Charles Vancouver Piper:The AgrostologistA profile of the first chairman of the USGA Green Section.BY MICAH WOODS

Charles Vancouver Piper isremembered today as the firstchairman of the USGA Green

Section and as the senior author of theseminal Tuif for Golf Courses (1917). Hiscontemporaries, however, knew him asa world-renowned botanist and agrono-mist, and in the scope of Piper's work,his turfgrass investigations were simplya small part of a remarkable andproductive career.

Piper was born in Victoria, B.C., in1867, and his family soon moved toSeattle, where his father had a bakerynear the intersection of First Avenueand Cherry Street. As a young man,Piper was an avid botanizer. He joinedthe Young Naturalists Club and wascollecting plants near Seattle as early as1883. Piper studied at the TerritorialUniversity (now University of Wash-ington) there, and in 1885 he graduatedwith nine other students.

In 1888, Piper climbed Mt. Rainierin a party that included John Muir,the Sierra Club founder. During thedescent, Piper nearly lost his life; all savePiper and Muir had crossed an icebridge over a crevasse, and then theexpedition photographer heard a "cry[that] made the very blood in our veinsturn cold. This time it was Piper. Hestepped into the middle of the bridgeand it had given way with him; he hadthrown himself forward and caught."

"My alpenstock and the whole icebridge fell into the crevasse," remem-bered Piper in 1915. "I have often won-dered what would have happened if Ihad attempted to go across the bridgein the ordinary way."

Charles Vancouver Piper (Courtesy ofManuscripts,Archives, and Special Collections,Washington State University Libraries)

It was at this time that Piper beganextensive botanical investigations thathe would carryon until his death in1926. Botany was his passion, and hecollected and described many newspecies. He exchanged plant specimenswith herbaria and other collectors; withEdward Lee Greene of Berkeley andCharles Sprague Sargent at Harvard,Piper disputed the former's classificationof the Oregon white oak, Quercusgarryana. When President Clevelandestablished forest reserves in the 1890s,Sargent wrote to Piper, noting, "Thereis a very bitter feeling in the west

against these reservations and we aregoing to have difficulty in holdingthem unless local public sentiment canbe aroused in their favor. I count onyou to do everything possible to helpthis good cause."

PULLMANAll the while continuing to botanizeand making collecting expeditionsthroughout the Pacific Northwestwhen time allowed, Piper moved toPullman in 1892 and took on broadresponsibilities at the state agriculturalcollege there (now Washington StateUniversity). Piper was hired as professorof botany and zoology at the college,and he served as botanist and entomolo-gist at the experiment station, where hewas also responsible for plant pathology.He taught on subjects ranging fromplant physiology to comparativeembryology, answered on average twoletters a day from interested farmers,and performed spraying experimentsfor insect and fungal pests of fruit,grain, and vegetable crops.

We have no record of Piper playinggolf or being involved with turfgrassesduring the 1890s. Golf was still in itsinfancy in the United States. TheUSGA was formed in late 1894, thesame year that Tacoma Country andGolf Club was founded near Seattle.Piper was working at that time in allareas of horticulture and agronomy,gathering a store of knowledge aboutplant pathology, entomology, and agri-cultural practices. His time at Pullmanwould serve him well in his later yearsof turf grass work.

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John Muir (sitting) climbed the summit of Mt. Rainier in 1888.Although not shown in the photo. Piper also climbed the mountain with this group. On thedescent, Piper almost lost his life after nearly falling into a crevasse. After losing his alpenstock. he descended the mountain with the assistance of a rope.(Courtesy of University of Washington Libraries. Special Collections PH Coil. 273)

For example, brown patch was acommon problem on golf course putt-ing greens in the 1920s, and Pipershowed his broad understanding ofplant pathology at the 1924 AnnualMeeting of the Green Section in NewYork City. He was asked about thebelief that wheat rust was due to a lackof potash in the soil, and if brown patchcould be caused by a similar phenonle-non. Piper, with his typical directness,responded, "Well, that statement is nottrue, to begin with." He then began anextemporaneous discussion of the mis-conception about potash and rust be-fore bringing the story back to turf grassand brown patch, eXplaining thathealthy plants were usually moreresistant to disease.

