Earl Lemley Core

Earl Lemley Core (1902–1984) was a botanist and botanical educator, researcher and author as well as a local West Virginia historian. He was founder (1936) of the Southern Appalachian Botanical Club and editor of its journal, Castanea, for thirty-five years. He was a teacher and professor at West Virginia University (WVU) for over forty-four years (1928–72). He served for four years on the Morgantown City Council and was mayor of Morgantown for two years. The Earl L. Core Arboretum at WVU was named in his honor in 1967.

Biography

Youth and education

Core was born on January 20, 1902, at Core, West Virginia, the son of Harry Michael and Clara Edna (née Lemley) Core. He graduated from Morgantown High School, taught in rural schools (1920–23) and then attended WVU, earning Bachelor of Arts (1926) and Master of Arts (1928) degrees. He married Freda Bess Garrison on June 8, 1925. (They eventually parented four children: Ruth, Merle, Harry, and David.) He earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree (1936, Columbia University) with a dissertation on the systematics of the sedge genus Scleria.

Career

Core became an instructor at WVU in 1928 and remained on the faculty for over 44 years. He progressed to assistant professor (1934), associate professor (1941), professor (1942), and professor emeritus (1972) and was chairman of the Biology Department from 1948 to 1966. He served as curator of the university herbarium from 1934 until his retirement in 1972. In addition, he served as a member of the summer faculty at Ohio State University during 1939-41 and of Concord College in 1961.

Core was named botanist for the Colombia Cinchona Mission, Bogota, Colombia, from 1943 to 1945 during which assignment he explored in the Andes Mountains in search of wartime sources of quinine from the Cinchona tree.

Author

In the course of his career, Core authored numerous technical articles, several books, and hundreds of newspaper articles. Two notable textbooks that became standards were General Biology by P.D. Strausbaugh, B.R. Weimer, and Earl L. Core and A New Manual for the Biology Laboratory by Core and Weimer. His botanical texts were The Flora of West Virginia (a four volume series written with Strausbaugh), Flora of the Erie Islands, Spring Wild Flowers, Plant Taxonomy, Vegetation of West Virginia, and The Wondrous Year, a collection of weekly botanical writings he prepared for the Charleston (West Virginia) Gazette newspaper.

In 1937, Core wrote The Chronicles of Core, a history of his home community and in 1960 he published Morgantown Disciples, a history of the First Christian Church of Morgantown, West Virginia. Late in life he embarked upon an extensive five-volume history of Monongalia County, West Virginia (1974–84), completing the last volume shortly before his death. (This material had been published over a period of 12 years in a weekly column of the Morgantown Dominion Post newspaper.)

Honors and accolades

Works

References

Citations

  1. ↑ IPNI.  Core.

Other sources

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