RARE \"Plant Pathologist\" Erwin Frink Smith Cut Signature For Sale

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RARE \"Plant Pathologist\" Erwin Frink Smith Cut Signature:
$139.99

Up for sale a RARE! "Plant Pathologist" Erwin Frink Smith Cut Signature.

ES-9647

Erwin Frink Smith

(January 21, 1854 – April 6, 1927) was an American plant

pathologist with the United States Department of

Agriculture. He played a major role in demonstrating that bacteria

could cause plant disease.  Smith was born in Gilbert Mills,

near Fulton, New York to Louisa

Frink Smith and Rancellor King Smith. In 1870 he moved with his family to an

80-acre farm, which eventually included an apple orchard, in Clinton County, Michigan.

The farm ultimately failed, causing the Smith family to move to North Plains

Township, Michigan. Because he was no longer needed to help on the farm, Smith

was finally able to attend Ionia High School, starting in 1876, when he was 22

years old. Smith read widely and was largely self-taught in botany

and bacteriology.

In 1881, while still in high school, he co-authored a book on the flora of

Michigan titled "Cataloque of the Phaenogamous and Vascular Cryptogamous

Plants of Michigan" with Charles F. Wheeler.[6] In 1885 he published a book on

water sanitation. Smith also enjoyed writing poetry and wrote several poems

about his boyhood, his childhood teachers, and even a poem titled

"Evolution." Poverty kept Smith from attending college after

graduation from high school. Instead, he accepted a position at a Michigan

prison, where he worked as a guard. While working there, he developed an

interest in public health and sanitation and began reading about bacteriology. Smith

was accepted to the University of Michigan in 1885 and passed

examinations for most of the coursework soon after acceptance, which allowed

him to earn his bachelor's degree in biology after only one year at the

university. Soon after earning his 1886 bachelor's degree, he took a position

as chief of Plant Pathology in Bureau of Plant Industry. He earned his

doctorate from Michigan in 1889. Throughout his career, he pursued the

hypothesis that bacteria were significant causes of plant disease. Resistance

in the field, most notably by Alfred Fischer, eventually gave way,

culminating in his three-volume 1910 work Bacteria in Relation to Plant

Diseases. Dutch American botanical explorer Frank Nicholas Meyer worked for Smith in

1901, upon his arrival in the United States. Erwin

Smith married Charlotte May Buffet on April 13, 1893. Their marriage was a

happy one, but tragically terminated by Charlotte's death on December 28, 1906,

eight months after she was diagnosed with endocarditis.

Smith celebrated his wife's memory in an elegantly produced book of poetry and

biography entitled For Her Friends and Mine: A Book of Aspirations, Dreams

and Memories (1915).

At a time when it was unusual to do

so, Smith was known for hiring many women at the Bureau of Plant industry,

including botanists Nellie A. Brown, Mary K. Bryan,

Florence

Hedges, Lucia McCulloch, Agnes J.

Quirk, Angie Beckwith, and Charlotte Elliott. Historian Margaret W. Rossiter cites this as an

example of a harem effect. In Smith's case, a factor in

hiring women only as assistants may have been USDA's structural exclusion of

women from taking the examinations that would have allowed them to enter the

higher-ranking jobs for which they were qualified. Many of Smith's assistants

praised him for giving them research projects suited to their skills rather

than confining them to the more limited tasks presumed by their job

classifications.

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