Walter Lane Barksdale

(23 November 1914 – 26 December 1996)^1,2

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Herbarium (NCU) curates 11 fungal specimens and over 600 vascular plant specimens collected by Walter Lane Barksdale.  As we continue to catalog our collections it is very possible that more will be found.  Barksdale usually used “Lane Barksdale” on specimen labels, and frequently used “LB” when annotating specimens. Other herbaria curating specimens collected by Barksdale include The Academy of Natural Sciences (PH; vascular plants), Botanical Research Institute of Texas (BRIT; vascular plants), Converse College (CONV; vascular plants), Duke University (DUKE; vascular plants & bryophytes), Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP; vascular plants), Harvard University Herbaria (AMES, GH; vascular plants), Louisiana State University (LSU; vascular plants), New York Botanical Garden (NY; vascular plants, algae, & bryophytes), The Pennsylvania State University (PAC ; vascular plants), University of South Carolina, Columbia (USCH; vascular plants), Washington State University (WS; vascular plants), and Western Carolina University (WCUH; vascular plants).³

Walter Lane Barksdale was born in Emporia, Virginia on 23 November, 1914 to Wallace and Amanda Barksdale.^1,9   He attended primary school and high school in Greensboro, North Carolina.⁴  After earning his A.B. in Botany from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1937, he continued at Carolina for graduate studies.  He completed his Masters thesis, “The pedicellate species of Trillium found in the southern Appalachians, ” in the Botany Department in 1938 with his thesis, but is listed in the university records as having completed his graduate studies in 1941.

Barksdale served in the United States military during World War II.  He joined the United States Army in 1941 and began active service on 10 September, 1943.  He served in the Sanitary Corp in medical laboratories in New Guinea and the Philippines.  He was discharged from active duty on 2 August 1946 at rank of Captain.^4,5

From 1946 to 1949 Barksdale was a bacteriologist in the 406th Medical General laboratory in Tokyo, Japan. ⁴

Barksdale married Alma J. Whiffen (25 October 1916 – 5 July 1981) in New Jersey in June 1952.⁶   Alma Whiffen Barksdale had earned her Masters degree in 1939 and Ph.D. in 1941 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the laboratory of mycologist Dr. John Nathaniel Couch.  It is likely that Barksdale and Whiffen had met while graduate students at Carolina.

In 1953 Lane Barksdale earned his doctorate in the Department of Microbiology at New York University with his thesis, “Phage-host relationships in nontoxigenic and toxigenic Diphtheria bacilli.”⁴  Shortly after earning his doctorate, he joined the faculty of the Microbiology Department in School of Medicine of New York University, and taught and did research on diphtheria and leprosy for more than thirty years.⁷

Lane Barksdale was a William Hallock Park Fellow from 1949 to 1951, and a National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis Fellow from 1953 to 1954.⁴

He became Guggenheim Fellow in 1971.⁸ (His wife, Dr. Alma Whiffen Barksdale, had become a Guggenheim Fellow in 1951.) Lane Barksdale was a Visiting Professor at Osaka University and a Lecturer at Kyoto University in Japan from 1960 to 1961.⁴

The Minneapolis Institute of art curates 143 objects which were a bequest of Walter Lane Barksdale.  The collection contained mostly netsuke, but there were also a few okimono and inro as well.^10,11   An inro is “a traditional Japanese case for holding small objects, suspended from the obi (sash) worn around the waist when wearing a kimono… Consisting of a stack of tiny, nested boxes, inro were most commonly used to carry medicine.  The stack of boxes is held together by a cord that is laced through cord runners down one side, under the bottom and up the opposite side.  The ends of the cord are secured to a netsuke, a kind of toggle that is passed between the sash and the pants and then hooked on top of the sash to suspend the inro.”  An okimono “may be a small Japanese carving, similar to, but larger than netsuke. Unlike netsuke , which have a specific purpose, okimono are purely decorative and are displayed in the tokonoma [alcove]”.¹³

After Alma Whiffen Barksdale’s death in 1981, Lane Barksdale retired from New York University and returned to Greensboro, North Carolina.  He died on 26 December, 1996 in Greensboro at age 82. ^{7 ,2}