Winter 2001

My quest for Dr. Vasey began as a simple attempt to locate information about plants to guide the composition of restoration plans. As I have so often found in conducting research for purely ecological reasons over the past decade, beneath the empirical data lay a compelling human drama.

Fifteen years ago I joined McHenry County Conservation District’s newly formed Resource Management Division and moved my family near the district’s headquarters in Ringwood, Illinois. Eager to learn everything of relevance to McHenry County’s natural history, I devoured information wherever I could obtain it, including that cornerstone for understanding the complexities of the plant communities of northeastern Illinois, Swink and Wilhelm’s Plants of the Chicago Region.

Anyone familiar with this tome knows it is not light reading. Persistently I plowed through the confusing matrix of Latin names a few pages each day. As my botanical comfort level grew, I began to notice periodic references to the town of Ringwood. Without exception, the botanical reference to Ringwood also identified George Vasey as the collector of the relevant specimen.

"Agoseris cuspidata, PRAIRIE DANDELION. One of our very rarest plants. Known in our area only from McHenry County, where it was collected by Vasey in a prairie at Ringwood on May 20, 1858."

Not only did Ringwood’s location, a mile south of the District headquarters intrigue me, but also the early dates of many of the specimens. I reasoned that as a botanist Vasey might have left records related to the county’s natural communities before many of the human changes associated with the last 170 years had occurred. As time allowed, I began to unravel the mystery of this pioneer plant collector from Ringwood.

Over the years that search has spanned two continents, three countries, and dozens of museums, arboretums, and libraries as each new piece of information produced new leads. I have reviewed nearly 300 letters written by Dr. Vasey, most dated between 1849 and 1866, the time period corresponding to his active collecting in northeastern Illinois. Many Vasey letters provide tantalizing clues about the composition and structure of the Chicago region’s natural communities. Perhaps more importantly, his insights and observations have allowed me to see the landscape from a fresh perspective, through the eyes of a man living in a time when much of the human impact on our natural heritage lay in the distant future.

Background
George Vasey was born in Scarborough, England, in 1822. His family immigrated to North America the next year, settling in Oriskany, New York, and moved to Illinois around 1840.

The fourth of 10 children, Vasey left school at 12 to take a job as a store clerk. Unable to afford books on botany, he borrowed several, copying them entirely by hand. During Vasey’s tenure as a clerk, he met and befriended Dr. P. D. Knieskern, a physician and one of the foremost botanists of the day. Encouraged by Knieskern, Vasey eventually entered into a botanical correspondence with Asa Gray at Harvard and other prominent botanists. Vasey’s relationship with Gray, who was then preparing one of the first comprehensive botany manuals, flourished for decades to come.

At 21, George completed advanced studies at Oneida Institute and decided to study medicine, graduating from the Berkshire Medical Institute in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 1846. Vasey married Martha Scott of Oriskany and a year later relocated to Ringwood, arriving via the Erie Canal. Here, he would spend the next 18 years of his life practicing medicine and pursuing his other great passion: collecting plants.

As the years passed, Vasey’s medical practice flourished. The construction of the Fox River Railroad in 1854 allowed him to extend his medical practice to Elgin. He opened a dry goods store to support a growing family including four children, his wife, Martha, and mother, Jane. The breadth of his botanical correspondence and collecting expanded as well.

By 1858, his list of correspondents numbered in the dozens including S. B. Mead of Hancock County, John Kennicott of Cook County, Michael Bebb of Winnebago County, and Dr. Engelmenn of St. Louis. Late in that same year, Vasey, Kennicott, and several other prominent naturalists established the Illinois Natural History Society. The Society supported natural history and agricultural innovation, eventually evolving into the Illinois Natural History Survey. Vasey served as president and collections curator for several years.

A son Frank was born in 1859, and Flora Nancy, a daughter, in 1861. Vasey became a prolific writer for the Prairie Farmer and the Natural History Society. His books and articles included floristic inventories of the entire state, treatises on buffalo, and even a book on the philosophy of laughing and smiling.

