University of Wyoming. Department of Botany records, 1885-1983

The Botany Department at the University of Wyoming was created in 1887. Its most prominent collection of specimens, the Rocky Mountain Herbarium, was started in 1893. The Botany Department offered bachelor, master, and doctoral degrees and encouraged students to study topics such as botany, mycology, zoology, agriculture, molecular biology, wildlife management, and general biology. Students majoring in botany or biology also had the option to minor in Environment and Natural Resources.

The department's first faculty member was Aven Nelson. Nelson came to Wyoming in 1887 to teach at the newly created University of Wyoming. An internationally respected botanist, Nelson helped start the Rocky Mountain Herbarium at the University of Wyoming and was highly active in Wyoming's State Board of Horticulture. Nelson continued his duties teaching at the university and as curator of the Rocky Mountain Herbarium until 1939. Three years later, at the age of eighty-two, he was named Curator Emeritus for the Rocky Mountain Herbarium. Nelson passed away in 1952.

Nelson's successor was Dr. Edwin B. Payson. Payson was a professor at the University of Wyoming from 1921 until his untimely death in 1927. He published several well-received monographs on Cruciferae and Boraginaceae and worked for the Rocky Mountain Herbarium.

W. G. Solheim came to teach at the University of Wyoming in 1929. By 1932 he had become the Botany department head, a position he filled for twenty years. Solheim’s mycological collection was the basis of the Wilhelm G. Solheim Mycological Herbarium, which was established in 1978.