Biography

American botanist. Agnes Chase, self-taught doyenne of American agrostology, worked for the U.S. National Herbarium in Washington for over 60 years. She collected and described more than 10,000 grass-type specimens from her travels in the United States and Latin America, and was recognised by the Botanical Society of America, the Smithsonian Institution, the Linnaean Society of London, and the Government of Brazil for her contributions to botany. She received her first and only degree, an honorary doctorate from University of Illinois, at the age of 89.

She was born Mary Agnes Meara in Iroquois County, Illinois, the daughter of a railroad blacksmith from Tipperary, Ireland, who died when she was two years old. Because of the prejudice against Irish immigrant workers, the family name was changed from Meara to Merrill after her widowed mother moved the family to Chicago. Although she attended grammar school, Agnes Chase was expected to help support the family. She found work as a proofreader and typesetter on newspapers and at the age of 19 married William Chase, editor of the School Herald. He died of tuberculosis less than a year later, leaving her with a mountain of unpaid debts from the journal. She paid off his creditors by living frugally and working nights on newspapers, and in the daytime attended extension courses at the Lewis Institute and the University of Chicago.

Her childhood interest in plants was rekindled by one of her nephews, Virginius Chase, who later became a botanist in his own right. Their visit to the plant collecting exhibit at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago made a deep impression on both of them and inspired her to make a personal study of the flora of northern Illinois. She began her first field book in 1897 and the following year, while collecting in an Illinois swamp, met Reverend Ellsworth Hill, a retired minister and amateur bryologist, who became her mentor. Discovering her talent as a botanical artist, he employed her to illustrate his publications and introduced her to Charles Frederick Millspaugh, curator of botany at the Field Museum of Natural History, who commissioned her work for his Plantae Utowanae (1900) and Plantae Yucatanae (1903-1904). In addition to botany, Hill taught her microscopy, which enabled her to land a job as a meat inspector in the Chicago stockyards. At his urging, she applied for a position as a botanical artist in the U.S. Department of Agriculture and was hired in 1903 to work in the Division of Forage Plants in Washington, DC. Shortly afterwards she began her long association with Albert Spear Hitchcock, the USDA's principal scientist in charge of systematic agrostology, first as an illustrator, then as his scientific assistant, and, finally, after his death in 1935, as his successor. She officially retired in 1939 but continued to work, without pay, as a research associate and custodian of grasses of the National Herbarium until the end of her life. Her field books from 1897 to 1959 are in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution.

Soon after joining the USDA, Chase started using her spare time to work in the grass herbarium on a study of the Paniceae, which resulted in a series of publications, starting in 1906. That same year she made the first of her (mainly) self-financed collecting trips for the USDA. She collected extensively in the United States, visiting 19 in total, and Mexico. In 1913 she spent two months in Puerto Rico, collecting grasses, bamboo, and ferns. In 1924 and 1929 she made two trips to Brazil, where she collected over 20,000 specimens in areas largely ignored by botanists, travelling, by whatever means were available, across often hazardous terrain. "The hardest physical feat of my life", she called it. One story has her detained as a suspected lunatic after being observed pulling up clumps of grass on her hands and knees. She twice toured Europe's herbarium collections in pursuit of her research (Vienna, Florence, Pisa, Geneva, Leiden, and Brussels in 1922-1923; Montpellier, Caen, and Paris in 1935).

A year after her retirement, she was invited to Venezuela to advise their Ministry of Agriculture on the development of a range management program, and during her stay collected over 400 different types of grasses from a variety of ecozones, including the Andes, savannah, and cloud forest. On these trips, she met many Brazilian and Venezuelan students of botany, whom she encouraged to study in the United States, and some she even boarded in her Washington home. Many of the species she collected were new to science, and were incorporated into Hitchcock's Manual of the Grasses of the United States and her own 70 publications, the last of which, Index to Grass Species (co-authored with C.D. Niles and others), came out a year before her death at age 94, and is considered her culminating achievement. Her popular guide to grasses for non-professionals, Agnes Chases's First Book of Grasses, originally published in 1922, is still in print.

Chase was a dedicated pacifist, prohibitionist, and socialist, and an early and active contributor to a number of political organisations: the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Women's Party, and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. She was twice arrested and jailed during the Wilson administration for agitating in the cause of women's suffrage, the first time in 1918 for making a speech in Lafayette Square, the second time in 1919 as one of a group of protesters who had vowed to maintain a continuous fire in front of the White House by burning copies of presidential speeches containing the words "freedom" and "liberty", until women had the right to vote.

Sources:
L.J. Cooper-Freytag, 1997, “Mary Agnes Meara Chase (1869-1963)”, in L.S. Grinsten, C.A. Biermann and R.K. Rose (eds), 1997, Women in the Biological Sciences: A Bibliographic Sourcebook: 70-74
T.R. Faust, “Mary Agnes Meara Chase”, in B.F. Shearer and B.S. Shearer (eds), 1996, Notable Women in the Life Sciences: A Biographical Dicitionary: 63-67.