Aaron Vasey was born in 1864 and named for George’s brother killed at the battle Fredericksburg the year before. This year (1864) is the apex of Dr. Vasey’s Illinois botanical correspondence encompassing nearly fifty other collectors. It also marks the beginning of a series of events that would result in the Vasey family abandoning northeastern Illinois forever. In rapid succession, measles, scarlet fever, and whooping cough devastated both parents and children. Aaron Vasey succumbed to whooping cough in June, four months after his birth.

Martha Vasey grew progressively weaker. In a desperate attempt to save her life, George moved the family to Richview, Illinois in Washington County in 1866. The fervent hope that a milder climate might improve his wife’s condition proved short lived. She died within a month of the move.

Vasey’s botanical correspondence ceased until 1867, when he began to write once again to long time friend Michael Bebb, a botanist from Rockford. Perhaps the fact that Bebb had also lost his own wife a year before created a special bond between the two men.

In 1871 after joining John Wesley Powell’s exploration of the Colorado River, Vasey accepted a position in Washington, D.C. as the first botanist for the Department of Agriculture. Later he would become the first Director of the Smithsonian’s National Herbarium, a position Vasey would retain until his death in 1893.

Specimens of Wilderness
The period from 1848 when Vasey arrived in Illinois until his relocation to Washington in 1866 holds the most relevance for restoration ecologists working in the Chicago region. His correspondence is rich in first-hand information relating to the area’s natural history. Shortly after arriving in Illinois, Vasey renewed his association with Gray. His earliest letter conveys the excitement for botany felt by this 28-year-old newly graduated physician:

"I have for some time had it in contemplation to write to you, believing that you will be interested in a few remarks on the botany of this section... I have concluded to give you a list of the plants with some occasional remarks which may possibly be serviceable to you in the preparation of a second edition of your manual which by the way is an exceedingly valuable book, and has been of great service to me, and I presume many other learners of botany." October 9th, 1849, Ringwood, Illinois

Vasey included in this letter "A List of Some Interesting Plants of McHenry County Illinois," a handwritten key placing many plants he observed as occurring in either prairies or barrens. Some of those observations on now-rare plants are striking today, 150 years after they were first penned.

Platanthera leucophaea (prairie white-fringed orchid), Common in prairies and barrens

Cypripedium candidum (small white lady slipper orchid), Abundant in marshes and wet places

Sporobolus heterolepis (prairie dropseed grass), Perhaps the most common grass of the prairie.

Castilleja coccinea var. flava & sessiliflora (Indian paintbrush), found together and most abundant.

While Vasey’s notes on individual species are insightful, the tantalizing hints concerning the appearance of the larger landscape should be even more compelling to today’s land managers.

For instance, Vasey selected only two natural communities — prairie and barrens — in assigning specific habitats to the plants he had identified. In 1849, much of the rugged, poorly drained topography of northeastern Illinois still defied cultivation despite the fact that settlement had begun more than a decade before. The country was recovering from a severe economic depression, called the Era of Hard Times, that had lasted more than 10 years. Agricultural drainage lay 30 years in the future. Thus in many areas, the sparsely settled landscape of McHenry County still retained large blocks of native vegetation.

The character and richness of the prairie is understood today as well as it was in Vasey’s time. By 1849 the fecundity of the prairie soils had been well established and the introduction of the steel moldboard plow earlier in the decade had convinced most farmers that well-drained prairie soils were superior for crop production.

The barrens, however, have been harder to understand. Vasey, like many of his contemporaries, possessed an intimate familiarity with the diverse flora of eastern forest. By Vasey’s time the term "barrens" had come to mean a very specific natural community type, recognized by the predominantly agrarian society of the time as possessing certain attributes in terms of structure and composition. Consider the clear and concise criteria assigned to barrens in Peck’s 1836 Illinois Gazetteer:

"In the western dialect the term barrens has since received a very extensive application throughout the west...The timber is general scattering, of a rough and stunted appearance, interspersed with patches of hazle (sic) and brushwood.These barrens occur where the contest between fire and timber is kept up, each striving for the mastery.

