Francis Harvey Green was born May 19, 1861 to Sharpless and Mary Booth Green in Booth’s Corner, a small town in Bethel Township, Delaware County, PA. In 1911, he married Gertrude Heritage, a graduate of Bryn Mawr College. He attended West Chester Normal School, earning his BA in 1882. After spending time at Amherst College and Harvard University, he earned an MA from Dickinson College in 1893. He began his career in Juniata College’s English Department, and was head of the department from 1884 to 1888.
In 1888, Green joined the English Department at West Chester Normal School, and became head of the department in 1890, a position he held for the next thirty-three years.
Green edited several books of quotations, and also wrote poetry himself; he once submitted an annual report of the Historical Society in verse. He wrote school songs for West Chester, one of which can be seen to the left. He was a popular lecturer on literature, with engagements all along the Eastern seaboard and in the Midwest, and continued to give lectures up to his death.
He was a devout Christian, and encouraged West Chester students in their Christianity, serving as president of the YMCA for many years. He was also active in local organizations, particularly the Historical Society of Chester County, of which he was president.
Green left West Chester in 1922 and became headmaster of the Pennington Seminary for Boys in Pennington, New Jersey. He was evidently a popular administrator, since in May 1941 a three-day tribute was held in Green’s honor at the Pennington School. In 1943, he retired from Pennington after 21 years of service there. He still had a reputation at West Chester, and in 1947 a building was dedicated to him: the Francis Harvey Green Library.
At the ground-breaking ceremony for a public school named after him in Bethel Township, Green wielded the shovel himself. He didn’t live to see the dedication of the Francis Harvey Green School, however, as he passed away January 31, 1951. He was interred at Siloam Cemetery, in his hometown Booth’s Corner.
References
Scrapbook. Francis Harvey Green Collection, Special Collection and Archives, West Chester University.
Serpentine, 1910. West Chester University.
“West Chester Normal School Hymn.” 1919. Series 2, Subseries 2, Folder 7. Francis Harvey Green Collection, Special Collection and Archives, West Chester University.
Overlease and his wife Edith pursued many research projects together, both in the West Chester area and elsewhere, and the collection contains raw data and drafts for scholarly publications from these projects. There is correspondence and other material relating to the fight for the Gordon Natural Area, and materials relating to courses that Overlease taught at West Chester. Additionally, it contains biographical information about Overlease.
William Roy Overlease was a botanist, ornithologist, ecologist, historian, and teacher who was committed to science education throughout his career. Among many other accomplishments, he was in large part responsible for the establishment of the Robert B. Gordon Natural Area for Environmental Studies on West Chester’s South Campus, and he was Curator of the Darlington Herbarium and the College Science Museum.
Overlease was born and grew up in Elkhart, Indiana. He attended Michigan State University, where he earned a Bachelor of Science in Forestry, a five year professional degree, in 1950, and an MS in Conservation in 1952. These were early days for academic programs in this field, and Overlease was required to get special permission from the graduate council of the university in order to pursue his MS. He also earned a Secondary Education Teaching Certificate in 1950, demonstrating his dedication to science education from the start of his career.
From 1952 to 1957, Overlease worked for the Interpretative Program of the Indiana Department of Conservation, Division of State Parks, as the only full-time state park naturalist in the Midwest (the rest were hired seasonally or on a part-time basis on weekends). As such, he had broad responsibilities for developing educational programming for state parks throughout Indiana.
During this time, he met Edith Dymond at Turkey Run State Park, Indiana and they married there in 1955. They were a devoted couple and collaborated on all of William’s field work and publications.
Overlease returned to Michigan State University, to pursue a PhD in Botany and Plant Pathology, which he completed in 1964.
One of his greatest accomplishments was to establish the Gordon Natural Area at the South Campus as a permanent natural laboratory to study plants and animals. The struggle began the year after he began working at West Chester, when he found out that the Physical Education Department wanted to develop 45 acres of forest on the South Campus: “Beginning in 1964, I began to request and negotiate with the Physical Education Department to preserve some of the forest and wild land owned by the college on South Campus for ecological studies. After several years of effort, a hearing was obtained with the board of trustees but the project was turned down. With the change in national attitude toward ecology in the early 1970s a new effort was made.” The second time the proposal went before the board of trustees, it was approved and on November 10, 1973, the Robert B. Gordon Natural Area for Environmental Studies was dedicated.
Overlease’s curation of the Darlington Herbarium was another important contribution to West Chester. The Herbarium originally belonged to the Chester County Cabinet of Natural Science, but when its membership dwindled in the later nineteenth century, the Cabinet donated all of its 17,000 plant specimens to West Chester. The specimens were mostly collected between 1828 and 1850, from all over the world: throughout North America, Siberia, South Africa, Australia, Jamaica, the British Isles, the European Continent, and Egypt are all represented.
Over the years, various faculty members and students from the Science Department had ensured the preservation and organization of the specimens. In 1965, Overlease overhauled the cataloging system, rearranging the collection alphabetically by family and alphabetically be genus within each family. A card catalog reflecting this new organization system was created over five years. Overlease also replaced the wooden cabinets the specimens had been stored in for decades with metal cabinets that offered the specimens much more protection.
References
Holt, Jack. 2011. “William R. Overlease (1925-2007).” Bartonia 65: 115-116.
http://digitalcommons.wcupa.edu/gna_sp_series/10/ Accessed May 24, 2017.
Gordon, Robert B. “The William Darlington Herbarium of the West Chester State College.” [circa 1950s].
Overlease Collection, Box 1, Folder 2.
Overlease, William R. “A Short History of the William Darlington Herbarium.” 1989. Folder 1, Box 1,
Overlease. Special Collections, West Chester University Libraries.
Overlease, William R. [Curriculum Vitae]. [Circa 1983]. “Personal Data” folder, Overleaseb Collection.
Special Collections, West Chester University Libraries.
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