Thomas J. Howell (botanist)
Thomas Jefferson Howell (October 8, 1842 – December 3, 1912) was an American botanist and one of the Pacific Northwest’s top self-taught plant scientists, along with Wilhelm Suksdorf and William Cusick. Born in Missouri, he moved with his family to Oregon in 1850 and settled on Sauvie Island. With only about six months of formal schooling, Howell largely educated himself, helped by his father, a doctor who taught some Latin and science. He farmed along the Clackamas River and later ran several Portland-area grocery stores. He served as the first postmaster at the Willamette Slough post office on Sauvie Island (1873) and later as the first postmaster of Creighton in Oak Grove (1904).
Howell and his brother Joseph developed a serious interest in botany. In 1877 he started an herbarium, cataloging 2,152 plant species. His collections are housed in many herbaria across North America and Europe, with a large portion at Oregon State University. He published exsiccata called Howell’s Pacific Coast plants and issued his first catalog of regional plants in 1881. From 1897 to 1903 he prepared A Flora of Northwest America, a comprehensive survey of plants in Oregon and Washington; due to limited funds, he borrowed type and hand-set many pages to print it.
More than 30 species have been named Howellia in his honor. He donated about 10,000 specimens to the University of Oregon, later transferred to Oregon State University in 1993, and he cataloged the collection during the 1903–04 academic year. Howell died December 3, 1912, in Woodstock, Oregon (now part of southeast Portland).
His legacy lives on in Oregon: his name appears in the friezes of the Oregon State Capitol, and his family home, the Bybee–Howell House, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. He married Effie McIlwane in 1892 and had two sons, Dorsey and Benjamin.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 05:42 (CET).