On Harper's Trail: Roland McMillan Harper, Pioneering Botanist of the Southern Coastal Plain (review)

O C T O B E R 2 0 1 0 301 practiced. Although his work consistently displays a balance between private and public commissions and programs for residential, commercial, industrial, recreational, and institutional buildings, in this book we can clearly see his practice grow and change over time to include, for example , large-scale public housing projects and consolidated schools for both black and white neighborhoods, as well as innovative programs for buildings like stadiums and large entertainment complexes. Through his careful inventory and analysis of Whilldin’s buildings, Shelby fleshes out the image of the man himself as a civic-minded, responsible, competent , talented, and forward-thinking Alabama architect. Shelby’s book is thoughtful, admirably thorough, and thus invaluable in the contribution that it makes to the body of knowledge concerning the built heritage of central Alabama. In the foreword, Robert O. Mellown remarks that “it is to be hoped that this book will raise public awareness of D. O. Whilldin’s architecture and help protect it from remodeling and destruction.” Shelby has provided us with a book that not only broadens our knowledge concerning the work of one architect, but one that also makes a noteworthy contribution to the awareness and protection of the built environment in the region as a whole. Equally important is that, with D. O. Whilldin: Alabama Architect, Shelby has also enriched our knowledge of the history, the fabric, and the texture of Birmingham, Tuscaloosa, and Gadsden, all places that Whilldin played a fundamental role in shaping. KAREN L. ROGERS Auburn University On Harper’s Trail: Roland McMillan Harper, Pioneering Botanist of the Southern Coastal Plain. By Elizabeth Findley Shores. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008. xii, 267 pp. $42.95. ISBN 978-0-8203-3100-3. Gifted botanist and ecologist Roland Harper (1878–1966) set out to devote his life to studying the longleaf pine forest of the Southern Coastal Plain, a swath of land that includes much of the state of Mississippi and the southern halves of Alabama and Georgia. He discovered plant species as yet unknown to science, wrote hundreds of papers, and was a leading proponent of the value of wetlands and the importance of fire to the survival of this formerly vast ecosystem. Born in Maine, Harper had spent part of his youth in Georgia before earning a PhD in botany at Columbia University. Many assumed that he was destined to document the biogeography of the Southern Coastal T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 302 Plain, which would have established him as a leading botanist of his time. Wildlife biologist Herbert Stoddard called him “probably our greatest living Southeastern botanist and a pioneer student of the ecology of the country, especially as such is [molded] and shaped by fire” (p. 135). But something had gone wrong. Historian Elizabeth Findley Shores concludes that Harper suffered from an obsessive-compulsive personality, which is not necessarily a negative trait for a systematic botanist. Harper’s preoccupation with his psychological idiosyncrasies and family history of mental illness, however, eventually drew him into the study of insanity and the dark pseudoscience of eugenics and away from the botanical work where he was making a name for himself. Shores has done a masterful job of bringing together this enigmatic man’s disparate traits to present the life of an accomplished but troubled individual whose contributions to science are only today becoming fully recognized. On Harper’s Trail is an engaging and well-documented work covering an important chapter in Alabama natural and cultural history. Readers interested in botany, history, or psychology, as well as anyone who likes a real-life mystery, will savor it. Aptly, the book’s title conjures up images of the treks of stouthearted eighteenth- and nineteenth-century naturalist explorers, including William Bartram, André Michaux, and Thomas Nuttall, who first surveyed for science the savannah-like forests and pitcher plant bogs of the Southern Coastal Plain. Like them, Harper spent days in the field, walking miles through forest and swamp, all the while keeping extensive diaries . In his eyes, he was completing the botanical work that the earlier discoverers had begun...