American botanist and legislator active in Alaska. Jacob P. Anderson lived in Alaska for over 25 years, all the while collecting tirelessly until he had amassed the largest collection ever to be made in that territory. Born in Glenwood, Utah he moved with his family at an early age to Nebraska City and received some high school tuition from the university of that state. In 1903 he began to teach at Graceland College in Lamoni, Iowa, before homesteading for a few years in Kansas (1906-1911). It is clear that he had begun to collect plants quite early on, for his herbarium contains numerous specimens from southern Iowa, eastern Nebraska and western Kansas. His formal education resumed in 1911 when he took a course in botany and horticulture at Iowa State College, receiving a BSc in 1913. Later he was also awarded a master's degree (1916).
Anderson first moved to Alaska in 1914 when he was employed as a horticulturalist at the Sitka Experiment Station and three years later he set up his own business, creating the first florist in Alaska. Based in Juneau he continued in this enterprise for over 20 years and resumed with renewed vigor his plant collecting activities. Much of Alaska was unexplored botanically and there was little literature to aid his exploration, but over the years Anderson learnt to identify plants from all over the territory and their distribution. The idea of producing of a flora of Alaska became a hobby to which he dedicated a great deal of his spare time and, even when his entire herbarium was lost in a fire in 1924, he returned to his indefatigable gathering undaunted.
In 1938-1939 Anderson served in the House of Representatives of the Alaska Legislature and in 1940 became supervisor for the territory's census. In 1941 he left Alaska and returned to Iowa where he worked as assistant curator of the herbarium at the State College. The collection that he bought with him was the largest ever amassed of Alaskan specimens. Here Anderson concentrated on the preparation of his Flora of Alaska and between 1941 and 1952 returned to that territory four times to gather further data, completing a survey of its plant life which was published in nine parts by the Iowa State College Journal of Science.
Over the years Anderson produced numerous papers on various aspects of the Alaskan flora, including its fungi and plants used by the Eskimo of the northern Bering Sea and Arctic regions. Anderson's premature death in Minnesota in 1953 meant that his flora was not published until 1974, when it appeared co-authored by Stanley L. Welsh under the title Flora of Alaska and Adjacent Parts of Canada. Anderson received an honorary PhD from the University of Alaska in 1940 and the Alaskan mountain, Mount Anderson, in named for him. His collection of some 30,000 specimens (two thirds of which are Alaskan) is now housed in the University of Alaska's Museum of the North.
Sources:
D. Isely, 1953, "Jacob P. Anderson", Proceedings of the Iowa Academy of Science, 60: 53-54
E. Hultén, 1940, "History of botanical exploration in Alaska and Yukon territories from the time of their discovery to 1940", Botaniska Notiser, 1940: 289-346
Dr. Jacob P. Anderson, Juneau GenWeb Project:
http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~akcjunea/biographies/a.html, accessed 11 February 2011.
