Bartlett, Harley Harris, 1886-1960

Professor of botany and director of the Botanical Gardens at the University of Michigan.

An expert in tropical botany with wide-ranging interests, Harley Harris Bartlett was born at Anaconda, Montana, on March 9, 1886. After studying chemistry at Harvard (A.B., 1908), Bartlett accepted a position as a chemical biologist with the Bureau of Plant Industry, working on the genetics of Oenothera, and although he left government employment only a few years later, he often took part in government sponsored projects seeking to exploit the resources of tropical forests.

In 1915, Bartlett moved to the faculty at the University of Michigan, eventually becoming full professor (1921), head of the Botany Department (1922-1947) and Director of the Botanical Garden (1919-1955). He traveled widely during his years in Ann Arbor, collecting plants from tropical regions in Asia and the Americas. His most ambitious schemes included two trips to Asahan, in northeast Sumatra in 1918 and 1927, when he explored for the U.S. Rubber Company. During the Second World War, he worked in the Office of Rubber Investigations of the Department of Agriculture, exploring for sources for rubber in Central and South America. Bartlett collected elsewhere in the Caribbean and Asia, and spent the academic year 1934-1935 as an exchange professor at the University of the Philippines.

Bartlett's travels and wide-ranging interests led to publications in a number of disparate fields. When he was awarded the Merit Award of the Botanical Society of America at his retirement in 1956, he was cited "for his unflagging support and encouragement of the whole field of botany and its students and for his diverse contributions to paleobotany, enthnobotany, ecology, and systematics." His stay in Sumatra produced articles on Batak and Malay ethnography and linguistics, and he wrote works in history and ethnohistory, as well. In 1929 Bartlett was elected to the APS. Bartlett remained in Ann Arbor after his retirement, where he died of heart failure on February 21, 1960.

Harley Harris Bartlett was born March 9, 1886 in Anaconda, Montana, and attended high school there and in Indianapolis. He graduated from Harvard in 1908 receiving his BA in chemistry. For the following six years he was associated with the Bureau of Plant Industry of the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a chemical biologist.

He came to the University of Michigan in 1915 as acting assistant professor of botany Six years later he came professor, and from 1922 to 1947, he served as chairman of the department of botany. From 1922 to 1955 Bartlett was director of the Botanical Gardens. He retired from the University in July 1956.

During his years at the University, Bartlett had a particular interest in the botany of tropical countries and he conducted botanical explorations in Formosa, Sumatra, Mexico, British Honduras, Guatemala, the Philippines, Panama and South America. Much of his work in Central and South America was concerned with the research for sources of rubber there. From 1940 to 1944, he served as the principal botanist in government-sponsored rubber investigations in the Philippines, Haiti, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile and Mexico.

Bartlett died February 21, 1960.