Dr. Elsie Quarterman known fondly to her students as EQ passed away
on 9 June 2014 at her home in Nashville, Tennessee, at the age of
103 years. She was born on 28 November 1910 in Valdosta, Georgia.
Dr. Quarterman obtained her B. A. degree from Georgia State Women’s
College (now Valdosta State University) in 1932,
after which she
taught English in the Georgia public schools for 11 years. She
obtained her M.A. degree in botany from Duke University in 1941 and
her Ph.D. from the same institution in 1949. Her Ph.D. advisor was
the renowned plant ecologist Professor Henry J. Oosting.
EQ’s M.A.
degree was on the distribution of Compositae in Lowndes County,
Georgia, and her Ph.D. degree on the plant communities of the cedar
glades of middle Tennessee. She published papers from her
dissertation in The Bryologist (1949), Bulletin of the Torrey
Botanical Club (1950) and Ecology (1950).
Dr. Quarterman joined the faculty of Vanderbilt University as an
instructor of biology in 1943 and was promoted through the academic
ranks to professor in 1966; she served as Chair of the Department of
General Biology from 1961 to 1963.
EQ retired from Vanderbilt in
1976 and became Professor Emerita. In the academic world, Dr.
Quarterman is best known for her work on the plant communities of
the middle Tennessee cedar glades. She also is well known for the
publication entitled
“Southern mixed hardwood forest: climax
in the southeastern Coastal Plain: U.S.A.” coauthored with her
long-time friend the late
Dr. Catherine Keever and published in
Ecological Monographs in 1962. Her first journal paper, entitled
“A preliminary survey of the bryophytes of two cedar
glades,” was published in The Bryologist in 1947. Her last
paper, which she coauthored with her former Ph.D. students Carol and
Jerry Baskin, entitled
“Flow diagrams for plant succession in
the middle Tennessee cedar glades,” was published in the
Journal of the Botanical Research Institute of Texas in 2007.
Altogether, Professor Quarterman authored or coauthored about 25
papers in referred journals. Another of her important scientific
contributions was a chapter entitled
“Rock outcrop
communities: limestone, sandstone and granite” coauthored with
M. P. Burbank and D. J. Shure and published in the
“Upland Terrestrial Communities”
volume of “Biodiversity of the
Southeastern United States” edited by W. H. Martin and others
and published by John Wiley & Sons in 1993. Additionally, after
retirement EQ and Dr. Richard Powell, a geologist from Indiana,
worked on a 5-year contract with the National Park Service to survey
“Potential ecological/geological natural landmarks on the
Interior Low Plateaus,” a physiographic province that extends
from southern Indiana, extreme southern Ohio and southern Illinois
through central/west-central Kentucky and central Tennessee to
northern Alabama. The 738-page document resulting from this work is
a valuable contribution to our knowledge of the plant ecology,
geology and physiography of the Interior Low Plateaus.
Professor Quarterman taught a wide array of courses in plant biology
at Vanderbilt, including general botany, plant ecology, plant
autecology, plant geography, systematic botany and plant anatomy. We
took graduate courses in plant ecology, plant autecology and plant
geography with her and today judge that her teaching was
“ahead of its time.” That is, EQ insisted that students
engage in active learning via reading the literature rather than
them listening to long detailed lectures and subsequently memorizing
the notes for the exam — then quickly forgetting everything.
Her method of teaching/training has served us well in research and
in interpreting the scientific literature. Dr. Quarterman served as
major professor for seven students who obtained a Ph.D. degree and
for six who obtained the Master’s degree. EQ was highly regarded as
a teacher and in 1988 received the Association of Southeastern
Biologists
Meritorious Teaching Award.
Dr. Quarterman was a very gracious person and concerned about her
graduate students. For example, she loaned us her personal car (with
gas in the tank) on a number of occasions to visit cedar glades in
middle Tennessee, northwestern Georgia and northern Alabama, in
connection with our Ph.D. research in the mid-1960s. Also, Dr.
Quarterman gave us money for gasoline to go on a field trip escorted
by Dr. Delzie Demaree to Illinois in search of Astragalus
tennesseensis (Carol’s study species), after Jerry purchased a 1957
Ford. There were many field trips to the cedar glades, about which
Dr. Quarterman had considerable expertise; she was always eager to
share her knowledge on their unique flora and plant communities. We,
along with several other graduate students, enjoyed several trips
with EQ to various universities in the southeastern USA to attend
the annual meeting of the Association of Southeastern Biologists.
