biography
| name: |
Chase, Agnes
|
| |
née Meara
|
| sex:
| female
|
| lived:
| (1869–1963)
|
| biography:
| Botanist and agrostologist, born in Iroquois Co, Illinois, USA. She had little formal education and, after her one-year marriage ended with her husband's untimely death (1889), she worked at various jobs to pay his debts. She began cataloging her own collection of wild flowers in 1897 and worked at the Field Museum of Natural History (1901–3), the US Department of Agriculture (1903–39), and the Smithsonian Institution (1939–49). An ardent suffragette, she was twice jailed for her protests (1915, 1918) and forcibly fed. Her long association (1905–36) with Albert S Hitchcock resulted in their collaborating on several books and eventually led to her updating his work, Manual of the Grasses of the United States (1951). She collected over 12 000 sets of plants, mostly grasses, and published a revised index of grass species (3 vols, 1962). |
|
|
