ALICE (RICH) NORTHROP, 1864-1922

The daughter of Mary (Althouse) Rich and Franklin Rich, Alice Bell (Rich) Northrop was born in New York City on March 6, 1864. She had two brothers and a sister, all younger than she; all three had died by the time ARN was thirty-four. She attended New York public schools and Hunter College, and then taught briefly in the New York City school system.

ARN's diaries begin just before her nineteenth birthday and indicate an early and intense interest in nature studies. In 1889, at the age of twenty-five, she married John Isiah Northrop, an instructor of botany and zoology at Columbia University. The couple commenced a series of wide-ranging field trips, but in 1891, almost exactly two years after their marriage, Dr. Northrop was killed in a laboratory explosion at the Columbia School of Mines. ARN's only child, John Howard Northrop (Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, 1946), was born eight days after his father's death. ARN suffered a long and severe illness after the near-simultaneous loss of her husband and birth of her son, but then began to rebuild her life. She was by then instructor of botany at Hunter College, and continued to teach there throughout the period covered by these papers. She did not marry again, but raised her son alone, suspending her travels for several years while he was very young; when he was about six she resumed them, taking him with her.

She traveled widely in the American and Canadian West and Northwest, and in Central America and the Caribbean, at a time when most of these areas were considered inaccessible to non-native women, and were still largely unexplored even by (non-native) men. Throughout her adult life she endeavored to make the joys of nature available to people confined to cities, and for this purpose she founded the School Nature League in 1917. The Northrop Memorial Nature Camp was eventually established at her property in Mt. Washington, Mass., to continue that work.

ARN helped write two books: A Naturalist in the Bahamas, written with her husband and edited by H.F. Osborn (ca. 1910); and Through Field and Woodland, a guide to upland flora in New England, edited by O.P. Medsger (New York: Putnam, 1925). She also contributed articles to botanical journals, and gave new plant specimens as well as writings to major research institutions, among them the American Museum of Natural History, the Gray Herbarium at Harvard, the New York Botanical Garden, and the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory.

ARN lived most of her adult life in New York State : in Yonkers, and in Columbia County in the Berkshires, where she also had a house. In 1919 she moved to High Meadows Farm near Great Barrington, Mass., where the Northrop Memorial Camp now stands. While she was out with colleagues to complete the arrangements for the foundation of the camp, her car was hit by a train, and she died on May 6, 1922, at Mt. Riga, N.Y.

Additional biographical information, provided by the donor and his sister, Alice N. Robbins, is available in the Schlesinger Library's correspondence files.

From the guide to the Papers, 1884-1916, (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute)