Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections September 2017 - 30

Features
Public engagement with the
"Botanical Maverick in the West":
an exhibit on the life and work of
Marcus E. Jones (1852-1934)
Rachel Poutasse

A museum exhibit is much more than a display of objects; it
is an opportunity to tell a story about natural history collections that are often hidden from public view. At Rancho Santa
Ana Botanic Garden, we drew on materials from our herbarium and archives to create an exhibit about the life and work
of late 19th century western U.S. botanist, Marcus E. Jones.

A transplant from the Midwest, Marcus E. Jones (18521934) botanized extensively throughout the western United
States and Mexico, and documented his long career through
writing, photography, and plant collections. In 1923, Jones
sold his private herbarium and library to Pomona College in
Claremont, California, and the Marcus E. Jones Archive was
acquired after his death. In the 1950s, the herbarium, library,
and archives were transferred to Rancho Santa Ana Botanic
Garden. Although the Archive had been used by Director
Emeritus Lee Lenz to write the biography of Jones in the
1980s, it was not formally catalogued until the herbarium
received a grant from the Mellon Foundation in 2012. Since
then, staff, students, interns, and volunteers have digitized
select items from Jones' archives and herbarium with the
goal of making this material available to researchers and the
public on JSTOR. The project, as outlined by the grant, ini30 * SPNHC Connection

tially focused on processing Jones' Mexican collections. We
completed processing these collections in 2015, and the scope
of the project was then expanded to include Jones' other work
in the United States.
To date, over 20,000 of Jones' herbarium specimens have
been databased and imaged as part of the project. The archives have been rehoused, reorganized, and databased, and
the majority of the photographs and lantern slides have been
imaged. As we processed materials from the archives, we
recognized that in addition to their scientific value, the photographs and written accounts of Jones also had significant
historic and institutional importance. We decided that the best
way to share Jones' work would be through a museum exhibit
that would emphasize the scope of his travels and the value of

his plant collections, with additional presentations to provide
depth and context into his fascinating life and career.
The exhibit ran from March-June 2017. Titled "A Botanical Maverick in the West: Marcus E. Jones (1852-1934)," in
order to emphasize the scope of his collecting, we decided to
organize the exhibit by geographic region. The centerpiece
of the exhibit was a large vinyl map of the western United
States and Mexico, combined with a timeline of significant
events in Jones' life. The map included points representing
the number of collections Jones made in a given county in the
United States or state in Mexico, drawn from location data on
Jones' digitized herbarium specimens and information from
Dr. Lenz's biography. We selected a variety of images, herbarium specimens, and documents related to four geographic
areas where Jones spent considerable time: Utah, Mexico and

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections September 2017