100-year-old samples go digital
A little more than 100 years ago, Marcus Jones, a well-known botanist, geologist and mining engineer traveled thousands of miles by horse and buggy or by train, collecting almost a half million plant specimens and taking photographs of the landscape.
In 2010, more than 1,000 of those original negatives and glass slides were found at the Rancho Santa Ana Botanical Gardens. Dr. William Gray, a retired biochemist from Salt Lake City, digitized the slides and then traveled to those same spots and took the same picture – 100 years later.
Michael Piep, The president of the Cache chapter of the Utah Native Plant Society, said it was a miracle the slides were found in such good condition considering the difficulty Jones went through to develop them in the primitive conditions of desert camps in Utah and how long they must have been in storage.
“The fact that these glass negatives have survived all of that was amazing to begin with,” Piep said. “Everyone had assumed that most of these glass negatives had been destroyed when he died.”
Dr. William Gray took the initiative to raise money in Utah to curate them, preserve them and get them digitized.
“The idea is to recover some of these places and come as close as possible to where the photograph was taken and then recreate that photograph showing the changes that have taken place over a hundred years,” Gray said.
Gray said the big impact is when people see the old photograph and it clicks with them what they mean. Seeing the land where there house is now or what their fields looked like back then is an experience for them. When they see the hundred year’s difference, people get genuinely interested, he said.
“Everybody you wave these photographs at gets intrigued,” said Gray. “I think it’s a connection to the past that was here. I think it’s then and now that most people can relate to.”
One of Jones’s photographs in particular had a distinctive plant in it. When Gray went to photograph the same site, he discovered the same plant was still there.
“Realizing that that one shrub in Capitol Reef was one in his photograph and in mine, it gives you goosebumps,” he said.
As a slow-growing shrub, Gray determined the plant to be a mountain mahogany between 150 and 200 years old.
“The park is there, it’s protected, and many of the plants are still there after 120 years,” he said.
Gray said many of the other photographs showed changes in the topography, but the change was not always worse in the later photograph. In some of the old photographs the land was desolate from overgrazing and other problems even a hundred years ago, and in the new photographs the land has begun to heal itself.
“I hope one thing that will come out of it is that people will realize that we need to look after what we’ve got,” Gray said. “They were not looking after it in those days.”
Gray said overgrazing and weeds were major problems and even Jones himself was not always prudent in the number of samples he took since he sold the extras to make a living. He said in many ways, we’re doing a better job now, but not entirely. He said botanists wonder what it will look like after another hundred years.
“Some places it’s going to be doing better, others, there’s no hope for,” he said.
Mary Barkworth, director of the Intermountain Herbarium, said USU has a real connection to Marcus Jones and his work because some of the specimens from his travels are housed in the herbarium in the basement of the Junction on USU campus.
“As of today, we have 259,922 specimens in the herbarium,” she said. “We call it the jewel in the basement of USU.”
– abhendrix@pentaracorp.com