wife and children from 1939-1941.

Having moved to Shanghai in late 1942, Newton was subsequently interned at Chapei Camp for the last two years of the Second World War. A little while after his release he spent some months in the United States with his family, and after a final period in China in the late 1940s returned to the U.S. for good. Here, supported by a Guggenheim grant Steward worked on his Manual of Vascular Plants of the Lower Yangtze Valley (1958) with Elmer Drew Merrill at Harvard's Arnold Arboretum. He was fortunate to be able to draw on duplicate collections he had sent to Merrill, for his original herbarium was confiscated by the Communists when he left China. In 1951 he was appointed curator of the herbarium and professor at Oregon State College, which position he held until his death in 1959.

Sources:
H.M. Gilkey, 1959, "Albert Newton Steward", Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club, 86(5): 342-344
M. L. Smalley and N.H. Price, 2010, Guide to the Albert and Celia Steward Papers, Yale University Library:
http://tinyurl.com/5wjn4fl, accessed 10 October 2011.