All these acts of kindness are remembered by us and other students,
with much gratitude.
Dr. Quarterman served the scientific community in many ways,
including Vice President of the American Bryological Society,
President of the Association of Southeastern Biologists, Chair of
the southeastern section of the Botanical Society of America and
member of the Editorial Board of Ecology and of the Plant Science
Bulletin. EQ was a member of the Executive Committee of the
Tennessee Academy of Science, editor of the Journal of the Tennessee
Academy of Science, and served on the Board of the Highlands (NC)
Biological Foundation (Station). Professor Quarterman was a Fellow
of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, of the
Tennessee Academy of Science, and of the Association of Southeastern
Biologists.
In addition to her university and society duties, Dr. Quarterman was
very much engaged in conservation efforts, especially in Tennessee.
She was a founder and active member of the Tennessee Protection
Planning Committee (an inter-agency forum to coordinate efforts to
preserve ecologically important areas in the state), a very active
board member of the Tennessee Nature Conservancy for many years and
served on the Tennessee Environmental Council. Dr. Quarterman played
an important role in the preservation of a remnant virgin forest in
Savage Gulf on the west-facing escarpment of the Cumberland Plateau
in Grundy County, Tennessee, and inspired the preservation of Taylor
Hollow on the Highland Rim in Tennessee. She was involved with the
Tennessee Botanical Gardens at Cheekwood (in Nashville) for many
years and served as Acting Director (1967-68). She was a member of
Friends of Warner Park, Friends of Radnor Lake, a strong supporter
of the Middle Tennessee State University Center for Cedar Glade
Studies and worked with the U.S. Corp of Engineers to identify and
preserve some of the cedar glade communities on Percy Priest
Reservoir Lands.
For her conservation efforts, she received the
Oak Leaf Award from
The Nature Conservancy, the
George B. Fell Lifetime Achievement Award
from the Natural Areas Association and the
Sol Feinstone Environmental Award from the State University of New York
College of Environmental Science and Forestry.
Dr. Quarterman will be remembered as a fine southern lady who loved
her family and students, studied cedar glades, had a deep
appreciation of the value of natural ecosystems and worked
tirelessly for the preservation of natural plant communities.
In her
honor, a 185-acre cedar glade in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
Percy Priest Reservoir and Wildlife Management Area near La Vergne,
Tennessee, has been named the
“The Elsie Quarterman Cedar Glade,”
and the annual wildflower weekend at Cedars of Lebanon
State Park in Tennessee has been renamed
“The Elsie Quarterman Wildflower Weekend.”
Also, the
Elsie Quarterman-Catherine Keever Award
is given by the Southeastern Chapter of the Ecological
Society of America
for the best student poster at the annual meeting
of the
Association of Southeastern Biologists.
The thing that many people will remember about Dr. Quarterman is
that she and one of her students, the late Dr. Barbara Turner,
discovered a population of the Tennessee coneflower (Echinacea
tennesseensis) in a middle Tennessee cedar glade in 1969; the
species was thought to be extinct, thus accounting for the great
excitement upon its rediscovery. One of Dr. Quarterman’s Ph.D.
students, Dr. Thomas Hemmerly, studied the ecology of this
coneflower for his dissertation research. Dr. Quarterman worked hard
to help educate the public about the significance of this federally
endangered cedar glade endemic and served on committees to plan for
its protection and recovery; the species was delisted in 2011. Now,
many people in Tennessee can recognize the Tennessee Cone Flower and
have come to appreciate it — a fine and fitting tribute to the
lady who loved the “flower gardens” of the cedar glades
and spent many years educating people about the wonders of plants
and of the necessity of preserving their habitats.
Carol C. Baskin
Department of Biology
Department of Plant and Soil Sciences
University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY
Jerry M. Baskin (retired)
Department of Biology
University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY
Thanks to Prof. Richard Carter of VSU for the pointer.
-jsq
Her students Carol and Jerry Baskin wrote for the
July 2014 Southeastern Biology newsletter of
The Association of Southeastern Biologists,
OBITUARY: Professor Elsie Quarterman: In Memorium, 1910-2014