William C. Cusick was born in Illinois in 1842 and emigrated to Oregon while a youth. He had a modest "collegiate" education and worked as a teacher for a time. Most of his adult life he spent as a rancher in the area of the Wallowa Mountains. He began botanical collecting and distribution sometime in the 1870s, encouraged by Harvard’s Asa Gray. Most of his plants came from the area of the Wallowa and Blue Mountains and were arranged in two successive herbariums, one of which he transferred to the University of Oregon, while the second went to Washington State University.
Encouraged by C. V. Piper, Cusick’s second herbarium project included extensive and exhaustive botanical surveys of the area in the two mountain ranges. Unlike his earlier efforts, this second phase did not include large distributions of plants. Cusick died in 1922.
William C. Cusick’s extant papers consist primarily of his field books, which doubled as the catalog for the second herbarium, and the draft list of the floral surveys he conducted, circa 1900-1910. A few surviving items of correspondence with C. V. Piper, and a biographical sketch of Cusick by W. W. Eggleston are also included.
The Cusick papers are arranged to content, with the meager extant correspondence segregated. The field books follow Cusick’s numbering system.
This collection is open and available for research use.
Copyright restrictions may apply.
[Item description]
William Conklin Cusick Papers, 1906-1924 (Cage 316)
Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, Washington State University Libraries, Pullman, WA.
The papers of William C. Cusick, 1842-1922, of Union County, Oregon, were acquired by the Washington State University Herbarium about 1921, along with Cusick’s
The materials in this collection of botanical documents were transferred to the Washington State University Library in 1975 from the university’s Ownbey Herbarium.
Cusick’s life and botanical experiences are discussed in Irwin F. Lange,
Northwest Botanical Manuscripts : an Indexed Register of the Papers, 1867-1957, of Wilhelm Nikolaus Suksdorf, William Conklin Cusick, Charles Vancouver Piper, Rolla Kent Beattie, and Harold St. John in the Washington State University Library. Washington State University; 1976.
Washington State University Botanical Papers, 1881-1973
Xerpha Mae Gaines Papers, 1948-1970
Wilhelm Nikolaus Suksdorf Papers, 1867-1935
Charles Vancouver Piper Papers, 1888-1926
Rolla Kent Beattie Papers, 1899-1956
Harold St. John Papers, 1912-1957
This collection is indexed under the following headings in the online catalog. Researchers desiring materials about related topics, persons, or places should search the catalog using these headings.