Piper spent the 1899-1900 schoolyear in the East, studying at Harvardand conducting research at the GrayHerbarium there. For five weeks in thesummer of 1902, Piper followed thepath of the Lewis and Clark expedition,taking pack horses along the Lolo Trailinto the Bitterroot Mountains of Idaho.Whether it was further explorations ofMt. Rainier, pack horse trips throughthe Blue and Wallowa Mountains, orbotanical collections on Vancouver

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Island or in Alaska, Piper spent his holi-days in the wild. His work in later yearswould take him around the world, fromBatavia to Bombay to Berlin, yet Piperwas at heart a citizen of the PacificNorthwest. R. Kent Beattie, a notedbotanist in his own right, wrote ofPiper, "Those who knew him in hislater years only remember him chieflyfor his brilliant leadership in the agro-nomic field. But Professor Piper's olderfriends think of him as a naturalist,especially as a botanical explorer andpioneer. Aptly was he named Vancouver.What George Vancouver did for thegeography of Puget Sound and thePacific Northwest and more, Piper didfor the botany."

DEPARTMENT OFAGRICULTUREIn 1903, Piper was hired by the UnitedStates Department of Agriculture(USDA) in Washington, D. C., to takecharge of the grass herbarium. Over thesucceeding years, Piper would serve firstas Agrostologist, and from 1907 asAgrostologist-in-Charge, of the officeof Forage Crop Investigations. Hispeers described him as "working withunusual rapidity;' having "an astonishing

capacity for productive effort," and as"a prodigious worker who knew norelaxation."

During Piper's 23 years at the USDA,he made notable investigations into andwas instrumental in the developmentof the soybean, personally directed theexperimental work on grasses and otherforage plants, and was renowned inagronomic circles for his discovery andsubsequent introduction of Sudan grassinto the United States. He was the soleauthor of Forage Plants and Their Culture(1914), a classic that remained in printuntil at least 1942. Piper was a foundingmember of the American Society ofAgronomy in 1907 and was its

. president in 1914.As a scientist, he wrote papers on a

wide range of subjects, expressing hisbroad interests in botany and agriculture.In the Proceedings of the American SocietyofAgronomy, Piper wrote about experi-mental methods, botanical and agricul-tural history, and agronomic termi-nology. An especially interesting articleby Piper and Carleton Ball begins, "Thepurpose of language is to convey ideas."The paper goes on to call for more pre-cision in agricultural terminology, asksfor comments and criticism from read-

A group portrait of Piper's (back row, first person on the left) zoology class in 1883at the TerritorialUniversity of Washington. (Courtesy of University of Washington Libraries. Special CollectionsPH Coil. 282)

ers, and then offers a glossary of termswith proposed definitions. There was ahearty response to this paper, and abulging folder at the National Archivesin Washington holds the letters ofcriticism that Piper requested.

Piper also contributed papers toScience on subjects as varied as grassspikelet terminology, the role of bota-nists at agricultural colleges, and thebasalt mounds of the Palouse. In 1922,with William Jennings Bryan in themidst of his campaign to legislate a banon the teaching of evolution in publicschools (which would lead, incidentally,to the Scopes Trial of 1925), Piper re-sponded with a humorous but pointedletter to Science about Darwin, theBible, Bryan, and evolution. All thewhile, Piper continued to describe newspecies in the botanical journals, andover the course of his lifetime Piperdescribed more than 100 species. Infact, a genus of orchids, Piperia, is namedin his honor.

In 1911, Piper made a round-the-world voyage, spending the first part ofthe year in the Philippine Islands, wherehe made a comprehensive investigationof forage crops for the u.S. Army. Therewere over 200,000 horses in the Philip-pines in 1910, and they were primarilyused by the Army. All of their feed,which amounted to 46,000 tons in1910, was imported from America orAustralia. In his report, Piper identifiedgrasses and grains that could be grownin the Philippines to eliminate theunnecessary importation of feed.

