(1916-2008)
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (NCU) curates over 890 vascular plant specimens collected by Alton McCaleb Harvill, Jr. He usually signed his specimens as “A. M. Harvill” and his spouse, Barbara J. Harvill, was a co-collector on many specimens. His hand-written herbarium can be challenging to read. As we continue to catalog our collections, without doubt many more specimens collected by the Harvills will be found.
For a detailed tribute to Alton M. Harvill, Jr., see Wright, Robert A. S. (2011) Alton McCaleb Harvill, Jr. (1916-2008): A Necrology and Tribute. Banisteria 38: 89-98. See pages 97 and 98 for a list of Harvill’s publications. Below are some excerpts from that work.
“Alton M. Harvill, Jr., Professor Emeritus of Biology at Longwood University, died on February 21, 2008 at age 91. Dr. Harvill was most certainly the foremost authority on the Virginia flora, specializing in documenting the geographical distribution of plants. At Longwood University, he established the Harvill-Stevens Herbarium, a collection of approximately 75,000 specimens considered one of the finest and most significant systematic collections of vascular plants in the mid-Atlantic regions…
[Dr. Harvill] died on February 21, 2008 at age 91 in Cape Carteret, North Carolina… he is interred in the Westview Cemetery in Farmville, Virginia. He was preceded in death on January 29, 1988 by his devoted wife, Barbara Jean Hopkins Harvill, originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota…
[Harvill] was born on November 20, 1916 in Russellville, Logan County, Kentucky, to Altom M. Harvill, Sr. and Della Doss Harvill. He had one sister, Thelma Harvill.
Dr. Harvill grew up in Princeton, Kentucky and as a youth enjoyed working with plants in his father’s greenhouse. He was educated in the Princeton public school system and graduated in 1934 from R. E. Butler High School. Dr. Harvill then attended Murray State Teachers College for two years. After completing some classes at the University of Idaho, he finished his undergraduate work at the University of Kentucky (UK), receiving his B.S. degree in 1939. He immediately enrolled in UK to pursue graduate work; then, taking a break, he worked for a year at the plant operated by U.S. Steel Company in Pittsburg, California. Dr. Harvill rturned to Lexington, Kentucky and completed the M.S. requirements in the summer of 1941 under the direction of Professor B. B. McInteer.
Dr. Harvill’s Master’s thesis, The Compositae of Kentucky, documented several state records at that time including Aster lateriflorus L. Britton var. angustifolius Wiegand (from Whitley County), Solidago boottii Hooker (McCreary County), Vernonia fasciculata Michaux (Ballard County), and Iva ciliata Willdenow (Ballard County), the latter record based on a previously misidentified herbarium specimen. In all, Dr. Harvill processed collections representing 219 species from 57 genera in 10 tribes of this plant family (Asteraceae). Unfortunately, most, if not all, of Dr. Harvill’s M.S. thesis voucher specimens were lost in the November 1948 fire that destroyed the early herbarium collections and large botanical library first established at UK by Frank T. McFarland and others…
After receiving the M.S. degree, Dr. Harvill attended classes at the University of Michigan Biological Station (UMBS) at Douglas Lake, Michigan. He then received a UMBS assistantship at the University of Wyoming (US) and briefly curated the Rocky Mountain Herbarium at UW prior to entering military service on March 12, 1942.
Dr. Harvill enlisted in the U.S. Army for the duration of WWII plus six months as a private at Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indian, and was assigned as a service-unlimited warrant officer’s assistant. He also served as a medical lab technician and was posted mostly in Alaska where he began to amass a large collection of mosses. He was discharged with the rank of Technician Fifth Grade on October 9, 1945.
In March, 1946, Dr. Harvill returned to the University of Michigan (UM) to complete additional coursework and begin research to support his dissertation. In June 1948, under the tutelage of Dr. William Campbell Steere, the UM Botany Department Char, he finished his dissertation, A Phytogeographic Study of Alaskan Mosses…
he published three more papers on mosses while teaching at the University of Alabama (UA) from 1948 to 1953. In July 1949, Dr. Harvill found what he believed to be a new species of moss in virgin hardwood forest in King Cove, Lawrence County, Alabama, naming it Diphyscium cumberlandianum.
After his appointment at UA ended, Dr. Harvill conducted rubber research in Liberia in 1953-54 on a 10,000 acre plantation. He returned to the U.S. in 1955; then, after a grand tour of Europe, settled into a teaching position at River Falls State College (RFSC, now University of Wisconsin – River Falls). Feeling an urge to travel, Dr. Harvill and his wife, Barbara Jean, left RFSC in the fall of 1956 for Cairo, Egypt, where he operated a “one-man biology department” at the American University of Cairo (AUC). Mrs. Harvill served as the Administrative Assistant to AUC president Raymond McLain…
The Harvills returned to Kentucky so Dr. Harvill could teach at Murray State College from 1957 to 1961 and be close to his convalescing parents… in December 1962, Dr. Harvill accepted a research position with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in Washington, D.C. to conduct vegetation studies for the National Intelligence Survey (NIS)…
In the Fall of 1963, he accepted a professorship at Longwood College (now Longwood University, LU) where he taught numerous undergraduate courses in natural sciences, mentored students, and conducted personal research. During his tenure at LU, Dr. Harvill began to concentrate on vascular plants instead of bryophytes, and in 1965 he became involved with the Virginia Academy of Sciences (VAS) and the Virginia Flora Committee (VFC)…
Dr. Harvill formally retired as Professor Emeritus at Longwood University in 1983. This even permitted him to focus on this studies of Virginia botany. He spent much of this first 17 years after retirement pursuing numerous phytogeographical interests, refining ideas, filing paper, filling in distributional maps, and corresponding with a staggering number of botanical researchers, authors, and colleagues from around the world…”