Kellogg, Louise, 1879-1967

Louise Kellogg was born in Oakland, California on August 27, 1879 to Anita Kellogg and Charles Winslow Kellogg. She attended the University of California (in Berkeley) and graduated in 1901 as a classics major. In 1908, she was invited by her friend Annie Alexander, the founder of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, to be her companion on a scientific expedition to Alaska. The two women entered into a relationship that lasted until Annie’s death in 1950. Together, they went on many collecting trips, acquiring over 34,000 specimens for the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, the University of California Museum of Paleontology, and the University Herbarium. Kellogg’s first paper, entitled Rodent fauna of the late Tertiary beds at Virgin Valley and Thousand Creek, Nevada, was published in 1910, and represented only the second paper in mammalogy to be published by a woman. Over the course of the next five years she published five more papers. In 1911, Kellogg and Alexander purchased a ranch on Grizzly Island in Solano County, California, where they raised livestock and crops, in addition to collecting specimens in the still relatively undeveloped area. They also continued to go on collecting trips out of the Bay Area. After Joseph Grinnell, the first director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, died in 1939, Kellogg and Alexander began to focus less on collecting animal specimens and more on collecting plants. Kellogg continued this work after Alexander’s death in 1950. Her last collecting trip took place in Baja California in 1960. She died in 1967, leaving an endowment to the University Herbarium.