Nelle Ammons

A quick little post for International Women's Day. My coworker Scott Schuette and I were recently working on a checklist of the mosses of Erie County, PA and a number of the specimens we included were from a women named Nelle Ammons who worked in the region in the first half of the 1900s. I've become fairly fascinated with her and have spent some of my spare time researching her story. There's terribly little biographical information written about her and most of what I found was in the History of Botany in West Virginia book, coincidentally written by spouse's great-uncle.

Nelle was born on 1889 in Greene County, PA and did undergraduate and master's work at WVU and then got her PhD from Pitt. She then ended up as an instructor at WVU and spent nearly 40 years there retiring as a botany professor in 1959. She did a pretty amazing amount of botany work in the region and authored a number of papers and books.  I hope to dig more into her background in the near future.