American pharmacist and botanist. Born in Providence, Rhode Island, George Thurber studied at the Union Classical and Engineering School of Providence, but without graduating. After apprenticing with a local pharmacist, he set up in business with a partner, and around this period gave lectures in chemistry at the Franklin Society of Providence.
Thurber was self-taught as a botanist. His interest in the field was stimulated initially by his research into the sources of vegetable drugs, but it soon developed into a desire to make botanical explorations. The opportunity came in 1850 when he was offered the position of botanist on the U.S. Boundary Commission, which had been assembled to survey the boundary between the United States and Mexico. He stayed with the commission until it was disbanded in 1854. His collections, including the curious Pilostyles, form the subject of Asa Gray's Plantae Novae Thurberianae.
He then earned a graduate degree in chemistry from Brown University and was appointed, probably through the influence of Dr John Torrey, to the United States Assay Office in New York. He left the Assay Office in 1856 and held a succession of teaching positions at Cooper Union, the College of Pharmacy of the City of New York, and Michigan Agricultural College, before assuming the position of editor of American Agriculturist, which he occupied for 22 years. As editor, he not only wrote regular columns on botany and horticulture but was also dedicated to exposing business and professional frauds, and the many swindlers and charlatans circulating within the agricultural community.
After his death, Garden and Forest magazine praised him for having elevated the standing of the American agricultural and horticulture press more than any other writer of his time. His larger publications included American Weeds and Useful Plants, the graminology of the botany of California, and the botany entries for Appleton's New American Encyclopaedia. Thurber, who suffered most of his life from a debilitating rheumatism contracted in Mexico, did not live to complete his monograph on American grasses on which he laboured for many years.
He became a corresponding member of the Royal Horticultural Society of London in 1886, six years after his tour of the European continent, during which he met many leading botanists and horticulturalists. In America, he was a member of the New Jersey Horticultural Society, the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences, the New York Academy of Sciences, and the American Pomological Society, and received an honorary doctorate from the University Medical College of New York. After the death of his good friend Dr Torrey in 1873, Thurber served as president of the Torrey Botanical Club for seven years. Two different genera of plants were given the same name in dedication to him, though neither is in current usage. Thurberia A. Gray (1855) in the Malvaceae is a synonym of Gossypium. The later homonym Thurberia Bentham (1881) in the Poaceae is an illegitimate name for Limnodea L.H. Dewey.
Sources:
H.H. Rusby, 1890, "A Biographical Sketch of Dr. George Thurber", Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club, 17: 204-210.
