American farmer, school-teacher and mycologist at Stockton, Kansas. Elam Bartholomew hailed from Strasburg, Pennsylvania, and grew up on his father's farm at Farmington, Illinois. Working on the farm during the summer he attended a rural school every winter and later became a qualified school teacher, for which he was required to have a basic understanding of botany. Purchasing Asa Gray's Lessons in Botany he developed an interest in plants which would remain with him throughout his life.

Some time after his graduation as a teacher, Bartholomew decided to move west and settled in Kansas in 1874, acquire a farmstead at Bow Creek near Stockton. As well as his agricultural activities there he also became very active in the local church, politics and education, tutoring youngsters in botany. At the same time Bartholomew collected plants in north-western Kansas and was initially concerned with the collection of every local phanerogamic plant, a feat he had achieved by 1885. Later, at the instigation of an associate, W.A. Kellerman, he turned his attention to fungi and in particular rust moulds.

Becoming a knowledgeable mycologist he is responsible for the discovery of some 470 new species. Bartholomew himself travelled widely in North America (including Mexico and Canada) in order to gather specimens but also enlarged his collection through exchanges with other collectors. In total his herbarium contained 292,380 specimens which were deposited widely. Over 5,000 specimens were acquired by BM but much or all of this would have been transferred to K (c. 1961) under the Morton Agreement.

Bartholomew also conducted agronomic research and worked for the US Department of Agriculture on several projects, growing various plant varieties on his farm, particularly alfalfa. In 1901 he became editor and publisher of J.B. Ellis and B.M. Everhart's Fungi Columbiani (1901-1917), a monumental work which contained descriptions of fungi from all over the continent.

Although Bartholomew did not publish extensively, he made several important contributions to the rust fungi literature and in 1898 received an MSc from Kansas State College for his work The Plant Rusts of Kansas which was published the following year. The same college awarded him a PhD in 1927 for his work on the fungal flora of Kansas and the same year he published his most extensive contribution, Handbook of the North American Uredinales. In 1929 Bartholomew finally moved from his farm to take on a more academic role, becoming mycological curator in the herbarium of Kansas State College in Hays. Bartholomew was married to Rachel Isabel and together they had five children.

Sources:
E.T. Bartholomew, 1935, "Elam Bartholomew", Mycologia, 27(2): 91-95
H.B. Humphrey, 1961, The Makers of North American Botany: 18-19
F.A. Stafleu and R.S. Cowan, 1976-1998, Taxonomic Literature, 2nd edition (TL-2).