Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation

Biographical Note

Taxonomist John Donnell Smith (1829–1928) of Baltimore, Maryland, was a trustee of Peabody Institute in Baltimore (1888–1915) as well as a captain in the Confederate Army. In 1906 he donated his herbarium of more than 100,000 mounted specimens and his botanical library of over 1,600 volumes to the Smithsonian Institution. The herbarium is now kept as a historical collection in the U.S. National Herbarium.

Scope and Contents Note

Collection no. 41 contains seven letters to Smith about the identification of plants, particularly relating to Lobeliaceae, Agave Linnaeus and Annonaceae, from Ignatius Urban (1848–1931), Benjamin Lincoln Robinson (1864–1935), Charles Baron Clarke (1832–1906), Casimir de Candolle (1836–1918), William Trelease (1857–1945) and William Edwin Safford (1859–1926). There is also a commentary, which originally may have been included with the Candolle letter, from Robert Buser (1857–1931) about Lobelia tuerckheimii Rendle and L. parviflora M. Martens & Galeotti.

Collection no. 42 contains Smith's partial catalog of 32 volumes of reprints of botanical publications; 2 letters (possibly copies) from Smith to William A. Kellerman (1850–1908) and Joseph N. Rose (1862–1928); and 4 letters to Smith from Nathaniel L. Britton (1859–1934), Jesse M. Greenman (1867–1951), Harlan P. Kelsey (1872–1959) and Andrew P. Morgan (1836–1907) about the collection, exchange and identification of plants.

Collection no. 92 contains two autograph manuscripts of plant descriptions by Smith and photocopies of pages from Botanical Gazette and of plant labels.

Additional collections and materials

The Hunt Institute Art Department also has 32 pencil drawings by Faxon, which are the originals for new species described by Smith in his series of 36 papers, "Undescribed plants from Guatemala," for the American journal, Botanical Gazette (1887–1916, nos. 12–61).  For additional Smith items, see HI Archives collection no. 370.

Finding aid

A finding aid for collection no. 41 is available online.

A finding aid for collection no. 42 is available online.

A finding aid for collection no. 92 is available online.

Other resources

For information about portraits of and biographical citations for this subject, see the Hunt Institute Archives Register of Botanical Biography and Iconography database.

For thumbnails of artwork by Charles Edward Faxon, see the Catalogue of the Botanical Art Collection at the Hunt Institute database.