While researching the old Unitarian Church of Palo Alto (1905-1934), I came across someone who is famous enough to be featured on Wikipedia. He’s an entomologist, so he’s not famous famous. He’s not even that famous as scientists go. Still, he’s on Wikipedia so I think it’s worth drawing the attention of today’s Unitarian Universalists to him.
John Merton Aldrich
A renowned entomologist, he was born January 28, 1866, in Rochester, Minnesota. In 1870, he was living with his parents L. O. and Mary, and his older brother and younger sister, in Quincy, Olmsted County; his father was a farmer. In 1880, he was still in Quincy with his family, which now included another younger sister and a servant.
In 1881, John’s family moved to a farm in South Dakota. He attended the new South Dakota Agricultural College in Brookings, S.D., graduating in 1888 after just three years of study. It was in his last year of college that he first took a course in entomology.
Following his graduation, he taught school for a term, then went to study at the University of Minnesota. Although there was then no formal course in entomology at the university, John was able to study with Otto Lugger. Station Entomologist at St. Anthony’s Park. Then in the autumn of 1889, John went to Michigan State University to study entomology. It was there he first turned his attention to Diptera; as he later recalled, his professor advised him “to select a single order as a specialty, and to proceed at once to get together a library and collection; he also suggested the Diptera as a large order in which there were but two workers…at the time in the country.” John began his lifelong study of Diptera in the spring of 1890; this was also the start of his massive collection of Diptera which eventually included some 45,000 specimens.
In November of 1890, John traveled east, both to meet other entomologists and to find work. After failing to obtain a job at Harvard, he traveled to Washington, D.C., and worked for several weeks at the Smithsonian Museum on the insect collections there. However, lack of money forced John to return home, and he spent the winter of 1890-91 working on classifying his growing Diptera collection. He moved to Brookings, and worked worked at the South Dakota Experimental Station, making his first major collecting trip that summer. He received his master’s degree from South Dakota State College in 1891, and had an assistantship the following year. Due to faculty infighting, John lost his assistantship, and he went to to the University of Kansas in 1892; he received a second master’s degree there in 1893.
The University of Idaho was founded in 1893, and John was hired to found the department of zoology. He moved to Moscow, Idaho, to work at the university. There he began working on his catalogue of North American Diptera.
Before leaving South Dakota, he married Ellen J. “Nellie” Roe (b. 1870) of Brookings, S.D., in 1893. Ellen had received her B.S. degree from South Dakota Agricultural College in 1889; she and John had first met while they were both students. At the time of their marriage, Nellie was the assistant principal of the Brookings High School. John and Nellie settled in Moscow, Idaho, where they had a child, Spencer, who died the day he was born, May 17, 1895. Nellie died two years later, on December 3, 1897. To cope with his sorrow after these two deaths, John lost himself in his research. He completed his monumental A Catalogue of North American Diptera (or Two-winged Flies) (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Inst., 1905) on January 1, 1904.
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