William Jasper Spillman
William Jasper Spillman (October 18, 1863 – July 11, 1931) is considered to be the founding father of agricultural economics. In addition, he is famous for being the only American to independently rediscover Mendel's laws of genetics.
William Jasper Spillman was born October 23, 1863 in Lawrence County, Missouri, the eleventh of fifteen children of Nathan Cosby Spilman (b. 1823) and Emily Paralee Pruit (b. 1830). His childhood was spent on their 200-acre (0.81 km2) southwest Missouri farm among a large family burdened by the accidental death of his father on July 21, 1871.
In his mid-teens, he began teaching at a rural school near home. Then in 1881, young Willie Spilman (he changed the spelling while in college) enrolled at the University of Missouri. He subsequently received his B.S. in 1886. Following three years as a teacher at Missouri State Normal School, Cape Giradeau, where he married Miss Mattie Ramsay (1865–1935) in 1889, he received his M.S. in 1890 from the University of Missouri in absentia.
At this time, Spillman was teaching botany and physics at Vincennes University in Indiana where he was fortunate in making the acquaintance of Dr. Enoch A. Bryan who later, as president of Washington Agricultural College and School of Science, invited Spillman to join the faculty.
In 1889 the Spillmans moved to Oregon where he was appointed teacher of science at the Oregon State Normal School, today Western Oregon University, at Monmouth. One of the Spillman sisters and her husband were living in nearby McMinnville. Another older sister was living at The Dalles with her family. It was in Monmouth that Ramsay Spillman was born September 21, 1891.
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