Sweetser, Albert R. (Albert Raddin), 1861-1940

Albert Raddin Sweetser (1861-1940) was professor of botany at the University of Oregon, 1902-1931. Carrie K. Sweetser (1863-1952) was a watercolorist, a life-long diarist, and her botanist husband's devoted travel companion. In 1897, the Sweetsers came to Oregon, where Albert's first teaching post was at Pacific University. He moved to the University of Oregon in 1902, and the couple remained in Eugene until their deaths.

In 1902, Albert Sweetser joined the faculty at the University of Oregon as professor of botany and became department head seven years later; he would go on to teach for botany twenty-nine years. He founded the University of Oregon Herbarium in 1903. He was an early Oregon conservationist and author of many popular natural history articles. Early in his tenure at Oregon, he was appointed State Biologist. Sweetser retired in 1931, the year he also received an honorary doctorate from the university.

Albert Sweetser was born in Mendon, Massachusetts, on July 15, 1861, the son of a Methodist minister. He attended Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where he received his bachelor’s degree in 1884 and his master’s degree in 1887. He married Carrie Knowles Phinney in 1888. Carolyn Knowles Phinney was born in Centerville, Massachusetts, on September 11, 1863.

On botanical exploring and collecting trips, the Sweetsers took many photographs and Carrie painted wildflowers and fungi. They both kept travel journals, with Carrie illustrating and writing most of them. During the summer of 1892, the Sweetsers taught at a boys' camp at Rangeley Lake, Maine, and Carrie kept an illustrated journal that chronicled their adventures.

Albert Sweetser died in 1940; Carrie Sweetser lived for another dozen years, passing away in Eugene September 9, 1952, at the age of eighty-nine. The couple had no children, but they are survived by the descendants of George Phinney, Carrie's nephew, whom they raised as their son.

From the guide to the Albert and Carrie Sweetser papers, 1887-1952, (Special Collections and University Archives, University of Oregon Libraries)