"Dwarfish shrubs and small trees of oak and hickory have contended for years with the fire for a precarious existence, while a mass of roots, sufficient for the support of large trees have accumulated in the earth. As soon as they are protected from the ravages of the annual fires, the more thrifty sprouts shoot forth, and in ten years are large enough for corn cribs and stables.

"The rapidity with which the young growth pushes itself forward, without a single effort on the part of man to accelerate it, and the readiness with which the prairie becomes converted into thickets, and the barrens into a young forest, shows that in another generation, timber will not be wanting in any part of Illinois."

Vasey clearly distinguished between the barrens and two other communities he knew well, the treeless prairie and the dense Eastern forest. He makes it clear that the fire-dependent oak barrens were a major part of the landscape as he saw it.

As interesting and useful as the natural history information in the Vasey correspondence is, the human drama associated with the letters is even more evocative. The trials and triumphs of an individual emerge through flowing cursive handwriting as one reads the letters.

"I have the pleasure to announce the recent arrival at my house of a very interesting young stranger a little daughter making the third of that kind and including the boys completing my half dozen. We welcome her to our fireside. Her mother is doing well thanks to kind providence." February 25th, 1861, Ringwood

"I know that the attachment between yourself and wife must have been very strong from the few glimpses I was permitted to take of your conjugal relations. Alas that our earthly ties should be so easily sundered. When I lost my little child last year I thought that this world was a failure if there was no future for us. But we have the reasonable and comforting assurance that there is a better and an eternal world beyond and there we may no doubt be permitted to continue and perpetuate the friendship and attachments we form here. So I trust my dear Sir that you have to sooth your great bereavement the Christian hope of a glorious reunion above." October 25th, 1865, Ringwood

People of the Deep Soil
These poignant vignettes of one man’s life have bequeathed to me one of the most important insights of all into the management of natural areas. Land is a sentient entity possessed of a tangible living spirit. Human culture has always been a personification of the land itself, a mirror through which nature reflects back her qualities in the character of the people who become part of that landscape.

Nowhere does this intrinsic connection to place ring with more resonance than here in the Heartland. We are people of the deep soil, rooted in the rich blackness of prairie earth. Equally crucial to land stewardship is the cultural legacy that is part of every wild place regardless of its location. We must understand that as stewards we shepherd not only rare plants and animals, but also the tears and laughter and dreams that define each acre as clearly as do its natural communities. Failing this, we have learned only half of the story that land yearns to tell us.

The Midwestern culture we have inherited was intimately connected to that natural world, directly dependent upon its resources for survival. Ours is the world the settlers strove to build, the pinnacle in a long struggle to conquer a wilderness continent. In an odd way, their greatest and most enduring legacy may be the doorways they have left us back into that wild world. In every painting, every journal, every dog-eared letter lies a secret portal back to the natural world.

One is tempted to speculate what the good Doctor might have thought of our rediscovery of the wilderness in our own backyard were he alive today. I am convinced he would support it enthusiastically for in one of his final letters from Ringwood, he wrote these lines to his friend and fellow botanist Michael Bebb:

"I believe with you that those who love nature, and researchers into the field of nature, are generally men and women of blameless lives. If the poet is correct in saying the undevout astronomer is mad, would it not be equally proper to say the undevout naturalist is also mad. For surely it is our appreciation for things of beauty that we come closest to ourselves and to the creator of all that is blessed."

Ed Collins is a restoration ecologist with the McHenry County Conservation District and one of the architects of the Nippersink re-meandering project. His popular course — "Landscape Genealogy" taught at several Chicago Wilderness locations — shows how to research the history of land in the region.