He would make another trip onArmy business in 1923, this time toinvestigate forage conditions in thePanama Canal Zone. But in 1912, afterhis return from Asia via Egypt andEurope, Piper began his turf grass in-vestigations. Those led to the publica-tion of Tuif for Golf Courses (withRussell A. Oakley) in 1917,to a series ofarticles about golf turf in Golf fllustratedand Golf, and to recognition of Piperand his colleagues at the USDA as aresource for golf courses with questionsabout their grass.

GREEN SECTIONIt is not surprising that the developersof new golf courses soon turned toPiper and the USDA for assistance, forhe was the country's leading authorityon grasses. This expertise was not loston the USGA and would lead to theformation of the Green Section inNovember of 1920. When Piper tookup the game himself is not clear, but hewas an avid player and a regular partici-pant in tournaments held near thenation's capital. Piper did not always

break 100, although he played, accord-ing to Oakley, "a very creditable game."And, like so many who love the gameand work in the golf industry, Pipersaid of himself that "when a man be-comes interested in golf turf, golf archi-tecture, or golf course construction andmaintenance, his game at once declinesand soon is abandoned altogether."

Piper's work as chairman of theGreen Section would last only fiveyears, from the establishment of theGreen Section on November 30, 1920,until Piper's death in 1926, yet his con-tributions to golf were so valuable thathe is remembered in many circles firstand foremost as a turfgrass expert, not-

withstanding his contributions to thebotanical and agronomic fields. Aseditor of the Green Section's monthlyBulletin, Piper produced a publication ofgreat practical use to readers across thecountry.

His work included a tremendousamount of correspondence and travel.Piper managed to combine his director-ship of the Forage Crops Division witha Green Section chairmanship andongoing botanical endeavors. Thesemultifarious interests are evident in

Piper's activities of August 30, 1923,when he was at Portland, Oregon, inthe midst of an extensive trip to visitexperiment stations in the Westernstates. Taking a break from his USDAobligations, Piper visited WaverleyCountry Club and Portland Golf Club,examining the turf and also collectingtwo species of willow, Salix jluviatilisNutt. and Salix piperi Bebb.

The Green Section of the 1920swas organized to conduct research anddistribute information. In Piper's reportof the Green Section's activities in1925, he wrote that "quite a few callswere received from golf clubs request-ing a visit from one of the officials of

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Piper collected Poo multnomae (now P. secunda Presl.) in 1904 at Multnomah Falls in the Columbia River Gorge. It is housed at the National Herbarium, along with numerous other plant specimens collected by Piper. (Courtesy Smithsonian Institution, Plant Image Collection)

the Green Section to survey local con­ditions at golf courses. Unfortunately, it was impossible to comply with all of these requests, but where opportunity permitted, the courses were visited and consultation freely granted."

A much larger Green Section was required, and Piper laid out his plan at the 1925 Annual Meeting of the Green Section: "We need more assistants, Mr. Oakley and I are growing old, and we will have to have some youngsters trained to carry out the work. We need these men to travel over the country . . . to get information to give to the clubs. Incidentally, these men traveling around the country will be able to help the clubs on a lot of the problems which they will point out to them."

Ill health forced Piper to rest for much of that summer, and he returned to work only to suffer a stroke at his office on February 8,1926, dying at home three days later. "At the last," Oakley remembered, Piper "had but one desire, which was that the Green Section be put on a permanent basis so that its functions of investigation and education might enlarge and endure." That desire has come to fruition, and with Piper's initial endeavors, the turf-grass industry and Green Section were set on a most solid foundation.

REFERENCES Research for this article was conducted at

Cornell University's Mann Library, at the

National Archives in College Park, Maryland,

and at the Manuscripts, Archives, and Special

Collections division of Washington State

University Libraries at Pullman. Additional

information about Piper's work with the Green

Section was obtained from USGA Green

Section archival papers. The author thanks Jim

Snow and Frank Rossi for their assistance in the

pursuit of information about Piper.

MlCAH W O O D S recently completed a Ph.D.

in Turfgrass Science at Cornell University.

He has been a golf course superintendent, a

writer, and an agronomic consultant.

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