Fay MacFadden papers

Fay A. (MacDonald) MacFadden (1888-1964) was an amateur botanist and bryologist whose plant collection became the founding core of the herbarium at California State University, Fullerton.

Born in Colorado in 1888, MacFadden was raised in the mining town of Cripple Creek, where her father encouraged strength and independence in his daughters, teaching them to box and play baseball. By the time she married, a local news editor described her as the foremost woman athlete in the state. Her interest in science began in childhood, when she accompanied the community doctor on his calls, and as a teenager she hiked the mountains collecting and identifying plants. In 1908 she enrolled at the University of Colorado as a pre-medical student, hoping for access to the libraries and laboratories she lacked at home. She found little support there for a woman entering a scientific field, and after open antagonism from a botany professor she left the university after two years. The experience did not diminish her interest in plants, and she spent the rest of her life as a collector and correspondent with botanists around the world.

In 1911 she married Joe MacFadden, a mining engineer, and moved with him to British Columbia. The forests around their mountain home renewed her botanical work, and a chance meeting with a fellow botanist drew her toward bryophytes. Working without a nearby reference collection, she turned to established botanists for guidance. A 1924 letter from Edward B. Chamberlain, then secretary-treasurer of the Sullivant Moss Society, put her in contact with A.J. Grout and John M. Holzinger, both of whom incorporated her specimens into their published exsiccati. She collected widely across the region, at first on horseback from dawn to dusk and later by flagging down the local train to reach and return from the woods.

The MacFaddens lived in several mining camps in British Columbia, including Kamloops and New Denver. When the mining industry declined, the family moved to Roscoe, California, in 1929, and then to Los Angeles in 1936. Financial hardship slowed but did not stop her work. She built a lath house for a collection of living ferns, and as her reputation grew she mentored botany students much as Grout had once encouraged her, among them the botanist Joseph Ewan. Alongside her botanical work she was a prize-winning photographer, a mountaineer, and a member of the Canadian Alpine Club.

The last twenty years of MacFadden's life centered on her work with mosses. She preferred not to publish, choosing instead to work with her specimens in her own way and leave the written scholarship to colleagues. Through the 1940s and 1950s she maintained an extensive correspondence and specimen-trading network that reached across the United States and Canada and into Belgium, Wales, England, Sweden, Argentina, Cuba, Mexico, Trinidad, and East Africa. Her correspondents included Fr. Verdoorn, R.S. Williams, W.G. Newcombe, Henry Conard, A. LeRoy Andrews, T.D. Frye, Seville Flowers, E.B. Bartram, and H. Dupret.

In 1964, shortly before her death, MacFadden sold her collection of approximately 15,000 vascular plants, 12,000 bryophytes, and a number of lichen packets to California State College, Fullerton (then Orange State College), which purchased it with a National Science Foundation grant. The collection was designated the Fay MacFadden Herbarium. Much of her personal correspondence passed to the college along with the specimens and forms the basis of this collection.

Sources: Margaret Waner, "Fay A. MacFadden, 1888-1964" (1969); F. M. Shropshire, "Fay A. MacFadden Herbarium" (1998).