Thomas J. Howell (botanist)

Thomas J. Howell
Thomas Howell in 1910
Born	October 8, 1842 Cooper County, Missouri
Died	December 3, 1912 (1912-12-04) (aged 70) , Oregon, USA
Occupation	Botanist

Thomas Jefferson Howell (October 8, 1842 – December 3, 1912) was an American botanist from Oregon. Howell is considered one of the top three self-taught botanists of his era for the Pacific Northwest; the other two being Wilhelm Nikolaus Suksdorf and William Conklin Cusick.

Howell was born in Cooper County, Missouri on October 8, 1842. He came west with his parents, Elizabeth and Benjamin Howell, and his four siblings in 1850. The Howells took up a Donation Land Claim on Sauvie Island in 1854. Howell was largely self-taught, and only had six months of formal schooling. His father was a doctor who had taught him some Latin and science, but he mostly educated himself while farming along the Clackamas River after leaving Sauvie Island. He owned several grocery stores in the Portland area over years. He served as the first post master of the Willamette Slough post office on Sauvie Island starting in 1873. He later served as the first postmaster of Creighton post office in Oak Grove, Oregon, beginning in 1904. Howell married Effie McIlwane in 1892. The Howells had two sons, Dorsey R. Howell (born in 1894) and Benjamin A. Howell (born in 1904). Howell died on December 3, 1912 in (now a neighborhood in southeast Portland).

Soon after arriving in Oregon, Howell and his brother Joseph developed an interest in botany. An aquatic plant sent to Harvard botanist Asa Gray in 1878 was named Howellia aquatilis by him in the brothers' honor. In 1877, Howell started an herbarium, in which he cataloged 2,152 species. Today his collections are in many American and European herbariums. Howell published his first catalog of regional plants in 1881. He compiled and published A Flora of Northwest America: Containing brief descriptions of all the known indigenous and naturalized plants growing without cultivation north of California, west of Utah, and south of British Columbia between 1897 and 1903. Lacking funds, he borrowed type and hand-set the book a few pages at a time, taking them to Portland to be printed. It was the most comprehensive list of Oregon and Washington plants published up to that time.